This paper explores the circumstances in which a change in the land register should be stigmatised as a mistake and thereby introduce the discretionary power to correct it. Recognising the importance of clarifying the concept of mistake, due to its role in controlling the reliability of the register, the paper reviews and rejects various possible determinants for mistake. It proposes an account of mistake which rests on a set of rigid legal constructs about entitlement and registration and which pays respect to various traditional attributes of property.

The conception of moral responsibility, as Williams describes it, focuses on the “voluntary”. The voluntary, as applied to action, is to be defined roughly as “A does X intentionally and in a normal state of mind“. We have, he argues, good reason to use this conception for certain purposes—in particular, to use it in the context of criminal punishment for the purpose of determining who justifiably may be punished. However, this reason is not to be found either within the conception of moral responsibility itself, or within an understanding of what punishment is or should do: that is, this conception does not guarantee or require its own application; nor do the familiar accounts of punishment (as, e.g., deterrence or retribution) require that punishments be imposed only for voluntary wrongdoings. Rather, Williams asserts, we should follow H.L.A. Hart in founding the argument for moral responsibility on the value of political freedom: if citizens “should be able to conduct their affairs so far as possible without the state's power being unpredictably directed against them”, then punishments “should be applied to [and only to] voluntary agents”.

The article examines the different roles played by private and public intergenerational support obligations in England and France, assesses their impact on elderly people and their carers and suggests possible ways in which the law might be used to alleviate some of the difficulties.

Defamation law has historically occupied a position of overwhelming dominance in the vindication of the traditional right to reputation. Nevertheless, liberalisation of this legal framework including through the Defamation Act 2013 has led to a concern that, when analysed from a fundamental rights perspective, “gaps” in the protection provided for natural persons may have emerged. In this new context, there has been a renewed focus on whether data protection may fill the potential lacunae. Data protection law contains a number of important limitations and exceptions and its jurisprudence has been both limited and sometimes confused. Nevertheless, this article argues that its broad purpose and complex structure ensure it will play a significantly augmented role in the future, especially in actions against website operators facilitating the dissemination of information posted by a third party, the publication of opinion, or where either injunctive relief or the correction of inaccurate information is sought (in particular in cases of continuing online disclosure).

Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law, first published in 1861, postulated legal development in terms of an evolution from status to contract. Since that time both lawyers and anthropologists have made frequent use of the notion of status in their characterisation of law or society. Although status is a concept well known in social theory whose exponents, independently of Maine, have worked out its content and application, much that has been written about status in a legal or anthropological context owes its inspiration to him. Maine's status to contract thesis has proved of interest both to lawyers studying the history of the common law or modern developments in the law of contract and to anthropologists studying social and legal phenomena in simple or tribal societies.

In the late-nineteenth century, Dicey defined with clarity the modern doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, identifying both its positive aspect, that Parliament is legally empowered to make any law, and its negative aspect, that no court, institution or person is legally empowered to set Acts of Parliament aside. The historical genesis of this modern understanding of parliamentary sovereignty was, and continues to be, controversial. In his recent study of parliamentary sovereignty, Jeffrey Goldsworthy suggests that the sixteenth-century lawyer Christopher St. German, author of Doctor and Student as well as a series of publications relating to the Henrician Reformation, was likely “the first English writer to propound a comprehensive theory of parliamentary sovereignty”— a controversial claim given St. German's insistence that any “statute” made against the law of nature or reason is “voyd”.4 However, Goldsworthy appears to be supported by an impressive list of historians.

The proximate cause, whether an event covered by a policy (“peril”) or an event excluded from a policy (“exception”), “is the dominant or effective or operative cause.” So says MacGillivray and Parkington.1 So say the courts. It is hard to disagree. It is also hard to understand what it means and hence hard to apply it. The result is that most judges are reluctant to commit themselves to greater precision and that those lawyers who press further, judges or writers, do not agree.

MWB Business Exchange Centres Ltd. v Rock Advertising Ltd. [2016] EWCA Civ 553 deals with a number of important issues concerning variation of contracts. Rock occupied as licensee premises managed by MWB. In August 2011, Rock decided to expand its business, and entered into a written agreement with MWB for larger premises for 12 months beginning 1 November 2011. The licence fee was agreed to be £3,500 per month for the first three months, and then £4,433.34 from 1 February 2012. Unfortunately, Rock's business was not as successful as hoped and, by late February 2012, it had incurred arrears of over £12,000. MWB gave notice purporting to terminate the agreement, but the parties then orally agreed to reschedule the licence fee payments due from February to October 2012: Rock would pay less than the originally agreed amount for the first few months, but after that would pay more, with the result that the arrears would be cleared by the end of the year. Pursuant to this agreement, Rock paid £3,500 to MWB, which was the first instalment due in accordance with the revised payment schedule. However, MWB subsequently changed its mind and sued for the arrears. MWB presented two arguments why Rock could not rely upon the oral variation. First, MWB pointed to an anti-oral variation clause in the written contract. Second, MWB relied upon Foakes v Beer (1884) 9 App. Cas. 605 for the proposition that the variation was not supported by consideration. Both arguments failed before a unanimous Court of Appeal (Arden, Kitchin and McCombe L.JJ.).

“All Cretans are liars,” said Epimenides—at first sight a common-place scrap of mild xenophobia; about equal to “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief” in charity and acumen. Not, one would suppose, a statement calculated to attract close attention from philosophers or logicians, or (despite the introduction of the offence of incitement to racial hatred) from lawyers.

But Epimenides' statement was widely discussed by the best thinkers of classical times and has kept its importance for the foundations of logic until the present century. To understand why, it is necessary to add two facts. First, Epimenides was himself a Cretan. Secondly, his statement was taken to mean not just that all Cretans lied from time to time but that everything ever said by any Cretan was false. It thus implies, in particular, that it is itself false. Not only can this be shown to lead to absurd consequences; it also suggests a simpler form of sentence which heightens the absurdity and best introduces the following discussion. It is: “This statement is false.” If that is true it is false, and if it is false it is true. So we have the paradox of a sentence which breaks no rule of formal grammar, is composed entirely of words whose sense is well understood, combines those words in such a way as to produce an apparently normal and meaningful statement, but turns out on investigation to have something radically wrong with it. We feel inclined to say that it has proved to be “meaningless” or “self-contradictory,” or to involve a “vicious circle.”

“All statutes contrary to the common law … are to be interpreted strictly and have to be accepted in the most exact manner as they stand, and speak”. “Statutes which repeal the [common] law, have to be interpreted most strictly, and cannot be extended to cases which are not expressed in them.” “Statutes … generally consist more in ‘thus I want and thus I command’ than in a regulation according to reason”; “they fade like the moon's shadows, and like the moon they wax and wane at the legislators' whim”. It may be thought that these four sentences refer to the approach traditionally adopted in England to the interpretation of statutes. But they do not. They encapsulate the attitude adopted by the learned lawyers of the older ius commune, particularly in 13th and 14th century Italy, and in 16th century Germany. An English colleague has suggested that “civilian lawyers regard our case law with admiration and our statute book with despair”.

The issue of ratification is one whose “tentacles creep into every part of company law”. When a wrong has been done to the company, it is the mechanism which determines whether that wrong can be put right, and, if it can be, whether it will be; whether the wrongdoers ought to be released from their liability, and, ultimately, whether litigation can and will be commenced. That is a lot to ask of a single doctrine, and it is not, therefore, surprising to find that this topic has been described as being “singularly muddled”. The confusion has not been helped by the fact that the courts have often avoided tackling this difficult area head on, one judge going as far as to say “I do not think that it is necessary, nor do I feel competent to disentangle the many threads of principle in this tangled skein”. The Law Commission has also said that the “law on ratification is by no means clear” but has failed to tackle the complexities of the issue, stating that “[a]lthough there may be a need for modernising and simplifying the law of ratification, we are of the firm view that any changes need to be considered in the context of a comprehensive review of directors’ duties.” However, when recently given such an opportunity the Law Commission did not consider any changes to the law regarding ratification.

The Consumer Credit Act, which after many vicissitudes was passed on 31 July 1974, represents the product of nearly six years' concentrated labour. The genesis of the Act was the appointment in 1968 of the Crowther Committee on Consumer Credit, whose twovolume Report covering the entire field of consumer credit, and much else besides, was published in March 1971. The Committee devoted close attention to the state of the law governing credit transactions, and at an early stage in its deliberations concluded that consumer credit could not be considered in isolation from the general legal framework within which credit was provided, whether for business or for consumers. Among the seven major defects in credit law identified by the Committee, three were fundamental.

My first duty is to apologise for the delay which has caused me deliberately to wait until this relatively late date after my return to Cambridge a year ago before I felt able to deliver this inaugural lecture. For six years the locusts of war ate into my all too limited learning in the law, and involved a loss of all contact with academic life which made advisable a period of recovery—not yet completed—before I plucked up courage to say what I want to say to-day—in all too scanty words. I did, however, in the course of last year, address some informal remarks to the Cambridge University Law Society—and I take this opportunity of thanking their Officers for the invitation—on which occasion I put forward some considerations which seemed to justify the conclusion that the effect of the late war had been to stress the importance of public law.