‘I am very conscious of the difficulties confronting social workers and others in obtaining hard evidence, which will stand up when challenged in court, of the maltreatment meted out to children behind closed doors. Cruelty and physical abuse are notoriously difficult to prove.”

‘My Lords, I am anxious that the decision of the House in this case may establish the law in an unworkable form to the detriment of many children at risk.’

Boundaries are of the utmost importance because they establish size and shape. In so far as changes in the law affect the elements making up the boundaries of the firm, such changes can be expected to have an impact on the size and structure of firms. Theories which are capable of explaining how operations within the firm are different from those outside can be used to draw the boundaries of the firm and so to define its essence or nature. In this article three theories which give substance to the boundaries of the firm are presented and analysed.

The major debate in recent corporate legal theory has been between the coercionists and the contractarians. This can be caricatured as a dispute between those who follow institutional arguments, seeing the firm as a concession of the State, and those who follow economic theory, seeing the firm as a nexus of contracts.

Delivering the 1995 Goodman Lecture, David Glencross, the then Chief Executive of the Independent Television Commission (‘ITC’) commented that the Broadcasting Act 1990 did not contain sufficient flexibility to allow the ITC to deal effectively with unforeseen developments such as changing technology and media ownership and control issues. This is an interesting comment on the legislation because the Broadcasting Act 1990 represented a deliberate move towards a rule-based form of regulation away from the flexible, non-specific and discretionary style of the Broadcasting Act 1981 which it replaced. The White Paper which set out the Government's proposals for the new regulatory system emphasised this:

‘The ITC would apply lighter, more objective programme requirements. …The ITC would therefore adopt a less heavy handed and discretionary approach than the IBA necessarily does at present’.

However, the Government recognised that ‘[a] new enabling framework must be flexible enough to allow for technological change’.

The right to the exclusive services of sports performers is a valuable asset, in team sports, to the clubs which employ them and, in individual sports, to the agents, managers and/or promoters who act for them. This is most visible in professional football's market for players’ services where leading performers are currently ‘sold’ for many millions of pounds. The notion of players as assets is often reflected in clubs’ accounts and enhances clubs’ overall value. Of those clubs which are owned by publicly quoted companies the securing (or loss) of a star player can crucially affect the share price of the controlling company. In a more general sense a player's value to his club is reflected in his capacity to attract larger attendances, an increased volume of pre-season ticket sales and enhanced merchandising and marketing opportunities.

Despite having made some important advances in the harmonization of labour law in the European Union, the regulation of strikes continues to differ among the member states. In this article we will investigate the effect of the strike on the contract of employment and the extent of the employer's powers in the context of the strike in Spanish and English law. We will preface these particular issues with a general comparison of the characteristics of the two legal systems and their labour law principles. We will be concerned with the definition given to the strike in each legal system and whether there exists a right or a freedom to strike.

As the issue is usually framed, the fundamental issue at stake between mainstream liberal jurisprudence and various forms of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is, as Jeffrie Murphy puts it, whether there are ‘neutral principles in law and morality. By neutral principles [are] mean[t] those principles that can be agreed to by all rational beings.’ CLS theorists of all sorts typically hold that there are no neutral principles in a society divided into groups with vastly unequal power and status. Socialist Critics assert the class character of the law and morality. Feminist and Critical Race Theorists hold that these are infected with gender or racial biases. Social conflict between groups translates into irreconcilable conflicts of values. But in rejecting liberal neutrality, Murphy claims, the Critics fall into a radical ‘value relativism or skepticism’, which he regards as pragmatically self-defeating given their political commitments to the interests of subordinate groups.

In Henderson v Merrett Syndicates Ltd the House of Lords held, inter alia, that a party to a contract may rely on a tort committed by the other party, as long as doing so is not inconsistent with its express or implied terms. In doing so, it made clear (with respect, correctly) that the much-quoted passage in Lord Scarman's speech in Tai Hing Cotton Mill Ltd v Liu Chong Hing Bank Ltd should not be interpreted as assigning to contract an domain exclusive of tort and it thereby upheld the formerly predominant view which allowed concurrence of actions in tort and contract in principle. However, in finding a duty of care on which to base the plaintiffs’ claims in tort, Lord Goff in Henderson relied on Hedley Byrne as establishing a very broad principle of liability in tort based on the defendants’ ‘assumption of responsibility’ and this principle invites a radically different treatment of the relationship between the tort of negligence and contract between parties to contracts.