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 recent years the meaning of the word ‘interview’ has become central to the regulatory framework of PACE. In part, this flows directly and inevitably from the terms of the act itself. If a verbal exchange between suspect and police is an interview, certain procedural consequences follow: it must normally be contemporaneously noted verbatim or taped; if the suspect is a juvenile or mentally disordered, it must usually take place in the presence of an ‘appropriate adult’. Furthermore, as a result of the recent revision of Code C on ‘Questioning’, persons arrested for an offence may not normally be interviewed about it except in a police station.

In the Statute of Westminster II (1285) c. 34, it was enacted that a widow could lose her action of dower, and the possibility of claiming the usual proportion of her deceased husband's real property, if, while he was alive, she had left him for a lover, and the married couple had not been reconciled during the husband's life. This new exception to the action of dower represented an important change in the balance between a widow and her husband's heir, or others with an interest in lands she might claim as her dower, and is therefore of great significance to the history of women, law and property in the common law world. The exception remained part of the law of England until dower itself was abolished in 1925, but, although the early years of the exception have been explored, its later history is less well known. As this paper will show, there was a slow and contested move away from the early literal and relatively ‘widow-friendly’ interpretation of c. 34 to a purposive, more moralising and much more ‘widow-unfriendly’ view, influenced by the opinion of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), and encouraged by a number of other legal and social factors.

There is increasing concern with the cost effectiveness of charities' fund-raising activities. Using a recent decision of the US Supreme Court as a backdrop, this paper examines the regulation of professional fund-raising and the associated issues relating to fund-raising costs. Whilst there are no legal limits on fund-raising costs in England and Wales, there are some elements of legal regulation which may indirectly impose some limitations on costs. As well as these legal tools, a number of other mechanisms, both current and proposed, which may help donors to decide which charities to support, taking into account their fund-raising efficiency, will also be considered. The paper finally acknowledges that whilst limiting the costs of fund-raising is a desirable objective, achieving this aim is by no means simple. It is hoped that current and proposed measures based on the theory of ‘let the donor’ decide will help to achieve this aim.

One of the enduring features in Irish legal discourse in the postcolonial period is the manner in which the individual body has become a receptacle of contested meaning. In Ireland, with its birth out of a violent trauma based on a philosophy of blood sacrifice, the heroic patriot who dies in the service of his imagined nation is invested with particular symbolic capital and casts a traumatic shadow over discourses on death in Irish society. The nation is always already in the shadow of death, of the deathly apparition of the new nation, made hauntingly manifest in the photos of the dead body of the nationalist hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, as his corpse lay in state in 1920. This body being dead also signals the hope that, in the sacrifice of the individual for the national cause, liberation will one day come. This theme of the primacy of community over individual prefigured the manner in which in postcolonial Irish society the individual body of the citizen was relegated to a secondary position. The attempt to deny or repress death may be analogised with the similar attempt on the part of political elites to create a notion of political identity which is rigid and attempts to keep all those others associated with death and degeneration outside the body politic.

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.

In a number of high profile disasters, human and financial, in recent years, such as the Piper Alpha oil rig fire and the collapse of the BCCI bank, employees had concerns about the impending disaster but did not raise them for fear of repercussions at work. This has led to increased recognition of the role that employees can play in safeguarding the public interest. In 1998 legislation was finally passed to provide employment protection for employees who raise concerns about malpractice and wrongdoing at work. The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (PIDA) provides protection against dismissal and detrimental action where employees make disclosures about a range of specified subjects. Protection is primarily aimed at internal disclosure, but the Act also provides a framework for raising issues externally. This article examines the provisions of the Act and assesses its potential to protect those who risk their livelihoods to raise concerns that are in the public interest.

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.

Contemporary British counter-terrorist legislation is dominated by ‘counter-law’ in Richard Ericson's terms: by using law against law, it systematically undermines the rule of law. This paper supports this proposition by developing a detailed ‘archetypal’ account of the rule of law considered as a critical ideal, drawing on Fuller's ‘morality of law’. The rule of law is identified with four tendencies in law – towards greater universality, knowability, followability and justifiability – and ‘counter-law’ with tendencies to block or reverse all of these. Counter-law tendencies in contemporary counter-terrorist legislation are discussed in detail, with particular reference to the proliferation of inchoate, preparatory and situational offences. This critique is also related to contemporary debates on law and counter-law; it is argued that critiques which relativise or historicise the liberal model of the rule of law fall short by failing to engage with it on its own terms, thereby undervaluing its utility as a normative resource. The paper concludes by discussing the range, significance and gravity of the departures from the rule of law that have been identified, considering some counter-arguments and drawing conclusions for policy-makers and legal scholars.

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.

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.

How can the incapacity defence in contract law coexist with the concept of universal legal capacity advanced by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)? In the absence of clear guidance from the CRPD on the link between legal capacity and mental capacity, and given the silence of this Convention on the concept of contractual capacity, this article stresses the need to redefine contractual capacity in a manner that responds not only to economic interests (eg upholding the security of transactions) but also to social interests (including the protection of values such as dignity). The discussion insists that incapacity and disability must never be conceptually equated and calls for a definition of contractual incapacity that moves beyond the medical condition of individuals (whether this is known by or apparent to the other contracting party) and which considers the circumstances of the transaction. These arguments are explored in the context of English contract law, focusing on the question of contractual validity when a party lacked the mental capacity to understand the transaction and the other party was unaware of the incapacity and acted in good faith.

This paper examines the new statutory regime for paying damages for personal injury by means of periodical payments instead of a lump sum. How are such payments to increase in future to take account of rising care costs, especially when these usually form the largest part of a major award? The answer to this question is crucial in determining the extent that the new form of payment will be used. How periodical payments are to be indexed is also a key factor in calculating the total cost of compensation and, in particular, in assessing the liabilities of the National Health Service. The issue gave rise to litigation which was voted by personal injury practitioners as the most important of the year. Here, that litigation and the statutory reforms which gave rise to it are set in their wider academic contexts.

This paper focuses on the drivers steering companies’ behaviour over uses of patented health technologies, taking Covid-19 as a case study. Global equitable access to health technologies is vital to bringing the pandemic under control. Reflecting this, global mechanisms for rightsholders to share intellectual property rights, data and know-how over such health technologies have been developed. Yet, to date, there is limited support from corporate rightsholders for such mechanisms. Instead, health technologies have been licensed largely based on bilateral deals, with vast global inequalities emerging. Given the traditional focus within company law on prioritising shareholders' short-term financial value, we argue that it is unsurprising that many corporate rightsholders adopt a protectionist approach to patents, even in the face of health crises. However, we argue that the tide may now be starting to shift, catalysed by an emergence of engaged shareholders petitioning for socially responsible corporate behaviour, including for uses of intellectual property over health technologies in a manner that more clearly aligns with public interests. If harnessed and encouraged, such engaged shareholder behaviour could present an opportunity to reframe the conception of shareholder value towards one that considers a long-term sustainable approach and ultimately to shift corporate behaviour around uses of intellectual property over health technologies to take public interests into account.

The paper reports the findings of over a decade of pioneering, award-winning fieldwork which has explored how workplace experience, if embedded successfully in different stages of legal education, can accelerate the ‘speed to capability’ and skills development of early career lawyers. The benefits from initial experiments of graduate-level work placements carried out by the authors since 2008 are presented. The paper then explores the findings from almost 10 years of creating year-long work placements for law undergraduates, assessing student skill growth, and the impact of the work placements on degree results and employment outcomes, before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This paper explores the use of mediation in medical treatment disputes through the lens of therapeutic justice (TJ), a concept developed in the 1990s to consider the therapeutic and anti-therapeutic effects of justice systems. The paper argues that mediation may be a mechanism for achieving therapeutic effects for people involved in medical treatment disputes. In doing so, the paper highlights the conflict that can often arise between healthcare professionals, family members and patients in medical treatment disputes and the related difficulties with using litigation to resolve this type of conflict. It has been suggested by judges, academics and policy-makers that mediation might be a better way of resolving conflict in these cases. While mediation and TJ have much in common, the paper explores the many tensions between them, considering ways in which mediation might need to be done differently to achieve therapeutic aims. Finally, the paper identifies six TJ features against which mediation can be tested to consider whether it can live up to the claims that it can be used to resolve medical treatment disputes more therapeutically.

It is now well recognised that contractual purposes play an important role in the construction of contracts. The methods by which purposes are taken into account have not, however, been systematically explored. This paper considers three central issues in the purposive construction of contracts: first, the reasons contractual purposes are relevant to the interpretation of express terms and the identification of implied terms; secondly, the way in which contractual purposes are identified and distinguished from individual party interests; and, thirdly, the different ways in which contractual purposes inform the processes of interpretation and implication. It is argued that reference to contractual purposes can both raise and resolve interpretive choices, and that purposive construction plays a significant and under-recognised role in the identification of implied terms.