The anonymity of the year books has puzzled historians for over a century, and generated an extensive literature. Contemporary users of the year books cannot have been much interested in the identity of their authors; and this in itself is a historical fact of some interest. By 1600 there was an obvious difference in quality and authority between the reports of judges, or distinguished lawyers such as Plowden, and the scrappy notes of students below the bar. Both kinds of report circulated in manuscript, but their users were well aware of their relative merits and took notice of the reporters' identities. Why, then, did the medieval lawyer not show the same interest in names? Was it because the production of year books was so much a collaborative effort that identification of individual reporters would have been meaningless? Or was it, on the contrary, because so few reporters were involved that everyone knew who they were? Or was there simply no notion of authority, either legal or historical, to which the reporters' qualities might be relevant? In other words, were the reports evaluated solely on their intrinsic merits as books of potential arguments and procedural moves?

In recent years courts in the common law world have been concerned with their protective jurisdiction in the area of medical treatment; for example, the rights and status of the unborn foetus, the withholding of treatment from handicapped children, sterilisation, the provision of contraception, and the availability of abortion in relation to healthy and handicapped children and young adults.

Of the various devices for facilitating the disposition of property which conveyancers have invented, the trust for sale has been in the past one of the most useful, and its utility has been greatly extended by the Property Acts of 1925. Most students of the law first come across it in the famous argument of Lord Eldon, then John Scott, in Ackròyd v. Smithson (1780, 1 Bro. C.C. 503), and the rebuff he received when, a little later, he argued, or tried to argue, on the other side. “Mr. Scott,” the Chancellor of the Lancaster Chancery Court said to him, “I have read your argument in that case of Ackroyd v. Smithson, and I defy you or any man in England to answer it.” That was on the doctrine of conversion, the immediate result of a trust for sale, and the refinements to which the doctrine led formed, till the recent legislation, one of the most important branches of equity. With the abolition of the heir at law, and the distribution, in cases of intestacy, of the proceeds of real estate among the new statutory next of kin, these refinements have become obsolete so far as regards the property of persons dying after 1925, but the immediate operation of a trust for sale—the power conferred on the trustees of making a title to the land—remains.

The issue of miscarriages of justice1 has been at the heart of much recent discourse—legal, political and social—concerning the English criminal justice system. Indeed the crisis of confidence in the system has prompted attempts to re-establish legitimacy, which include such tried and tested methods as changes of personnel,2 and the appointment of a wide-ranging Royal Commission 3 which followed the attempt to quell the disquiet by the more focused May Inquiry.4 Much of the concern has arisen from the conduct of terrorist trials in Britain in the mid-1970s, the most important and significant 5 of which for the purposes of this paper were the trials of groups of terrorist suspects commonly known as the Birmingham 6,6

EU agencies have mushroomed in recent years and new agencies, such as those in the financial arena, can have far-reaching quasi-regulatory and supervisory powers. These developments raise fundamental questions as to their constitutional standing, the delegation of powers and how to wrestle the challenges of independence and accountability. This paper considers ESMA, the most ambitious new financial sector agency. It examines ESMA's governance and accountability mechanisms and makes normative proposals to better balance the competing supranational and national interests within it. Such refinements should also be implemented in conjunction with additional accountability requirements, particularly a greater role for the European Parliament. This reshaping is vital to guarantee ESMA's autonomy and legitimacy.

The aim of this article is to examine the purpose and effect of the alleged rule of English law that an agreement supported by consideration will not be enforceable as a contract unless there is additional proof of an intention to create legal relations.

When the gods looked down and spied lusty Ares entangled with lovely Aphrodite in the net which her grimy husband used to entrap them, there arose on Mount Olympus “unquenchable laughter”—in Homer’s words “asbestos gelos”. In the modern world, however, asbestos is no laughing matter: inhale the fibres of that mineral wool and you may contract asbestosis, a debilitating lung disease, or, as was discovered 30 years later, mesothelioma, a fatal cancer. Asbestosis is cumulative—you get worse the more you inhale—so that everyone who culpably fails to protect you contributes to your ultimate condition. Mesothelioma is quite different, for it is most likely caused by a single fibre: of course the more you inhale, the greater the risk of getting that fatal fibre, but until you get it, exposure makes you no more likely to get it, and once you have got it, you are a dead man, and further exposure makes no difference. Thus if you get mesothelioma after being exposed to fibres in six successive employments, each employer has contributed to the risk of your getting the disease, but the disease itself is due to only one of them. To ascertain in which employment the fatal fibre struck is, however, quite impossible and will likely remain so whatever advances are made in medical science, since the symptoms take up to forty years to manifest themselves, and before then no one can tell whether, much less when, the victim has been hit.

English law provides inadequate protection for vulnerable testators, a growing class. Those thinking of challenging suspicious wills are deterred by the cost and poor prospects of success. Traditionally, probate lawyers have been reluctant, when challenging wills, to allege misconduct and the leading case of White v. Nye has caused general confusion by attempting to disguise a plea of fraud as though it were a plea of lack of knowledge and approval.

Before this article went to press, I was fortunate enough to receive a set of comments from Jim Evans. These comments are contained in his “The Status of Rules of Precedent: A Brief Reply” which is printed in this volume, and I have adopted the editor's suggestion of incorporating a response to Evans in my text. Remarks provoked by Evans's note occur at the end of Section II and the end of Section III.

Existing definitions of agency are inadequate. In this paper, I offer a new definition of agency: a relationship is one of agency where the agent has a power to exercise at least one of the principal's own powers. I call this a “proxy power” for short. This definition brings with it three advantages. First, focusing on the agent's proxy power highlights the distinctive idea at the core of agency: that people can act through others at law, thereby expanding their legal personality in space. Second, that distinctive idea then helps identify the three reasons justifying when an agent has a proxy power: the principal's unilateral manifestation of will, the necessity of protecting the principal's interests, and where the principal is an artificial person who can only unilaterally manifest his will through an agent. Third, the definition vindicates prevailing intuitions about agency, and gives us a more transparent way to decide whether or one's invocation of “agency” is illegitimate or legitimate.

Fuller made a leading contribution to the understanding of the adversary system and the process of adjudication. He did not officially publish his paper, “The Forms and Limits of Adjudication”, but distributed it widely and discussed it in his correspondence with prominent academics. His analysis of the limits of adjudication has been influential in both England and North America.

In Jogee and Ruddock, the Supreme Court/Privy Council decided that the law on secondary liability took a “wrong turn” in 1984 in the Privy Council's decision in Chan Wing-Siu. Chan Wing-Siu's contemplation/foresight-based fault element for secondary liability was alleged by the Supreme Court/Privy Council to have bucked a legal trend towards requiring that the secondary party intended to encourage or assist every one of the principal's offences. This article presents an alternative history of secondary liability that explains a wider selection of cases from 1553–1984 than were considered in Jogee and Ruddock. On this alternative account, Chan Wing-Siu was simply a more explicit and intellectually honest decision than its predecessors. If this alternative view of history is accepted, the Supreme Court/Privy Council's claim to be merely “correcting” (rather than substantively reforming) the law of secondary liability should be rejected. Doing so would make more critical a question that was side-stepped in Jogee and Ruddock, namely whether this reform should have been undertaken by the judiciary, rather than the legislature.

ON 18 October 2017, the UK Supreme Court decided Armes v Nottinghamshire County Council [2017] UKSC 60. The Court ruled that a local authority could be vicariously liable for intentional torts committed by foster parents against a child whom the authority had placed in their care. The outcome was not entirely unexpected. Less than two decades ago it would have been inconceivable. After all, isn't it the case that the common law does not recognise a general principle of liability in tort for the acts of third parties? And that in so far as it does, it holds an employer vicariously liable for a tort committed by an employee in the course of their employment? This is a very long way from the facts of Armes.

The legislature gives effect to the values of democracy and compromise in a pluralist society, but the legislation it produces is mediated in its application by the values inherent in the legal culture into which it is received. The judges complete the law promulgated by Parliament by applying it. In articulating the common law also, the judges act within the bounds of objective standards supplied by legal and political traditions, with a limited legislative role. The legislative role of the judges in applying statutes has been enhanced by the interpretive obligations applicable in areas where EU and ECHR law operates.