The direct action form of protest is becoming an increasingly significant form of political expression. This paper considers such protest in relation to the guarantees of free expression and peaceful assembly under arts 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, now binding on United Kingdom public authorities under the Human Rights Act 1998. Its aim is to set out a framework of principle which would guide and underpin judicial approaches to the application of the Convention to domestic criminal law aimed at such protest, specifically ss 68 and 69 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. It argues that, because of the deficiencies of the Strasbourg case law in this area, an activist judicial stance, one reliant on underlying Convention values, will be required if there is to be any significant change to the traditional, illiberal domestic approach to direct action.

Issues of national sovereignty and membership in the body politic are central to many current political and legal debates surrounding ‘New Britain’ and Europe. Traditional understandings of citizenship and belonging are grounded in the ideal of a territorially limited and defined nation state. In this article, I explore a series of judicial and political decisions surrounding the fate of Roma or Gypsies, both as claimants to refugee status in Britain, or as subjects of domestic legal controls. I argue that these decisions construct this nomadic Other as a fundamental danger and challenge to the coherence of the legally protected body politic of the nation state ‘Britain’. I argue that the deconstructive excess found in the construction of the Roma as dangerous nomads, without allegiance to a fixed and geographically delimited nation state, might contain the kernel for a possible re-imagining of the basis of our understandings of citizenship and belonging.

Breach of confidence is in danger of being enveloped by fiduciary doctrine. Law's ability to discipline confidence-breaking by computer hackers and persons unknown to their victims may be lost if this wrong's separateness is not maintained. Distinct moral imperatives and policies arise when confidentiality is protected. However, A-G v Blake casts doubt on the independence of breach of confidence and breach of fiduciary duty. Conflation of the wrongs may have occurred at Britain's highest appellate level. Similar developments can seen in Australia, Canada, Malaysia and New Zealand.

Recently in this journal John Keown attacked the BMA Guidance published on ‘Withholding and Withdrawing Life-prolonging Medical Treatment’, arguing that it was, fundamentally at odds with the sanctity of life doctrine as properly understood, condemning the intentional termination of individuals' lives. In riposte it is asserted that even this modified version of the doctrine cannot support a defensible moral or legal standard for decision-making here, being founded upon an excessive emphasis on the mental state of the clinician and an inappropriately narrow focus on the effects of the proposed treatment on the ‘health’ of the patient, as opposed to being primarily driven by the (best) interests of the patient. The attempt to divorce treatment decisions from broader evaluations of the net benefit or other otherwise able to be attained by the patient from such treatment, including the taking into account of the individual's handicapped state, accordingly fails. Acceptance of such reality is, at the least, the first step toward a common language for further dialogue even between those with polar opposite opinions in this sphere.

The immunity from negligence enjoyed by advocates has recently been abolished by the House of Lords. The immunity had no statutory basis, but its existence was judicially recognised in 1967, in the case of Rondel v Worsley, and its extent and limits were considered in Saif Ali v Sidney Mitchell and Co in 1978. Since that time, the scope and extent of the immunity has been the subject of much case law. It has also received a great deal of criticism and many have argued for its abolition. This article examines the basis and justifications for advocates’ immunity. It discusses the scope, extent and criticisms of the immunity, the problems with its application, and the reasons for its eventual demise.

Frederic Goadby's Introduction to the Study of Law, written for law students in British occupied Egypt and later Palestine, provides a significant record of colonial attitudes about Western law and the legal cultures encountered in the Middle East. Edward Said's Orientalism offers a deconstructive methodology which reveals the legal narrative of Goadby's work as offering an invitation to the students to become spectators, along with the colonists of their own legal culture. Once imbued with the spirit of English law, Egyptian and Palestinian students passed the test of civilisation. Goadby's book reminds us that while colonial occupation of territory may have ceased the impact of cultural occupations continue. For both coloniser and colonised this discourse becomes part of their legal inheritance, which creates much work for contemporary legal scholars.