It is the purpose of this article to consider the recent case law on the Majewski rule and to show the problems which can be created by an undisciplined use of language. The first section is concerned with the inaptness of the language used in one of those cases to confine the Mujewski rule to its proper sphere of operation. The second part deals with the somewhat reckless use of the term ‘recklessness’ and its potential impact upon that rule.

A contract which is believed to be legally binding sometimes turns out to be unenforceable by one or both parties because of some defect at the time it was made. An agreement may be affected, for example, by mistake; by uncertainty; or by the incapacity of one of the parties. Often preparation or performance has already begun, and the question then arises as to how the relationship – which was thought to be governed by the agreement – is to be adjusted. Where one party has received what he was promised under the agreement there exists the possibility of a claim against him in restitution. A difficulty in many cases of this kind is that the same factors which render the contract unenforceable also provide an argument against allowing a restitutionary claim. However, this is not always the case; and even where it is, there may be some justification for permitting recovery in restitution whilst refusing an action in con tract.

‘In my view, the criminal law of evidence should be developed along common-sense lines readily comprehensible to the men and women who comprise the jury and bear the responsibility for the major decisions in criminal cases. I believe that most laymen, if told that the criminal law of evidence forbade them even to consider such evidence as we are debating in this appeal, would reply, “Then the law is an ass.”…The hearsay rule was created by our judicial predecessors, and if we find that it no longer serves to do justice in certain conditions then the judges of today should accept the responsibility of reviewing and adapting the rules of evidence to serve present society.’

The legal tradition is a written tradition and is consequently centred upon the study of textual meanings. From the earliest times law, both religious and secular, has been inscribed and codified, be it chiselled in stone, carved in wood, scratched on vellum or written in books. While the law codes and law books are certainly not the only forms of law they are in historical terms the dominant ones. The law is ideally promulgated in books and is found in books, it being of the historical essence of sacred and secular legal power to take a written form.

Systems of representative democracy require that the electorate be given at regular intervals the opportunity to replace the party in government with a rival political association. In this context, the right of individuals to freedom of association permits the formation of competitor parties and prevents forms of state intervention that might otherwise privilege existing office holders and their political programmes. It follows then that restrictions on the right to political association are deserving of particularly close scrutiny. At the same time, liberal democratic constitutions usually insist that participants in electoral process manifest a level of commitment to core liberal democratic norms (such as the rule of law, toleration, the equal worth of each individual and the peaceful resolution of grievances). In the case of intolerant, extremist parties that would reject some/most of these norms, the state may invoke a range of defensive measures up to and including proscription in order to safeguard democracy. This paper takes as its focus the constitutional issues raised by the banning in Spain of Batasuna – the political wing of ETA. A legal challenge to the ban is currently before the European Court of Human Rights. Making reference to work of John Rawls, this paper considers whether the ban on Batasuna is justifiable in terms of liberal political theory, before analysing the extent to which proscription conforms to international human rights law and European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence.

Problems relating to the admixture of goods have arisen in many contexts. An up-to-date example is where the supplier of goods subject to a reservation of title clause lays claim to materials in which the goods supplied have been incorporated. Notwithstanding the practical importance of the subject, the matter has not perhaps attracted the degree of discussion that it deserves. This article attempts to redress the balance somewhat but firstly an effort is made to put terminological inexactitude and imprecision at rest.

In the 75 years since the Society of Public Teachers of Law came into being there has been a revolution in the conduct of business operations. Methods of transport have been transformed; commercial transactions have increased vastly in size, in number and in complexity; a whole range of new contract structures and financing techniques has evolved; and the receipt, storage and transmission of information and instructions have been completely changed by new technology.

If it be right that commercial law is rooted in the customs and practices of merchants we could reasonably expect to find a parallel transformation in English commercial law, a reappraisal of fundamental concepts, a wholesale jettisoning of nineteenth century statutes and case law. It is a matter for some astonishment that this has not occurred.

One of the concepts central to the ‘reconceiving’ of the ‘regulatory state’ during ‘the age of regulatory reform’ which we might trace back to the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s, has been that of the ‘hybrid’ form of economic organisation. Rejection of command-and-control regulation led, in the public sector, to the adoption of ‘marketmimicking’, a technique that claimed to replace the hierarchical direction of planning with the mobilisation of self-interest in ‘quasi-markets’, thereby merging ‘economic’ incentivisation with the ‘political’ stipulation of the markets' outcomes. In the private sector, institutions that had long been recognised to sit between contract and the company, of which the franchise had been the most thoroughly analysed within contract law, began to be regarded as ‘networks’.

This article is an attempt to add to our understanding of the map of common law obligations. That there is such a thing is an article of faith among those who believe that the common law is based on reason. Any map does three things: it represents a certain area; it enables us to locate any point on that area by providing us with axes of reference (for example, longitude and latitude) and it identifies certain points on that area as significant. The map of common law obligations covers the set of all possible duties. A duty is located in that set by reference to its pattern (its content) together with its origin (the set offacts sufficient to give rise to that duty). The map of common law obligations identifies all the duties which the common law may give effect to by compelling those who are subject to those duties to comply with them.

In this article I hope to be able to demolish a number of false assumptions that are to be found in textbooks on Criminal Law. These are the assumption that intoxication (whether voluntary or involuntary) is a ‘defence’; the assumption that, when D raises in evidence that he was intoxicated, special rules come into play; and the assumption that there is a difference between the legal effect of voluntary and involuntary intoxication. Whereas these assumptions may have been justified in the nineteenth century or even a few years ago, it will be shown that recent cases have tended more and more to assimilate the rules on intoxication to the general law, so that by now the differences have virtually vanished. If this is so, it might even be possible to eliminate a chapter from future editions of Criminal Law textbooks, and to save students a very troublesome week of study.

In this paper, which is the text of a lecture given at the official launch of the Law School at the University of Bradford on 11 May 2006, the history of law reform in England is traced, the role of the Law Commission is analysed and future prospects are considered.

This paper has two starting points, one theoretical the other practical. The theoretical starting point is Ronald Dworkin's rights thesis; the practical starting point is the controversial case of Bushell v Secretary of State for the Environment. Our concern is to examine the relationship between the rights thesis and public law disputes such as Bushell. We suggest that this examination throws up some important leads as regards the development of a normative theory of adjudication for public law cases.

Although the law relating to common mistake has engendered a plethora of conundrums, many problem areas have in fact been well-traversed in the literature. The present article does not seek to re-cover such welltrodden ground, but attempts, instead, to suggest a different and more systematic approach that would effect a merger of the common law and equitable branches of common mistake into one coherent, doctrine.

The nature of separate legal personality is a perennial debate in corporate law. This paper uses insights from a previous iteration of the debate to argue that separate legal personality is best seen as a two-step process: it is a concession from the state to something real. That real thing is the economic concept of the firm, which has been recently debated within institutional economics. Viewing separate legal personality as a two-step process lets us explore whether the concession of separate legal personality is operating as it should. Law imposes no prerequisite requirement that a firm exists before establishing a company, nor limits firms to only one company. Law thus facilitates misalignments between the firm and the company. Such misalignments will only occur if two constituencies within the company structure – the ultimate shareholders and directors – consider it in their interests to create such misalignment. As a result, these misalignments harm third parties by allowing risk to be exported to them through opportunistic misalignment. This paper then explores the methods of misalignment and reviews current legal tools which are available to be deployed to re-align the company to the firm, and argues that they should be deployed.

The concept of home has attracted considerable critical attention in recent decades across a broad range of social science disciplines. Analysis of ‘home meanings’ provides important evidence of the values which people attach to property that they occupy as a home. This evidence could be utilised to argue that home represents a site of special significance, deserving some additional protection in law, over and above other property types. Where such arguments have been considered in English law, the tendency has been to confer special status on the family home rather than on home per se. This article identifies several weaknesses, both practical and conceptual, with the application of ‘family home’ analysis in the context of creditor/occupier disputes. The article proceeds to consider whether ‘family home’ is sufficiently attractive as a central organising concept in policy discourse to outweigh the specific criticisms outlined. An alternative and, it is argued, more desirable solution would be to approach the issue of security of tenure in the owner-occupied home from a more individualistic, rather than family-centric, perspective.

This paper considers the viability of the office of Lord Chancellor. It focuses on the Lord Chancellor's judicial role and argues that a number of factors, most notably the dominance of his executive responsibilities, the political influence and style of the current incumbent, Lord Irvine, and the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights through the Human Rights Act 1998, make its retention unsustainable. It therefore concludes that the Lord Chancellor should relinquish the role and no longer sit as judge. In the light of this conclusion, it moves on to look at the Lord Chancellor's responsibility for judicial appointments, his role as head of the judiciary, his position as a departmental minister in Cabinet and his function as Speaker in the House of Lords, and suggests that the nature of the office of Lord Chancellor is such that once the judicial role is relinquished, justifications for these other roles also disappear. The office should therefore be consigned to history, with other institutions assuming its responsibilities.

Sterilisation (vasectomy in the case of the male and tubal ligation or laporoscopy or other variants in the case of the female) is a common method of contraception. It is perceived as having none of the practical and aesthetic disadvantages of ‘mechanical’ methods and none of the health risks associated with oral contraception. It seems to be generally assumed that these procedures are one hundred per cent effective. Indeed, they probably are the most effective methods available, but there are at least two possible sources of failure. First, the procedure may not be performed correctly, though in the case of vasectomy this does not present a very serious problem if, as is normal vasectomy practice in this country, fertility tests are carried out over a fairly extended period before the patient is advised that he may rely upon the operation.

What little empirical work there has been in the field of contract law has revealed that the parties do not always regard the legal enforceability of their agreements as a high priority. Problems arise when this attitude is combined with the use of standard terms by one or both parties. Perhaps the best known example ofthis is the ‘battle ofthe forms standard forms are exchanged with no attention being given to their inconsistencies and it then becomes very difficult to determine which set of terms actually form the basis of the contract. Another problem occurs where the parties have carefully negotiated some part of their contract only to discover, when a dispute arises, that it is inconsistent with the standard terms which were incorporated into the contract and to which neither party had paid much attention. This article is concerned with the problem which occurs when one party has a set ofstandard terms but has introduced them into the transaction after the contract has been concluded.