A modern approach to private international law must deal adequately with three overall concerns. First, it must provide functional responses to the modern international context of trade and commerce in which cross-border problems arise. Second, it must provide effective and fair remedies in civil disputes when those disputes spill over national borders. Third, it must resolve the otherwise irreconcilable conflicts between national legal systems—not as an end in itself or solely as a means of finding comity among nations, but in order to do substantial justice between the private litigants involved. As Dicey had it in the choice of law context, this “does not arise from the desire of the sovereign of England or any other sovereign to show courtesy to other states. It flows from the impossibility of otherwise determining whole classes of cases without gross inconvenience and injustice to litigants, whether natives or foreigners.” It is the burden of this article to examine the way in which the English courts have sought to work out these three general functions in the context of developing rules that govern the ambit of interlocutory orders to disclose and trace the proceeds of fraud internationally. Having identified the problems of abuse presented by the new opportunities of the international banking system, the courts have been quick to innovate in developing new remedies. But just as quickly they have run up against the boundaries of such remedies, both in granting orders themselves and in reacting to foreign orders.

Three are many reasons why a person may be reluctant to appear before a court as a witness. This article concerns the ability of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to compel witnesses to attend and also to answer questions when they are before the Tribunal. This second issue is more accurately represented as an ability to impose a sanction for the refusal to answer a question. This in turn raises the important question whether there are circumstances in which an individual may legitimately (i.e. without sanction) refuse to answer.

At the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the signature of the Treaty of Rome 1957 on 26 March 1997, Romano Prodi, President of the Italian Council, said that, with the Maastricht Treaty “we are perfecting our common economic constitution”, and that this Treaty should not be seen simply as an “instrument for the introduction of the single currency, but also as the awakening of the European peoples to the necessity of setting limits on the action of governments”. This notion of constitution or of economic constitution has received much attention from European legal scholars within the ongoing debate on constitutionalism and constitutionalisation within the Community legal order. However, constitutionalisation presents us with semantic difficulties, as legal doctrine has to adapt itself to the specificity of Community law. The discussion is further complicated by the divergence of views on the subject of whether the Treaties are a constitution for Europe and, indeed, whether Europe needs a constitution. Before we consider what constitutionalisation signifies, the notion of a constitution and an economic constitution in Community law merit consideration.

Within the past few years, the English Court of Appeal has ruled in a variety of cases involving disputes about the religious upbringing of children following the separation or divorce of their parents. Many of these cases have not been reported, although the most significant of them, Re R, is well known to family lawyers. In other jurisdictions the European Court of Human Rights in Hoffmann and the Supreme Court of Canada in Young and D.P. v. C.S. have also heard important cases in which a significant factor before the court was the influence of religious beliefs and practices on the children of those who professed them. This article is the result of a study of these and other cases from England, the United States and Canada in order to investigate the reasoning and the trends in judicial decision-making in cases involving children and religion.

The 1990s have been characterised by the globalisation of markets and the internationalisation of trade. Countries seem to be more interested than ever in creating new trading blocs and strengthening existing ones. As perhaps the most developed integration group in the world, the European Union has been used by framers of many other integration processes as a model on which to design their own institutional and legal structures.

History suggests that a military alliance will rarely survive major political change that results in the disappearance of the original danger that the alliance was first set up to combat. Since 1989 the reshaping of the political and strategic map of Europe has proceeded on a scale and at a pace such as to give rise to an expectation that the North Atlantic Alliance would become a victim of historical inevitability and thus be either formally dissolved or left to atrophy. Instead, the North Atlantic Alliance has embarked on a root and branch transformation of its structures, procedures and strategies for the twenty-first century. What is equally remarkable is that these changes have been accommodated within the framework of the original text of the North Atlantic Treaty drawn up in 1949,1 thus obviating the need for large-scale formal amendment.

Nato enlargement and related processes belong to subject matters in which law has a highly sensitive political content and its implementation is greatly dependent on the political environment. It is asserted that in such areas law is subordinate to political considerations or even that such matters may be outside the domain of international law and lawyers altogether.

The Private International Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1995 introduced major reform to the common law choice of rule in delict/tort under Scots/English law respectively. To all intents and purposes, and in the face of sustained and strong criticism, the Act abandoned the common law rules based on double actionability with exceptions. The primary rule under the statute would appear to state that the applicable law is to be based on the general concept of the lex loci delicti. It is of some significance for the analysis here that the statute does not in fact utilise that Latin expression as it is indeed unclear that the expression has any technical meaning. Indeed, the provisions of the Act seek, but in the end fail, to achieve a greater degree of certainty than that rather nebulous though “right-minded” concept. Significantly, a principal objective of the reforms was to ensure that the lex fori no longer played a primary role in choice of law for delictual/tortious claims in private international law. Of course, doubts remain as to the likelihood of direct resort to the lex fori via potential escape devices provided for in the Act The two most likely stages for this arise during characterisation and later when the lex fori may be applied qua public policy.

It has rightly been observed that every society “faces a delicate problem when it has to determine how its judges are appointed, especially the members of the senior courts and tribunals”. For, while it is usually recognised that judges should be independent, at the same time those in power may prefer judges who are not too independent, in the sense that they more or less share the general political orientation of government.

The European Commission has adopted an Action Plan to speed up the full implementation of the Single European Market. As part of its strategy the Commission has launched a stream of cases under Article 169 of the EC Treaty seeking to ensure the implementation of Community law in the fields covered by this note, which takes up and explains some of them. The first case is Commission v. Belgium where the European Court found that the Belgian rules, which effectively excluded those searching for work from Belgium after three months, contravened the job-seekers rights derived from Article 48 as interpreted in Antonissen. The Antonissen rights have also been extended to Turkish workers lawfully resident in Germany. Germany found itself condemned for failing to implement directives

The addition of “Justice and Home Affairs” (JHA) to the list of subjects covered in Current Developments reflects the growing significance of this area of European law and policy within the overall Treaty framework. In this introductory note, a brief account is given of the history of co-operation between EU member States in JHA matters, culminating in the significant changes announced in the Treaty of Amsterdam in October 1997. It is a historical record which is marked by discontinuity and institutional complexity, full justice to which would require detailed analysis. Here we confine ourselves instead to a broad-brush approach, seeking to highlight the main themes which have characterised JHA co-operation. In future notes particular areas and issues of current interest will be examined more closely.