When the coach carrying Mr. and Mrs. Houghland from Ternhill to Cheshire arrived at its destination, Mrs. Houghland's suitcase could not be found. The suitcase had been loaded on to one of Low's coaches at Southampton, but this coach had broken down at Ternhill and the luggage had been transferred by the passengers to the luggage compartment of a relief vehicle which had arrived some three hours later. The coach company was unable to trace the case or to explain how it had disappeared and in a subsequent claim, either for its value or for damages for its loss, the County Court found in Mrs. Houghland's favour. An appeal to the Court of Appeal was dismissed.

Traditionally, common lawyers are used to examining other jurisdictions of their legal family as a source of inspiration for law reform or even as persuasive authority for the development of case law. Developments in continental civil law jurisdictions are less noted. However, particularly in the field of public law, English law is now being influenced by civil law concepts through the mediation of Community law.1 Product liability provides an example in private law of rules shared by the civil and common law jurisdictions of the European Union due to harmonisation by the Product Liability Directive. An important new area of non-contractual liability is environmental liability. Firmly established in the United States, liability for damage to the environment is increasingly being introduced in many countries around the world.3 In the European Union, the first step towards Community-wide legislation was taken in March 1993 with the publication of a Green Paper by the Commission.4 One of the many controversial aspects of a possible environmental liability regime is the issue of standing to sue.

AFTER McCann and Others v the United Kingdom (Application no. 18984/91) (1995) ECHR 31, in which the European Court of Human Rights first read into Article 2 the procedural obligation of effective investigation, Mustafa Tunç and Fecire Tunç (Application no. 24014/05), 14 April 2015, is perhaps one the most interesting decisions on the nature of the obligation to conduct an effective investigation in the Court's recent history. The Court, through its case law, has clarified that, when individuals have been killed by the state or a private party, the Contracting Parties have to undertake an investigation under Article 2, which has to be independent, adequate, prompt, and publicly scrutinised. It has been unclear, however, whether the element of independence had to meet criteria similar to those under Article 6, which guarantees a fair trial, or whether a lower standard was sufficient for an investigation to be considered effective in the context of Article 2. The Strasbourg court went back and forth on the issue (even adopting an absolutist approach in Al-Skeini and Others v the United Kingdom (Application no. 55721/07) (2011) ECHR 1093) and it was not until Mustafa Tunç that the issue of independence under Article 2 was addressed head-on.

By the latter part of the sixteenth century the theory of liability on bills of exchange had been adapted to common law theory of contract so as to lie in assumpsit. In 1787 it was fully settled by the House of Lords that all “contracts in writing … [which are] merely written and not specialties … are parol” and require consideration. Promissory notes and bills of exchange fell into this category. Indeed, “bills and notes were contracts and being such there was no persuasive reason why the basis of liability on a bill or note should be any different from that on any other written contract for payment of money.” While there is no provision in the Bills of Exchange Act (“the Act”) directly to the point, it is well established indeed that consideration of “value” is needed for the creation of an obligation under a negotiable instrument. According to Chalmers, “where B, by way of gift, makes a note in favour of C, C cannot recover from B.”

An Introduction to the Law of Restitution was a landmark in private law. More clearly than any preceding work, it unpacked the ambiguity inherent in the notion of “the claimant's expense by delineating two forms of “unjust enrichment. (1) The autonomous action in unjust enrichment involves a subtractive expense. The defendant acquires a benefit from the claimant in circumstances that the law regards as reversible. The response is always restitution. The defendant must give the enrichment, or its value, back to the claimant. (2) Unjust enrichment by wrongdoing, in contrast, is concerned with a normative or wrongful expense. The defendant acquires a benefit, usually from a third party, as a result of breaching an obligation owed to the claimant (e.g. trespass to land). Although the standard response to a civil wrong is compensation for the claimant's loss, a court exceptionally may compel the defendant to give up, or disgorge, his ill-gotten gain.

Any attempt to evaluate the adequacy or inadequacy of tort law in general is bound to fail unless the scope of inquiry is severely limited. All attempts to find some unifying principle have failed. In light of the diverse interests involved which may be political, domestic or economic, and the purposes to be achieved, which may range from the quasi-criminal to determination of title to property, it would be a miracle of intellectual abstraction if it were otherwise.

To confine inquiry to “accidental” injuries, i.e., those arising as a by-product of some lawful activity carried on for reasons other than the invasion of a plaintiff's interest, is helpful but not satis-factory. For example, “accidental” injury to a person's privacy, honour or reputation could fall in this category. While issues of “strict liability” or liability for “fault” permeate this field and have, in England and Canada, been developed by the courts in favour of the former, public interest in freedom to disseminate news and the encouragement of freedom of speech is an important factor here which makes it impossible to compare other branches of the law where there is no counterpart. Here too legislation is playing an important role. By statute in England attempts have been made to mitigate some of the harsher features of strict liability by eliminating damages and substituting an “offer of amends” for accidental and non-negligent defamation. While legislation in Canada has been widespread, particularly with regard to the total or partial abolition of the distinction between libel and slander, such legislation has nowhere changed the strict liability of the common law.

The police do not owe a duty of care to protect victims from the criminal acts of a third party when investigating or suppressing crime save in exceptional circumstances. This is justified as an application of the omissions principle and on several other grounds. The article argues that most of these justifications are unconvincing and it sets outs a positive rationale for the imposition on the police of a duty of care in respect of sufficiently proximate victims of a negligent omission. The scope of this duty can be coherently delimited by re-adjusting the existing framework of negligence liability of public authorities.

(1) Legal Basis

When the first issue of the Cambridge Law Journal appeared in 1921, the English rules of the conflict of laws were those stated and reformulated by Dicey and by the editors of Westlake and Foote. Their progress between 1858 and 1912 had been charted by Dicey himself in a survey published in 1912. The legal basis for the application of foreign law in England was and remained Lord Mansfield's pronouncement in Holman v. Johnson: “Every action here must be tried by the law of England, but the law of England says that in a variety of circumstances … the law of the country where the cause of action arose shall govern.” Dicey never waivered in his adherence to this rule of English law, but he supplemented it with an argument drawn from the doctrine of acquired rights which bedevilled English lawyers for a long time, until in 1949 the editors of the sixth edition of Dicey took what they believed to be a bold, but substantially honest, step by restricting the concept to its proper boundaries and thus by depriving it of its capacity to serve as a general principle of the Conflict of Laws.

This paper traces a key example of the overlap between tort and crime and explains the impact of how disjointed English legal thinking has been. For about 400 years English civil courts have accepted some form of pre-eminence of the criminal law where civil and serious criminal liability co-exist. This has often been described as the rule that “a trespass merges in a felony” though a more neutral term would be a “timing rule”. The development of the timing rules casts light on how English legal reasoning has approached the relationship between the victim and the state, the procedural context of substantive rules and the impact rules in one area of law can have elsewhere.

I hope that I shall not either dissatisfy you or disappoint you in what I have got to say to-night, in offering you some observations on the Permanent Court of International Justice, but I confess that it is a pleasure to me to feel that I can cast away all such taints and disadvantages as may attach to a member of the Government, and speak to you as a Trinity man.

The doctrine of anticipatory breach was officially first established in a famous 1853 case, enabling a party to a contract to terminate it and sue for damages immediately after the other party refused to fulfil its part, despite the fact that the time stipulated for the latter's performance had not arrived. The doctrine has since been employed by counsel as a vehicle to justify a premature termination of contract in numerous legal battles. It was perhaps with the confidence in such vast general judicial experience that Lord Wilberforce once declared that the rules determining the existence of an anticipatory breach constituted “one of the more perspicuous branches of the law of contract”. With due respect, however, his Lordship seemed to be too optimistic on that occasion. When one takes a closer look at decided cases, it is hard to resist the conclusion that this area of law is still plagued with inconsistency, uncertainty and incoherence. Where the existence of an anticipatory breach of contract is in dispute, the courts have been applying two distinct approaches to fact patterns of the same nature. A major cause for this disparity is the courts' failure to realise in some cases that the cases they are dealing with are anticipatory breach cases and should be subjected to a uniform test. This cognitive failure is largely attributable to the fact that, although the term “anticipatory breach” itself was criticised on several occasions, little has been done to illuminate the very nature of an anticipatory breach of contract and what distinguishes it from what we normally conceive of as a breach of contract, namely an “actual breach” of contract. Another cause of the disparity of the courts' approaches is perhaps English law's case-to-case, piecemeal methodology. Pragmatic though this methodology may be, it is sometimes necessary to amass the fragmented pieces and fit them into a clear and stable conceptual structure, thereby bringing the law to a higher level of generalisation. It is the purpose of this article to propose a general legal test for all types of anticipatory breach on the basis of an exposition of its nature and hopefully to bring order, rationality and unity to this chaotic area of law.

The Countess Gundred was an occasional litigant in the Curia Regis Rolls of Richard I and John. She was evidently an important person. Other women are described in the rolls as the wife or widow or daughter of someone: she is simply ‘Comitissa Gundreda’ (ComitisGund) without more. She was probably the daughter of Roger, Earl of Warwick, and was perhaps a great granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Her first husband was Hugh Bigod, first Earl of Norfolk; her second was Roger de Glanvill, brother of the Justiciar.

In this paper I propose to defend legal conventionalism against the attack mounted on it in Chapter 4 of Ronald Dworkin's book Law's Empire. I do not propose to defend legal conventionalism against other arguments which might conceivably be deployed against it. Nor do I propose to say anything of great substance about the positive merits of the position.