Cross-border contracts often contain a clause which purports to reflect the parties’ intention regarding how disputes arising from their agreement should be resolved. Some such contracts might feature a “jurisdiction clause”, thus signifying the parties’ wish to subject their disputes to litigation before the courts in a specific state. Others may include an “arbitration clause”, meaning that claims arising from the contract should be subjected to an arbitral hearing. More unusual are cases in which the parties have included a jurisdiction and an arbitration clause in the same cross-border contract. This article seeks to assess English law’s approach to determining the parties’ preferred mode of dispute resolution in these more difficult cases. As it seeks to demonstrate, the current practice in this area is not always easy to defend. The article advances an alternative basis for determining which of the two competing clauses should prevail.

Parents’ discrimination against their children is lawful. But the family, as an institution in which social goods are allocated, is as significant as the sites in which anti-discrimination law operates. At least prima facie, therefore, parents should be governed by legal prohibitions on discrimination. While state incursion into family life poses a threat to children’s autonomy, so does parental discrimination against children. Anti-discrimination law therefore needs new institutions to promote the values of non-discrimination in a part of society that currently sits outside anti-discrimination law’s reach. We identify existing regimes that may provide a starting point for this work.

On the orthodox account of the private law compensatory principle, the claimant is compensated for the loss that they actually suffered because of the defendant’s wrong. Although the principle has various exceptions, it is widely accepted in both case law and academic commentary. We argue that it is nevertheless flawed, both doctrinally and theoretically. Claimants are never really compensated for their actual loss, and, contrary to popular belief, leading theoretical accounts of private law compensation (corrective justice and the continuity thesis) suggest that a principle of compensation for actual loss is not desirable in any event.

This article examines how intention became key to criminal responsibility in nineteenth-century England. It focuses on trials where judges wrested with defence counsel and juries for control over its determination. The most important rule that developed to support proof of intention was the presumption that a person intended the natural and probable consequences of their actions. The article charts the origins and functions of the presumption to offer a revised view of the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern law of criminal intention.

One commendable aspect of the ruminations by H.L.A Hart on legal positivism, which quite a few contemporary philosophers of law have not fully absorbed, is that he recognised the diversity of the points of contention that have pitted the devotees of positivism against the devotees of natural-law theories. Whereas some present-day philosophers of law are inclined to refer to “the separability thesis” of legal positivism – with the definite article “the” as a signal that there is one defining point of dispute between legal positivists and their opponents – Hart knew that there is no single such thesis. Natural-law theorists have in fact postulated numerous connections between law and morality which putatively clinch the character of law as an inherently moral phenomenon, and legal positivists have posed challenges to each of those connections or to the claim that any unchallenged connection serves to establish the inherently moral character of law.