This paper explores the reasons for the proposed abolition of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and its replacement by a new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. It focuses on the principal justification now advanced for the project, namely the need to institute full judicial independence. It does so very much in the spirit of the argument recently made by Lord Steyn in Counsel (although it comes to a very different conclusion from Lord Steyn's): even if there is a clear commitment to the reform of the United Kingdom's highest judiciary, the nature of that reform should depend entirely on the reasons for change. It is necessary to be clear on those reasons and to weigh them carefully.

Historically, Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code has influenced in the debate over the reform of personal property security law in England. The revision to Article 9 has provided some further impetus to the issue of reform. A central feature of Article 9 which has been adopted in recent reform proposals for English law is the development of a generic unitary concept of the security interest and the specific rejection of formalism in security transactions. The impact upon the common law environment in England and Wales of the adoption of such an approach is considered in this paper. It is argued that the unitary concept of a ‘security interest’ is too blunt a concept and is over inclusive in that it wrongly assumes that all security interests perform an identical function. Furthermore, the development of functionalism seen in Article 9 has blurred an important distinction drawn under the common law between relative property rights and in this way fails to distinguish between what are essentially different transactions. In turn, this invites scrutiny of the usefulness in this context of notice filing and the first-to-file priority rule which is at the heart of an Article 9 regime.

Proposals for a new constitutional settlement have highlighted issues, many of them factitious, about the Human Rights Act. This paper suggests that the relationship of rights to duties is poorly understood, and that the majority of recognised rights already carry corresponding duties, but that to try to make the enjoyment of rights conditional on the fulfilment of duties is neither principled nor practicable. It is suggested that, using mutual respect as a sounder basis, a larger Bill of Rights can be contemplated. But good constitutions cannot be willed into being: pending the arrival of a constitutional moment, reform is likely to be a process of interest-group wrangling in which the most that can be looked for are some modest but necessary reforms.

I will argue that – as an exception to the general rule adopted in England and Wales – third parties, including victims, should in some circumstances be permitted to bring proceedings for (inter alia) judicial review of sentences, and other measures, imposed on offenders. Such proceedings should not be ruled out when parts of sentences, or other orders, are meant to affect the interests of individual third parties themselves, and the prosecution cannot reasonably be expected to be solely responsible for protecting those interests. However, I will also conclude that, from a public law perspective, there is a preferable solution. Third parties who may be adversely affected by sentences or orders imposed on offenders should sometimes be given a limited degree of involvement in the process leading up to the imposition of those sentences or orders. Recent legislation takes us some way towards this goal.

Almost every leading work on the law of confidence mentions the possibility of a declaration of a constructive trust as a remedy for a claim involving an abuse of confidence. Apart from the Canadian Supreme Court, no other appellate court in the Commonwealth has seriously debated this issue. This paper investigates the legitimacy of the use of the constructive trust in this context.

First and foremost, I welcome the move to establish a new Supreme Court for the United Kingdom, separate from the House of Lords. I have favoured this for years, and I regard the Government's proposals as a real step forward. It is a piece of long-unfinished business nearly achieved by the mighty reformers of 1873-75. Their shades must rejoice to see it at last being tackled. All my other comments hereafter should be seen in that positive context.

The law of theft, as understood in Gomez and Hinks, has been the occasion of almost unanimous academic condemnation and of robust dissenting opinions in the House of Lords. While much of the critical discussion is sophisticated and challenging, it is important that the baby is not to be expelled with the bathwater. We suggest that one argument in favour of the current position is that it offers distinct protection to some of the more vulnerable members of society. This advantage ought nevertheless to be sacrificed if it can be purchased only at the cost of violating the rule of law and the harm principle. But our examination of these ideas reveals that the price need not be paid. The rule of law contains not one idea, but a plurality of ideas, many of which support the current position. As for the harm principle, it is notable that Hinks does not castigate harmless behaviour; rather it attacks the wrong of exploitation. This raises many difficult issues, but we argue that unless such exploitative behaviour is explicitly addressed in Legislation, reforming the current ‘broad’ understanding of the law in favour of a ‘reductive’ account assimilating theft to non-voluntary transfers would be a retrograde step. In principle the new concern for protecting the vulnerable from exploitation is welcome.

Lawyers place great stress on the ‘objectivity’ of the law’s approach to agreements. Humpty-Dumpty may claim that ‘when I use a word it means just what I want it to mean, no more and no less’, but a lawyer would advise Humpty that the law, should it interest itself in any promise he made, would be interested not in what he meant by what he said, but in how a reasonable man would understand that which was said. This, the lawyer would explain, is the dichotomy between the subjective and the objective interpretation of words, and it is a dichotomy which has considerable influence on lawyers’ and judges’ thought. Treitel discusses it on the first page of his text, and the very title of one of the chapters of Cheshire, Fifoot and Furmston, ‘The Phenomena of Agreement’, is derived from the law’s concern ‘not with the presence of an inward and mental assent but with its outward and visible signs.

Corporate governance is ‘hot’ in the United Kingdom and legal academics have written widely on the subject. Still, the topic has been virtually ignored as an academic discipline for law students. This article argues that corporate governance is a subject which should be included in the law curriculum and describes how a course dealing with the topic might be structured.

Promoting alienability has been a policy of the law for many years. The rule against inalienability is one aspect of that policy. This paper seeks to demonstrate that that rule throws doubt on the validity of useful provisions such as the asset-lock provisions of the new breed of community-interest companies; that, historically, it has not been applied where logically it should have been; that the related rules restricting the imposition of conditions on transfers can readily, and better, be based upon secure doctrine rather than uncertain policy; and that, overall, its repeal, if thought necessary with concurrent reforms, would be welcome.

In this paper, I use Dworkin's distinction between rules and principles to analyse the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. I argue that, inherent in many conceptions of the doctrine, is an assumption that it operates in the conclusive manner of a Dworkinian rule. I then submit that the doctrine actually functions in the flexible way characteristic of a Dworkinian principle. In support of this contention, I argue that Acts of Parliament may be balanced against competing principles or statutes; that they possess the dimension of weight or importance; and that the degree to which they will be adhered in any particular case will be contingent upon the importance attributed to any competing principle or statute. I finish the paper with an evaluation of my arguments and an attempt to anticipate potential counter-arguments.

Section 58 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 prohibits the use of means with intent to procure ‘miscarriage’. In Smeaton Munby J held that the administration of the ‘morning after’ pill with intent to prevent the implantation in the uterus of any embryo conceived as a result of sexual intercourse does not contravene s 58. This article respectfully questions the learned judge's decision.

The proprietary status of the contractual licence has long been a matter of dispute. In Arnold v Ashbum–Anstult the obiter remarks of Fox LJ signalled a return to orthodoxy in this area of the law. Unless a contractual licence can be supported by facts sufficient to support a constructive trust (and these, too, were restrictively defined by Fox LJ), it will not bind third parties. However, Fox W did not discuss rights over land arising by way of estoppel ( ‘estoppel rights’). The proposition that these can bind third parties has never attracted the controversy that surrounded the proprietary status of contractual licences. Nonetheless, due to the potential overlap between the two types of licence, it is a proposition that needs urgent re-evaluation in the light of Fox W’s views on contractual licences.

English law has recently recognised a tort of misuse of private information through the development of the tort of breach of confidence. This paper considers the conceptual issues that arise in the particular context of cases contesting the privacy of information exchanged in an intimate relationship. The courts have said that the purpose of protecting privacy through the tort is the promotion of individual autonomy. Examining what is entailed in this approach, it is argued that cases involving shared privacies can only be understood as involving the indirect promotion of autonomy through the protection of certain socially sanctioned relationships. A framework of analysis is developed under which the underlying issues are laid bare and through which the reasoning of the courts may be understood and criticised.

In focusing on David Cronenberg's film eXistenZ this paper interrogates the place of cyberpunk and the cyborg in understanding and challenging law's bodies and embodied subjectivities. The genre proves descriptive of the gendered bodies of law's imagination, yet it also contains the possibility of dissolving the prescriptive binaries of law and other discursive fields. The essay works with Donna Haraway's contention that the cyborg in its boundary transgression is a metaphor for gender obsolescence. Relating cyborg theory to law, and noting how law has colonised other discursive fields, the oppositional/binary construction of men's bodies as bounded and safe whilst women's are constructed as fluid and dangerous is examined. To illustrate this the essay considers the industrial bodies of law's imagination, an area which replays this bounded/fluid binary. Reading eXistenZ, the essay attempts to sketch an alternative analysis which recognises and challenges the gendered bodies of law's imagination. In focusing on the issues of permeability, of boundary pollution and fusion, the analysis privileges a recognition of bodies as both bounded and fluid. In this the analysis challenges the construction of gendered bodies within these policies and hence the construction of gender appropriate employment, behaviour and environments.

Chancel liability is an ancient property right, enforced by a Parochial Church Council, attaching to certain former rectorial lands. It requires a landowner to bear the cost of repair of the parish church chancel. The right poses particular problems for a purchaser, not least because it is hard to discover and is not limited to the value of the land. A recent decision of the Court of Appeal has found that a Parochial Church Council falls within section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998 as a public authority, and that chancel liability infringes article 1 of the First Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights. This paper will dispute the rationale used by the Court of Appeal, and in so doing will argue that whilst chancel liability is outmoded, widely regarded as incongruous and does not bear scrutiny in its modern context, it should nevertheless be removed on a principled basis, avoiding unwanted repercussions elsewhere in the law.

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.

Mounting concern over the burgeoning growth and impact of the tort of negligence has, as is well known, led to a backlash in recent years. The higher courts have re-imposed more restrictive approaches to the question of the duty of care, culminating in the assertion that ‘close and direct proximity’ is the pre–condition for the imposition of a duty of care, by the Privy Council in Yuen Kun Yeu v A–G .f Hong Kong. However, this attention, focussed on what are generally cases peripheral to the mainstream of tortious liability, has diverted many commentators away from the issue of breach of duty, which lies at the heart of the great preponderance of tortious litigation