THE recent judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the case of Dano (ECLI:EU:C:2014:2358) clarified some important points as regards access to social welfare benefits by EU citizens who move to another Member State. Furthermore, the judgment could have broad implications for any attempts by the UK Government to renegotiate the UK's membership of the EU, which is likely to focus on benefits for EU citizens coming to the UK. This note is an updated and expanded version of my analysis on the EU Law Analysis blog: http://eulawanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/benefit-tourism-by-eu-citizens-cjeu.html.

The period from about 1300 to 1628 witnessed the beginnings of martial law, the establishment of custom governing the situations in which it might be invoked, then a break with that custom followed by a period of widened application, and finally, a reaction, once again restricting the Crown's use of martial law. Although extended, this period needs to be understood as a coherent whole, what might be termed, the first chapter in the history of martial law in England.

This article investigates an apparent, convergent shift in common law jurisdictions away from the traditional principle of joint and several liability towards proportionate liability in cases involving multiple wrongdoers, and argues that this is best seen as an unprincipled drift. The shift is often presented by defendants and legislators as a logical extension of the ethics of comparative (contributory) negligence doctrine. Here we deny any ethical connection between the two doctrines. We also suggest that there is no good, generalisable ethical or pragmatic argument in favour of proportionate liability in its own right and caution jurisdictions currently considering reform of the joint and several liability rule against leaping to any such assumption.

It is a long-established legal rule that the contents of a will, once it is admitted to probate, are available for inspection by any member of the public. This article is the first examination of this remarkable rule, its possible rationales, and its attendant disadvantages. Particular attention is paid to the problems of the ensuing loss of privacy. Legislative attempts to limit open access are considered together with non-legislative devices used for the same purpose: the secret trust; and applications for the sealing of a will (a device especially prevalent in the case of royal wills).

In Spain in 1981, near Seville, there was a spectacular discovery. It allows us to see back to the reign of Domitian, third and last of the Flavian emperors (AD 81–96), and to recreate a vivid picture of the little local senate of Irni meeting in the very shadow of the municipality's newly acquired constitution. Ten bronze tablets, each nearly a metre wide and rather more than half a metre high, were fixed along the wall of its council-chamber, presumably at a level at which letters about half a centimetre high could be clearly read from ground level. Each rectangular tablet carried three columns of writing, each column about fifty lines, each line an average of about ten words. At five hundred words a column and thirty columns, the Statute of Irni— the lex Irnitana—was thus a massive document. The discovery in 1981, by people using metal detectors to search for coins, was of no less than six of the ten tablets. Later excavation discovered a few more fragments. The last tablet bears at its end the date 11th October, AD 91.

It seems to be generally accepted that a person who signs a contractual document may not dispute his agreement to any of the terms which it contains, unless he can establish one of three defences: (a) fraud, (b) misrepresentation, or (c) non est factum.

Which law governs a contract where none has been chosen by the parties? The solution lies in Articles 3 and 4 of the 1980 Rome Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations. Article 3 allows a court to infer the parties’ intentions from the circumstances. But such intentions must be “real”, not presumed, and in the absence of genuine consent, Article 4 provides that the applicable law is that most closely connected with the contract. Under Article 4(2) this is (in effect) the law in force where the supplier of goods or services is located, or (if relevant) has a branch—for the supplier’s performance is invariably “characteristic” of a contract, in the sense intended by the Convention. But any clarity thereby won is immediately lost because the presumption is rebuttable under Article 4(5) whenever a contract is better connected with another law, exposing Article 4(2) to the risk of constant challenge. The presumption is especially vulnerable because it will so seldom be appropriate to apply the supplier’s law, the law of the place of performance frequently having a stronger claim to govern. Perplexingly, it is a presumption more apt to be rebutted than applied.

There is a lively debate among scholars in Europe about how, if at all, the private laws (tort, contract, property) of the European nation states should be harmonised. Views range from no harmonisation at all, soft law methods such as models contained in Principles, step by step case law developments, to a fully fledged binding European Civil Code. Another hotly debated issue is the disharmonisation (fragmentation) of domestic systems of private law as a result of current and ongoing EC level harmonisation. The prime consequence of this partial legislative intervention is an enhanced role for the judiciaries of those jurisdictions: they are inevitably entrusted with the fine-tuning of the interaction between domestic and EC private law. Alien concepts make their entry into a Member State’s Civil Code or common law doctrine that do not necessarily easily fit (one scholar has called these “legal irritants”). Most likely, for the foreseeable future, piecemeal harmonisation of specific, and more or less narrow, legal fields is the only show in town.

The subject falls conveniently into two parts, (I) comment made during the century since McNaghten's Case in 1843 on the answers given by the judges to the questions put to them by the House of Lords, and (II) discussion of the defence of irresistible impulse. For the convenience of readers the Questions and Answers are reprinted from the tenth volume of Clark and Finnelly's Keports, 200, 209–212.

Mr. President and Gentlemen,—You make me feel a little shy. When I somewhat incontinently accepted your kind invitation I wholly forgot that I was a Judge of the Privy Council. Thank heaven, I have no written address to deliver, and I am informed that there are no reporters present. But even that does not free me from embarrassment. I have under-taken to speak to you tonight of the position of the Judicial Committee in the Constitution of the Empire, and I have to remember that we who sit on the Judicial Committee have taken a tremendous oath not to disclose any of the secrets that come to the fore there; and I have also to consider that it was only this very morning that at half-past ten, in the absence of the Lord Chancellor, who is frequently called away at this moment on other business, I was sitting to dispose of the list in that Court, presiding as the senior remaining ex-Lord Chancellor. Well, we finished the list at eleven, and I went over to sit on the Woolsack at the House of Lords, which I occupied till a ' quarter to four, when public business made it necessary that I should adjourn the tribunal a little early. I did not say why, and my unsuspecting colleagues acquiesced. Now, gentlemen, you will see why I have something of the sense of the boy who comes to tell tales out of school. However, let us begin.

Floating charges have been an integral part of company financing for over 100 years, and yet their most fundamental characteristic remains the subject of debate: what interest does the floating chargee have prior to crystallisation? The answer to this question is not academic: disputes between the chargee and interested third parties depend for their resolution on the view taken. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to rely upon precedent or statutory provisions for simple rules to resolve these disputes: the complexity of modern commercial transactions and the ingenuity of advisers now give rise to rights which cannot always be equated with more traditional security devices and which may not need to be registered. This makes resort to fundamental principles necessary, and the elucidation of those principles crucial.

Parliament has imposed on the Law Commission the duty to review the law of England and Wales “with a view to its systematic development and reform, including in particular the codification of [the] law … and generally the simplification and modernisation of the law”. There are a number of points which flow from this. First, as a body which reviews great swathes of the common law to see if they require to be modernised or simplified, the Law Commission has a unique standpoint from which to view the strengths and weaknesses of the common law method. Second, it has unique experience of law reform and the Parliamentary process. Third, in discharge of its functions, it has an interest in seeing that, if codification is appropriate, a recommendation to that effect is made to the Lord Chancellor. It need not be the Law Commission which carries out the recommendation, and indeed the Law Commission could not carry out a project purely of its own initiative.

Censure, blame and harms are central concepts in sentencing that have evolved over the years to take into account social context and experiential knowledge. Flexibility, however, remains limited as the current analysis in sentencing focuses on the offender while failing to engage with the state's contribution in creating wrongs and harms. This risks giving rise to defective practices of responsibility since the state can also contribute to their production. The following article presents a complementary and additional framework within sentencing to account for state censure, blame and harms. The framework is rooted in communicative theories of punishment that integrate a responsive understanding of censure and a relational account of responsibility.