In any system of property law a complete specification of rights and duties raises at least two questions. First, allocation of rights and duties inter se between the parties to the transaction; secondly, the rights and duties of the parties to the original transaction against the rest of the world. The traditional common law analysis where a third party wishes to acquire an indefeasible interest in a chattel is to direct the latter to the ‘owner’ and indeed the prerequisite for the enjoyment of most property rights depends upon our ability to acquire it from someone else. Furthermore, inherent in the idea of acquiring an absolute right in property (title) is exclusivity of possession ie superiority over the transferor and third parties.

The countries collectively described in this article as the Commonwealth Caribbean, comprise those former British possessions, the islands of the Caribbean archipelago and the mainland states of Belize and Guyana, which now enjoy the status of independent states.

In a major deviation from the Constitution and law obtaining in the United Kingdom and its colonial territories, these states have written constitutions which set up a regime of fundamental rights and freedoms as part of the law of the constitution.

The interpreter of a statute ought not, tempted by extraneous considerations, to force the meaning of words or phrases against a reasonable understanding or against the clear intention of the statute as a whole. He ought not, influenced by the tendency of legal practitioners to favour precise and narrow signification, to assume that precise and narrow signification is necessarily the most proper for words or phrases which are found difficult.

Extra-judicial divorces obtainable under some systems of family law are now very familiar to private international lawyers. The most familiar is the Muslim talak, by which a husband may unilaterally divorce his wife, but there are others including other forms of religious divorces and secular divorces obtained by administrative process or simply by mutual agreement. Some of these divorces may be hedged around by legal procedures; others may be extremely informal.

I yield to none in my admiration of the draft Criminal Code produced by the Law Commission's academic team, but everyone who studies it will have what he regards as improvements to suggest. So here is my item, relating to the team's proposals for omissions. I think the draft provides too great scope for offences of omission, particularly for serious offences of omission.

This article is concerned with pure omissions. I call them ‘pure’ since omissions combined with action are counted as acts - largely because they are not subject to the peculiar difficulties of penalising omissions.