No one has ever adequately described, either in poetry or in private conversation, what the very presence of justice or injustice in his soul does to a man, even if it remains hidden from gods and man....

Both the history of tort law and the recent theoretical literature on the subject suggest that there are two intellectually tenable and more or less equally respectable answers to the question of what should be the general standard of liablity in tort, namely fault and strict liability. Each is generally thought to have represented, at one time or another, the dominant approach of the positive common law. Each has its modern theoretical proponents: a fault-based approach has been argued for on grounds of economic efficiency by Richard Posner, for example, and on grounds of individual moral right by, among others, Ronald Dworkin and Ernest Weinrib; strict liability, on the other hand, has received an economic defence in the work of Guido Calabresi, and a rights-based defence in the writings of Richard Epstein. Each of these theorists has felt compelled not only to offer positive arguments in favour of fault or strict liability but also to answer the intellectual case, whether perceived as being founded on a conception of efficiency or of individual rights, for the rival approach.

One thing seems clear in British politics today: many of the old truths no longer hold. Voters no longer vote according to class. The current government has made some effort to shake up the civil service and bring in outsiders. And a third political party is struggling along. Faced with all this, scholars have had to rethink their approach to British politics and governance. Appellate courts have long been considered Britain’s least interesting governing institution, but they have also benefited from the shake-up. Studies published in recent years mean to examine the politics of the British courts, primarily the Law Lords, the members of the House of Lords who comprise the final court of appeal in Britain. And, congruent with other changes in politics, studies find that courts have become interesting enough that they ought at least be considered in discussing British politics.

“A free and democratic society” was declared to be the aborescent garden in which the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was planted in the spring of 1982. Branches of that new vigorous constitutional tree are now rapidly reaching out from many sections of the Charter. They will develop as nature and nurture allow; and provided they do not grow to obscure the sun or deplete the richness of the soil which the garden requires if it is to flourish, Canadians may one day come to