This commentary updates the paper ‘Excluding evidence (or staying proceedings) to vindicate rights in Irish and English law’ by analysing the recent decision of the Supreme Court of Ireland in DPP v JC. It argues that although the court has relaxed the exclusionary rule in one major respect, it has strengthened it in others, and that Ireland's approach to unconstitutionally or illegally obtained evidence remains very different from that of England and Wales.

One of the few areas of the law in which there is a significant and serious dispute between the United States and its Western Allies concerns the nature and scope of national regulation of international trade. This long-standing and mutually damaging dispute first arose in connection with the extraterritorial enforcement of US antitrust laws through the effects doctrine as elaborated by US courts commencing with the Alcoa case in 1945. Since then the dispute has progressively widened and deepened: it has extended to such matters as international shipping and civil aviation, commodity markets and securities and it has been aggravated by the extraterritorial application of US investigatory and other pretrial procedure.

In 2009 the legislature, judges and Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) each turned their attention to issues around assisted suicide. The legislature decided not to change the law. The judges decided the existing law was insufficiently clear and required the Director to clarify it. The Director flirted with reforming the law, but then drew back from such a legislative role. His published prosecution policy has been considered as a contribution to the regulation of death and dying, and as such has been found wanting. However, considered in the context of the proper roles of Parliament, courts and prosecutors, and seen as an exercise in constitutional restraint, the Director's approach should be appraised rather differently. From this perspective, the decision of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords in R (Purdy) v DPP raises significant concerns for the legitimacy of decision making in the contested moral issues that arise in healthcare ethics. In our democracy, courts should be wary of usurping legislative authority in areas where the Parliamentary position is clear. They should be reluctant to take sides in the protracted war over access to a ‘good death’.

In the pantheon of approaches open to participants in the pacific settlement of disputes, good offices holds a noteworthy place. The evolution of good offices over the past century is concurrent with a trend of considerable transformation within international law, including – amongst other changes – a move away from a state-led legal order, including in good offices following the emergence of the heads of international organisations as its prime users, and a process of legalisation and specialisation within the subject that has entirely altered its character. These changes have led to a redefinition of good offices that stresses the actor carrying out the role above the form that it takes. To accompany these changes in practice, there is a need for a transformation in the legal analysis and definition of good offices. One potential option in achieving this end is Bell's lex pacificatoria. If good offices is to continue to play a significant role in the settlement of violent conflicts, a fully developed legal analysis is necessary to grasp both its historical development and its potential future role.

The European Court of Human Rights (the Court) has been invoking the vulnerability criterion to overcome the drawbacks of cases concerning Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the prohibition of discrimination. This new criterion, allowing the Court to favour the applicants, highlights the applicants’ group affiliation. However, whether this criterion is effective in protecting vulnerable applicants against discrimination is doubtful. To examine this, I divide the Court's approach to Article 14 before and after the application of the vulnerability criterion. I argue that vulnerability criterion was used to fix the drawbacks of Article 14, but eventually backfired. The concept of vulnerability has been ambiguous, inconsistently used by the Court, and paternalistic. I suggest the Court focus on individual autonomy rather than grouping the applicants to improve their legal reasoning of Article 14.

Vaccines have continued to play a crucial global role in preventing infectious diseases in the twenty-first century. The Covid-19 pandemic has underlined their importance, with vaccines seen as the best way to protect the public from coronavirus. A longstanding problem of governments has been the extent to which they should assume responsibility for the compensation of those injured by vaccines. This paper reappraises the vaccine damage schemes currently available in the US and UK in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. It argues that any improvements to both US and UK schemes should be included in a revised national vaccine policy which takes into consideration their respective long-term national vaccine strategies to prepare for future pandemics. It supports the adoption of a UK-wide National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme, similar to the one in the US, to be administered by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. To balance the need for rigorous criteria to determine causation with the need for fairness, the programme should adopt the US practice of allowing negotiated settlements between parties in circumstances where review of the evidence has not concluded that the vaccine(s) caused the alleged injury but there are close calls concerning causation.

The usage of delegated legislation as a means of governance deserves significant attention, in view of the enormous impact that it is capable of having on the lives of citizens. While reforms to the process of parliamentary scrutiny are an important means of minimising the inappropriate usage of delegated legislation, this paper explores the possibility of drawing more fruitfully upon judicial review as an additional control mechanism. It undertakes a theoretical analysis of what makes delegated legislation distinct from primary legislation and other types of executive action for the purposes of judicial review, with a view towards identifying the proper normative orientation of judicial review of delegated legislation – upholding the moral requirements of delegation relationships and safeguarding democratic accountability and the rule of law. It then argues that existing grounds of review applied towards delegated legislation go some way towards but are inadequately directed at this normative orientation. Drawing inspiration from Irish and US jurisprudence, the paper critically evaluates several possible means of filling this doctrinal space, and concludes that the non-delegation doctrine and a rule of law-based ground of judicial review directed at exercises of delegated law-making power can supplement the law of judicial review of delegated legislation.

Unequal voting rights arrangements under dual class share structures are increasingly favoured by entrepreneurs and founders of technology companies, in order to retain a degree of control over the company that is disproportionate to their equity shareholdings. The rise of such share structures around the world has put competitive pressure on the UK Government and the country's financial regulator to relax the one share, one vote principle in the premium listing regime of the London Stock Exchange, to ensure the UK equities market remains world-leading and fit for the future development of the economy. There is, however, a long tradition of institutional investors’ distaste for dual class share structures. In fact, the near extinction of dual class listings in the UK capital markets can be largely attributed to the opposition of large British institutions. Therefore, this paper will critically discuss the conflict between the demands to attract listings from high-tech and innovative companies and concerns of a race to the bottom in the UK context. It rebuts criticisms based on investor protection and argues that if dual class companies were permitted to list in the Premium Segment, the higher level of regulatory protection provided in the premium listing regime would help enhance minority shareholder protection and shareholder engagement. The additional safeguarding measures, as we have seen from other global financial centres, would also help to restrain the potential abuse of controllers’ weighted voting power. Together with the market mechanism, permitting dual class listings in the Premium Segment should be welcomed.

This paper argues that shadow directors, as defined in English law, ought to owe the full range of directors' duties, both fiduciary and non-fiduciary, enacted in the Companies Act 2006 (CA 2006), ss 171–177, to the relevant company under their influence. Following the enactment of the recent Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act (SBEEA) 2015, these general duties are likely to apply to shadow directors, although there is still a case to be made as to why shadow directors should owe fiduciary duties to the relevant company. It is argued here that such a relationship is fiduciary in nature, but the current approach deployed in the English courts, based upon the application of Finn's originally formulated ‘undertaking’ test alone, is inadequate. Given these inadequacies, it is proposed that the Canadian ‘power and discretion’ test be deployed alongside the ‘undertaking’ test, in order to provide a far more comprehensive justification for the application of fiduciary obligations to shadow directors. This position is supported by establishing a theoretical basis for the ‘power and discretion’ test, via Paul Miller's ‘fiduciary powers theory’, as well as considering the application of such a test to shadow directors.

This paper makes a case for the integration of compulsory climate change topics across the core law curriculum. It argues that the most persuasive rationale for this is based in climate legal obligations and institutions, and a clear-eyed perception of climate risk, rather than the sustainability agenda. To this end, the paper outlines efforts taken to ‘mainstream’ climate change and environmental law education in a core course of the LLB degree – land law. An empirical study sought to evaluate the students’ engagement with these materials, and their broader views concerning climate change and their legal education. The paper critically evaluates the course and the results of the empirical study. It concludes that students want to be, and should be, taught climate law and the climate context of law as part of their prescribed learning throughout the core curriculum, rather than as optional or elective content.

In both England and Wales and New Zealand adoption law is under review. A series of discussion papers followed by a Report to Ministers has been published in this country, while New Zealand has published an interim proposal for amendment ofexisting legislation prior to a later full review The time is right therefore, to consider and compare the basis upon which adoption law reform is proceeding. The opportunity to question the nature of adoption as a legal construct and examine the particular patterns offamily morality that it promotes is timely. Equally, it is timely to re-assess the philosophical underpinning of the Adoption Act 1976 in light of the particular ideology imported into family law in England and Wales by the Children Act 1989. The Act stresses the durability of parenthood and establishes the concept of parental responsibility which survives both divorce and a child care order. While containing points of confluence with adoption law, the new ideology nonetheless clashes with the existing concept of adoption in certain fundamental ways.

The common law has solved questions of liability arising in the context of precontractual negotiations by resort to a range of different doctrines and approaches, adopting in effect ‘piecemeal’ solutions to questions of precontractual liability. Consequently, debate has arisen as to how best to classify or categorise claims for precontractual work and as to which doctrines are best suited to solving problems arising from anticipated contracts. The purpose of this article is to consider this question of how best to classify (cases of) precontractual liability. The initial focus will be on the ongoing debate as to whether principles of contract law or principles of unjust enrichment can better solve problems of precontractual liability. I will be suggesting that unjust enrichment theory offers little by way of explanation of cases of precontractual liability and, indeed, draws on principles of contract law in determining questions of liability for precontractual services rendered, though it does so by formulating those principles under different guises. Irrespective, however, of the doctrines utilised by the common law to impose liability, it is possible to identify a number of common elements unifying all cases of precontractual liability. In identifying such common elements of liability, it is necessary to draw on principles of both contract and tort law. How, then, should cases of precontractual liability best be classified? A consideration of the issue of classification of precontractual liability from a perspective of German civil law will demonstrate that a better understanding of cases of precontractual liability will be gained by classifying such cases as lying between the existing categories of contract and tort.

The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (hereafter the Convention) has been in operation for almost 40 years, the Commission and the court for more than 30 years. In the meantime, recourse to Strasbourg has become a built-in mechanism of judicial review in the Member States. In particular, art 25 of the Convention which entitles individuals to plead a violation of the Convention has turned into a corner-stone of a working system of human rights protection, since the court's first decision in 1960. Even though the court's output cannot compare to internal state jurisdictions, applications to Strasbourg have risen dramatically over the years.

The impending arrival of the Single European Market and the consequent drive towards European legal integration raise in stark form the future role of the national law school. Should we continue to have national law schools at all, in the sense of law schools with a predominantly national focus? Or should we move towards a system in which the typical law school, though located in a particular country within Europe, encompasses a structure, a body of staff and students and a curriculum which are a national and which focus on European laws and institutions rather than on those of the particular home State? I-f law schools are to retain their essentially national character, how should the growing influence of European law in general and Community law in particular affect their role, organisation and activities?

Corporate law — both in the UK and US — remains preoccupied with the separation of ownership and control. Share ownership, the story runs, has become so dispersed in the larger company that control of its affairs has passed from shareholders to managers. It is assumed that managers will have interests which conflict with those of shareholders and will use their control to further the former at the expense of the latter. The orthodox response has been to stress the paramountcy of shareholder interests and to seek ways of compelling management to advance those interests in preference to their own. The urgency with which these prescriptions for company law have been pursued has rather fluctuated, depending upon the wider economic and political climate within which companies operate. Thus, the take-over activity of the late 1980’s created its own excesses, as in the Guinness affair. The subsequent recession, with its effect on profits, caused further strain, exacerbated by rises in executives’ pay and generous severance awards at times unrelated to the companies’ own financial performance. A number of substantial corporate failures or controversies have provided a further impetus.

Arguments are sometimes made attempting to justify proprietary awards to unjust enrichment claimants by reference to the ‘priority’ such awards supposedly give in the defendant's insolvency. Those justifications are variously that unjust enrichment claimants do not take insolvency risks, that the defendant's creditors would otherwise receive an underserved windfall, and that unjust enrichment claimants occupy a position analogous to secured creditors. This paper shows that such arguments are flawed. To award unjust enrichment claimants' proprietary rights is not to give them priority in their defendant's insolvency but to withdraw the right from the estate available for distribution to all the unsecured creditors, whatever their order of priority. Moreover, insolvency ‘priority’ is not the only consequence of such an award. Finally, when seen for what they are, viz arguments for the award of property rights, the justifications do not, for a number of reasons, stand up.

Protection of confidential information has two main juridical bases, contract and equity. Where the defendant is or was the employee or agent of the plaintiff he may be subject to an express or implied contractual duty not to use the latter’s confidential information without his consent Other defendants who receive such information knowing or believing it to be confidential, either from the plaintiff himself or a thiid party, may be subject to an equitable duty of like kind

The purpose of this article is to examine the range and scope of compensatory remedies for breach of the equitable duty of confidence. The term ‘damages’ is sometimes used generically to describe these remedies which are several and different from one another in certain respects? albeit difficult to pinpoint exactly.

In the twin cases of Barclays Bank Plc v O’Brien and CIBC Mortgages Plc v Pitt the House of Lords consided for the first time an issue which has fresuently troubled the lower courts in recent years. In essence the issue can be boiled down to the following question:

Where a debt owed by A to C is guaranteed by B, in what circumstances will the fact that A induced B to make the guarantee by misrepresentation, undue influence or other conduct of which Equity disapproves, render the guarantee voidable by B against C?

(This simplified scenario, where A is the principal debtor, C the creditor, and B the guarantor, will be used in much of what follows). The contemporary significance of the question, and the difficulty which it has posed to the courts, are graphically shown by the fact that it has given rise to eleven reported decisions by the Court of Appeal in the last eight years.

The maxim ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse” has much to answer for. Defendants arguing that they did not know or misunderstood the law have been told that their ignorance or mistake made no difference to their liability. The institutional writers have laid down as much. The courts have repeatedly emphasised it.

However, it is here submitted that this blanket approach, characterised by the very existence of such a general maxim, is misconceived. No such general principle exists, nor should it. Although the judges have spoken in general terms, their remarks really depend on the context of the particular offences in question, where no knowledge of the law has been necessary, and liability has been (in this respect at least) ‘strict’.