There is a tendency in contemporary contract law for judges to “never say never” and permit an open-ended exception from the rule. This nebulous exception is designed to cater for the rare instance where application of the rule would be undesirable in the interests of justice. However, this kind of imprecise exception is deleterious in terms of the unpredictability it generates, as well as the attendant increases in time and costs that result. The “never say never” approach is to be discouraged in contract law where commercial predictability, while certainly not inviolable, nonetheless remains a weighty goal deserving of continued deference.

The doctrine of legitimate expectations is a developing area of administrative law, and many issues remain outstanding. Promises, practices, and policies generate legitimate expectations, but what is special about them? Why do they and only they generate legitimate expectations? The lack of an obvious answer has led some commentators to claim that the doctrine is ultimately incoherent and should be disaggregated. In this paper, we challenge this claim by arguing, first, that promises, practices, and policies each comprise or make applicable a certain type of rule, and second, that having a legitimate expectation is a matter of such a rule binding a public body to act in some way. This rule-based account gives the doctrine of legitimate expectations both coherence and distinctiveness.

Rejecting the competing positions of Swadling and Chambers, this article argues that the law of presumed resulting trusts reflects a very old rule that, upon a voluntary transfer, the fate of the beneficial interest in the property depends on the intention of the transferor. The case law shows that the presumption is of an intention to create a trust for the transferor or provider of the purchase money. It makes no difference if, reflecting the historically important concept of “retention”, this is phrased in negative terms as a presumption that the intention of the transferor was not to pass the beneficial interest to the transferee.

Having set express termination clauses (ETCs) in their legal context, this article's first aim is briefly to explain three significant points concerning their operation which have now been clarified. Other important questions remain unresolved, and the second aim is to explore four of them: the judicial “reading down” of ETCs; whether termination need be immediate; the recoverability of expectation damages; and the avoidance of an unintended repudiation. Respects in which the English law of contract on each of them would benefit from development or change are identified, and it is argued that the Canadian approach to the award of expectation damages following termination pursuant to an ETC is preferable to the established Anglo-Australian position.

For more than two and half centuries, the case of Emmanuel College v Evans (1626) has been understood as a leading case for the origin of the principal doctrine of mortgage law: the equity of redemption. A closer inspection shows that it has nothing to do with the equity of redemption. This article examines Emmanuel College to see what it was actually about and where this leaves the history of mortgages in equity. In so doing, the article demonstrates the status of Emmanuel College as a leading case to be invalid, and exposes a serious flaw in the methodology of much historiography on mortgages and of early-modern equity more generally. The article also shows how a leading case can obtain its position when it does not stand for its purported proposition. And it provides a nearly unique window into the nature of the Chancery court record and development of equity thanks to a serendipitous documentary survival.