This paper identifies the source, content and limits of the controls that might be imposed by a court on the way a party exercises discretionary powers conferred under the terms of a contract. It is argued that such controls boil down to a requirement of “good faith”, in the sense that the party exercising the discretion must do so honestly, and that this can be tested by asking whether the decision is one that no reasonable person acting reasonably could have reached in the circumstances. It is suggested that a similar requirement should apply when a contracting party exercises a right to terminate for breach, whether at common law or under a termination clause.

It is rather surprising that no one has yet written a history of the English Bar in its modern form. Although much valuable work has been done on the history of the legal profession, particularly in its earlier stages, and although the history of attorneys and solicitors has been written, little is known about the development of barristers as a branch of the profession and their relations with the other branches. The present article can hardly supply this deficiency, which is a very large one, but it may lay open some aspects of the subject in the hope that more research will follow.

Section 3(1) Human Rights Act 1998 appears to limit the powers of the court; statutes can only be interpreted in a manner compatible with Convention rights ‘so far as possible’. However, in practice, Parliament has given the judiciary carte blanche to determine when it is impossible to interpret statutes in a manner compatible with Convention rights. The express words of section 3(1) are so vague as to provide no clear outline of the limits of possibility. Nor does the legislative history of the Act provide any clear boundary. Should the judiciary so wish, section 3(1) could have the same effect in practice as if it impliedly repealed the provisions of all statutes contrary to Convention rights. It is the judiciary and not Parliament that determine how far human rights will be protected.

Having supposed a super-norm we may indeed suppose another still superior norm, and so on ad infinitum, like the elephants and tortoise which have been supposed to support the earth. Clearly there is no help in that.

Anti-Social behaviour sits at a strange juncture in the law. Maybe this is because of the many forms that it takes—noise nuisance, fouling public areas, aggressive and violent conduct. Some of this is simply non-neighbourly whereas some is quite clearly criminal. The legal responses to anti-social behaviour also take many forms, but the main focus—notwithstanding that anti-social behaviour affects the whole community—has been to see it as a problem to be tackled by local authorities wearing their “housing management” hat. Even the much trumpeted anti-social behaviour order (asbo), which looks in many respects like part of a criminal code, can be applied for by local authorities and other registered social landlords. This focus on the housing dimension may well have fed the notion that it is council tenants who cause anti-social behaviour, and council tenants alone who the local authority is responsible to, and for.

This paper argues that the problems commonly associated with the joint enterprise doctrine might be alleviated by supplementing the cognitive mens rea standard of foresight with a volitional element that looks to how the defendant related to the foreseen risk. A re-examination of the case law suggests that a mens rea conception of foresight plus endorsement might be within interpretative reach. The paper considers possible objections to such a development but ultimately rejects them. It concludes that it is not necessary to wait for Parliament to put in place reforms: joint enterprise is a creature of the common law, and the common law is able to tame it unaided.

I propose to present to you some reflections on the impact which constitutions have had on the law governing the relations between management and labour. In many parts of the world that impact has been very considerable, and continues to be so.

It may be thought that an analysis of the role thus played by constitutions may perhaps be of absorbing interest to a comparative lawyer, but that it cannot have much practical significance in the United Kingdom. People who argue that way are obviously inclined to agree with De Tocqueville who, when asked what the British Constitution was, said that it did not exist. If the British Constitution does not exist, it may be argued, what is the good of giving in an English University an Inaugural Lecture about the role constitutions may play in the development of labour law?

It has often been asserted that English private international law has no doctrine of evasion of the law. It is true that English law has never developed a general doctrine, like the French one of fraude a la hi, to deal with cases of evasion. Nonetheless, evasion of the law has been recognised as a problem in at least some areas of private international law, and an increasing number of specific anti-evasion measures have been introduced in response to this. The English approach towards evasion is a pragmatic one rather than being based on any broad underlying theory. In particular, the fundamental questions have not been addressed of what is wrong with evasion of the law and how it can be dealt with most effectively. The purpose of this article is to examine the present law on evasion, determine what is wrong with evasion of the law and put forward proposals for a principled approach to deal with the problem.

An extreme view of criminal responsibility might be that everyone is under a duty to act in such a way that others are not led to cause harm, so that in some circumstances he would be responsible for “causing” harm that is directly caused by others, even though it is caused without his authorisation, help or encouragement.

In recent years, one of the most vibrant doctrines has been that of equitable estoppel. This doctrine is generally seen as having two main branches: the defensive doctrine of promissory estoppell and the older and more aggressive doctrine of proprietary estoppel, which can itself be used to obtain rights: to be the cause of action itself. The aim of this article is to analyse the central concepts of equitable estoppel in order to distinguish it from its common law counterpart, to consider its relationship to the law of contract and also to present the two main branches as being closely related concepts, based on common underlying themes.

In a recent article under this title, Professor Goodhart has added fresh fuel to a well-known controversy. What is the fundamental attitude of the Courts towards tortious liability?

Law is practical. Legal reasoning is practical reasoning. We could make nothing of a judge who having listened to counsel's arguments and reflected about the law governing his case thought that the state of knowledge that he had achieved was the natural termination of his enterprise and submitted his conclusions to the editors of Halsbury's Laws of England rather than performed the action of giving judgment. The parties would be outraged, and rightly. And if the judge continued to do such a thing he would be dismissed. Legal reasoning is practical in the sense that its natural conclusion is an action (in the judge's case the action of giving judgment) rather than a state of knowledge. This is taking “practical” in a strong sense. By this definition thought is practical whose natural conclusion is an action (or decision against action): its strongest contrast is with theoretical thought whose natural conclusion is knowledge. But it also contrasts with hypothetical thought about action (say, my thinking it would be good to play cricket again). I do not call this practical because it does not conclude in an action or decision against action (others do; for example John Finnis in Fundamentals of Ethics; my reasons for differing in this matter will emerge). A judge's practical reasoning towards the action of giving judgment has priority for our understanding of law over that vast range of practically idle things that lawyers do, from the construction of digests like Halsbury to casual reflection about the rule in Shelley's case (of course there is one sort of doing involved in both these, but not legal doing). It is important here to be clear about this priority. It is a priority of practicality, not a priority of judges or lawyers.

The use of legislative history by the courts as an aid to the construction and interpretation of statutory provisions has an extensive common law history. This has encompassed significant variation in judicial approach, perhaps reflecting changing constitutional relationships. Where principles have emerged they have been somewhat inconsistently applied, no doubt because courts have a residual competence to regulate their own procedure which is only loosely regulated by superior courts.

Where criminal offences such as attempt and conspiracy require a defendant (D) to intend future conduct, D's intention will always be conditional. D's intention may be explicitly conditional (e.g. D intends to rob the shop, but only if unable to pay her rent), or implicitly conditional (e.g. D intends to rob the shop, but if asked, would not do so if she found it surrounded by police). Rather than interpreting and defining conditional intention as synonymous with all future conduct intention, however, courts and commentators have too often approached it as unique, separate and problematic. This has led to problems of inconsistency in application, and simple incoherence. This article sets out and defends a model of conditional intention as future conduct intention, and as the key to understanding and applying ulterior mens rea.

INRegulating Contracts Hugh Collins takes up the challenge presented by 40 years of empirical studies which show that business people make little use of contract law in settling disputes, preferring instead to rely on trust and various non-legal sanctions to organise their transactions. Indeed, business parties often actively avoid the use of law because of its expense, inconvenience and tendency to harm business relationships. These findings pose a challenge to traditional doctrinal scholars. If business parties do not make much use of contract law, one has to ask what role it does play and whether the attention that is paid to it by orthodox legal scholars is misplaced. Regulating Contracts takes on this challenge directly and is the most substantial attempt made so far to explain the role of contract law in light of the questions raised as to its usefulness.

I argue that process and substance are two aspects of the public law form and that the form conditions the content of the law. The reduction of a political programme to the explicit terms of a statute involves a conversion of policy into public standards, which produces a kind of legal surplus value. It brings into being a particular type of public standard – one that permits the operation of the principles identified by Lon L. Fuller as the desiderata of the inner morality of law, and which enables individual claims of right based on legal principle to be adjudicated.

Fifty years ago the rights of a parent were held in high regard by English law. Since then there has taken place a fairly steady erosion of those rights, so that the picture presented today differs quite markedly from that of the early 1920s.