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.

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.

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.

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

This article critically appraises the UK government's recently published Consultation Paper on the future of the anti-terrorism laws. The author considers the likely effect of the Human Rights Act 1998 on the impact of any legislation that might flow from the government's proposals. The interaction between human rights law and anti-terrorism legislation provides a useful case study of the likely effects of incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. The author argues that many of these effects have not been anticipated by the drafters of the anti-terrorism proposals, with the result that many of their suggested changes to the law will be vulnerable to legal challenge if not sharply modified before enactment. The author concludes by considering the likelihood that, over time, successive governments will learn to tailor their legislation to the requirements of the Convention, even in the anti-terrorism field, but that in the short-term a period of legislative instability is to be expected.

Writing in the introduction to his new treatise on contract in 1826, Joseph Chitty observed that ‘Perhaps no branch of the jurisprudence of this country has of late years been more subject of judicial inquiry and decision than the Law of Contracts’. It is generally accepted that the so-called classical model of contract law, which remains influential into the present day, was created at this time. Ever since the subject first attracted sustained attention from legal historians in the 1970s, the driving forces of these developments have been contested. Some saw legal change as a product of economic and social factors. For others the reception of new ways of thinking and legal literature provided a more convincing explanation. What is not usually disputed is that there was a fundamental revolution in contract doctrine and literature in the nineteenth century. This assumption is open to challenge. It fails to give proper weight to the past. In fact these changes were deeply rooted in the eighteenth century and even earlier.

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.

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.

This paper discusses the extent to which conscientious objections to vaccination qualify for protection under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Drawing on an examination of the nature of conscience and the ethics of vaccine refusal, it argues that a narrow category of reasons for refusal to be vaccinated can be differentiated from more general ‘vaccine hesitancy’. In relation to conscience objections of this kind, it engages in a systematic analysis of the applicability of the ECHR, both in relation to compulsory vaccination, and so-called ‘vaccine passports’. It concludes that states can – and in some situations must – recognise conscientious objections under the ECHR.

Tasked with enforcing criminal law, public prosecutors worldwide enjoy broad discretion. Existing literature on prosecutorial discretion and accountability tends to discuss the regulation of prosecutorial discretion or analyse the influence of the procedural environment in which public prosecutors operate. This paper focuses on occupational culture as an important factor affecting prosecutorial decisions. It draws particular attention to an understudied aspect of prosecutors’ professional identity: legitimacy and, specifically, self-legitimacy, ie the belief public prosecutors have in their own legitimacy to make decisions in individual cases. The paper presents research findings from direct observations and interviews which reveal a sense of a loss of self-legitimacy amongst Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) staff due to the constant monitoring of their decisions by colleagues and managers. This all-pervasive managerialism, paradoxically, undermines the very legitimacy (and, relatedly, transparency) which the CPS has had to work so hard to develop since its inception.

This paper explores the development and operation of law and policy concerning the charging of overseas visitors for healthcare in England from the beginnings of the NHS to the present day. It highlights how this has been a highly contentious issue for decades, often linked with immigration policy, and is an area that still lacks comprehensive reliable empirical data to inform the debate. It explores and analyses the recent reforms to the NHS Overseas Charging Regulations introduced in 2015 and 2017. It demonstrates the problems in implementing the most recent regulations in an era of the ‘hostile environment’ and argues that the approach which has been taken can be seen as undermining the covenant of trust between patient and clinician and thus the fundamental principles of the NHS.

The study of criminal justice policy making is generally approached from the perspective of structural variables (eg social, cultural or economic), or, if inclined towards agency-led approaches, on the policy making activities of ‘elites’. The potential of practitioners to shape policy has been relatively neglected. This paper explores a striking example of practitioner-led criminal justice policy transformation: the decline in the use of custody for juveniles in England and Wales in the 1980s. The focus of the study is on the communicative origins of a philosophical turnaround in youth justice localities through the empowerment of youth justice practitioners. Drawing on empirical sources (including reflective interviews with key participant-observers) the paper explores, in depth, the occurrence and the meaning of local structural transformations. It is argued that the emergence of trust relations between participants in local youth justice processes was the key development behind the transformation of the state of penal culture towards one of ‘communicative rationality’ which, in turn, enabled the dramatic reduction in the use of custody. It is suggested that proponents of more moderate penal policy could draw valuable lessons from this episode.

The law of complicity and conspiracy should neither be used nor be capable of being used to subvert the intentions of Parliament when it framed offences. To explain the ramifications of this simple message will take a little space.

The law of complicity and conspiracy is wide, but it is well known, and normally the legislature may fairly be presumed to intend it to apply to new edicts unless it is expressly excluded. Occasionally, however, the court may feel able to collect from the statute a legislative policy exempting from responsibility people who would otherwise have been accomplices or conspirators.

It is generally agreed that the law of murder is in need of reform. The scope of the reform necessary has however become the subject of increasingly robust debate. The retreat from Hyam, it has been argued, leaves us with a law of murder which is both too wide and too narrow to justify the continued bifurcation of murder and manslaughter. believe this objection to be justified but consider equally that the substantive aims of a two-tiered law of homicide are not, as some believe, incompatible with doctrinal rationality. The task of criminal lawyers therefore must be to attempt to effect the necessary reconciliation of substance with form. I shall argue that central to this enterprise is the maintenance of the dividing line between intentional and reckless killings but that a definition of intention must be adopted which incorporates certain categories of risk-taking. As the definition now stands, the wrong categories are incorporated at the expense of the right ones.

At common law, and whether or not there is default on the part of the debtor, the legal mortgagee enjoys the proprietary right to take actual possession of mortgaged property for any purpose: ‘… before the ink is dry on the mortgage.’ Although technically this is an absolute right, in practice possession will be sought only if the borrower is in breach of the mortgage agreement. The danger remains, however, that such an unqualified right may be arbitrarily used by a capricious mortgagee. Any minor and temporary default might be seized upon by the lender as justification for taking possession and, subsequently, selling the property. This would deprive the mortgagor of any opportunity to remedy the default. The lender could, thereby, render the borrower homeless simply to rid itself of the inconvenience of a problem debtor.

This paper attempts to contribute to the increasing body of research on the working practices of legal academics and what has been called the ‘private life’ of the law school. It seeks to subject to further empirical investigation the analysis made by Collier, Cownie, McGlynn, Morley, Wells and others that the new corporate managerialism in universities has created a gendered regime of control and target setting. It examines one under-researched aspect of academic practice, namely the award of sabbaticals. The study draws on an examination of the practice of sabbatical leave by academic staff in both pre- and post-1992 university law schools. Although sabbaticals are widely assumed to be necessary for the effective development of research and scholarship, there has been little recent investigation of their operation in English universities. This is in contrast to the USA where a number of studies have been conducted. Sabbaticals are thus an aspect of the ‘donnish dominion’ which, although well covered in campus novels, is missing from researched surveys of university life. The paper reviews the relevant literature on sabbaticals, reports on the results of a study of the published criteria law schools have for awarding sabbaticals and analyses responses to a questionnaire sent to law school heads on the operation of their policies. Particular areas of interest are differing practices between universities, possible gender bias and the relevance of sabbaticals both to the teaching versus research debate and to an understanding of academics’ working lives more generally. The survey results suggest that the practical application of sabbatical policies demonstrates the ambivalent way managerialism operates in universities. Although performance targets are stipulated, the mechanism for enforcement in relation to sabbatical awards is surprisingly light or non-existent. It is argued that the use of sabbatical leave plays a part in defining both the status of university law schools and also the organisation of academic research. It thus impacts on the formation of the professional identities of legal academics. Those who are excluded from this benefit may be marginalised and areas of academic labour considered inappropriate for sabbaticals consequently regarded as secondary. This may entrench already existing areas of inequality.

At one of the first meetings of the Society of Public Teachers of Law that I attended a senior member declared that too much law reform was going on and that he proposed to form a law conservation group. That sentiment would now be widely shared by practitioners and perhaps even by some members of this Society, re-writing their lecture notes for the umpteenth time. Yet, by the nature of our job, most of us are continually looking at ways in which the law might be reformed. A university teacher cannot discuss any legal institution or rule of law without considering with his students whether it works fairly and efficiently and, this often leads naturally to a consideration of how it might be improved. At the very least we must send our students away with some ideas on law reform. Many of us are not content to stop there but seek to reach a wider, or more immediately influential, audience. In this paper I propose to discuss some personal views and experiences, more or less related to the subject.

It may or may not be possible to develop an Artificial Intelligence model of legal reasoning that accurately reflects the processes of the legal mind, but one positive result that could well emerge from all the research into such modelling is a fundamental reassessment of legal theory. The paradigm that legal reasoning is essentially a rule based activity may well have to be discarded in favour of an epistemological model that is very much more complex, in the systems sense of this term, than the hierarchical structure traditionally associated with jurists since the Enlightenment (if not since the Byzantines) and represented in one of its most perfect theoretical forms today in Kelsen's model. It is the purpose of this paper to examine, if only briefly, this challenge to conventional legal theory (Part I) and, using systems theory, historical jurisprudence and Justinian's Digest (Part II), to suggest an alternative epistemological model (Part III).