Section 21 of the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1857, provides that a wife deserted by her husband may apply to a metropolitan police magistrate for an order for the protection of her earnings; and the statute further provides that it shall be lawful for the husband and for his creditors to apply to the magistrate who made the order for the discharge thereof. A Mrs. Sharpe obtained such an order, and in 1864 her husband wished to apply for its discharge. He discovered that the magistrate who had made the order was dead; and the question what was now his proper course of action came before a bench composed of Cockburn C.J., Blackburn and Shee JJ., who decided unanimously that this was a casus omissus, and that it was not competent for the husband to apply to some other metropolitan magistrate who might present the advantage of being alive. Forthwith, and in the same year, there was passed the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1864, which consists of one section only, and which provides that ‘if the said magistrate shall have died or been removed or have become incapable of acting, then in every such case the husband... may apply to the magistrate for the time being acting as the successor or in the place of the magistrate who made the order.

Introduction: TheProblems

(1) Whichever is taken as the point of departure, a general principle of liability for injurious acts done intentionally or negligently, or a catalogue of individual protected interests, and whatever the wish to establish criteria of general liability, a comparison between some of the leading systems of the law of the Western World—both civil and common law—shows that it is impossible to get away from the individual situation, irrespective of the force of an existing, or the desire for the creation of, a general principle.

In common law jurisdictions, there has been considerable academic and judicial discussion of the duties of company directors generally. In contrast, relatively little ink has been spent on the specific duty, if any, of a company director to disclose his own misconduct (in the civil realm) to the company, even less so on the nature and basis of such a duty. This is unsurprising given the very restrictive approach to disclosure obligations in English law. Thus, while a director may in loose terms be said to be under a “duty” to disclose interests that conflict with the company's, such disclosure only serves the purpose of relieving him from liability, and failure to do so per se has not been regarded as an independent source of liability.

On 6 December 2006, the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property unveiled its much-anticipated report investigating whether intellectual property law was still “fit for purpose in an era of globalisation, digitisation and increasing economic specialisation”. The Review, which had one year in which to cover the entire field of intellectual property law, concluded that there was no need for radical overhaul of the system. However, it did make a number of recommendations for reform and one area it considered to be particularly important was strengthening enforcement of IP rights. In recent years, concerns about the inadequate enforcement of intellectual property laws have focused mainly on copyright law and the entertainment industries. More specifically, they have centred on the opportunities for copyright infringement offered by digital technology and the internet. The music industry was the first to find itself out of its depth in the brave new digital world, and the film industry quickly followed. “Piracy”, we are told, is now rife and must be fought at every opportunity.

A member of the Bar who appeared before us recently said he was an engineer by training and that what he did when he was looking at a problem was to turn it by 90° and examine it on a different plane.

For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximise their own revenue while shrinking their pay-outs to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because – as lawyers – we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder. I compare the 1710 Statute of Anne, which created statutory copyrights and consolidated them in the hands of publishers and printers, with the 1887 Dawes Act, which served a crucial function in the American divestment of Indian land. I draw from the stories of the two laws the same moral: Constituting something as a freely alienable property right will almost always lead to results mirroring or exacerbating disparities in wealth and bargaining power. The legal dogma surrounding property rights makes it easy for us not to notice.

This paper examines the role of rights and fundamental rights in English public law and private law in recent times. It argues that the idea of fundamental rights has been more significant in the filed of public law and seeks to explain why. It compares the operation of domestic fundamental rights with the rights in the European Convention of Human Rights and suggests a methodology for identifying the existence and scope of the former. The paper considers the possible legal effects which might follow from repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998.

The author focuses on the voluntary use by judge or counsel of foreign law and foreign legal ideas as a means of shaping national law when this is unclear, contradictory, or otherwise in need of reform, as distinct from the formal presentatin of foreign law through expert witnesses where such law has to be applied. The number of instances in which this kind of borrowing may happen must, of necessity, be limited. The problem is that foreign law is unlikely to come in a simple form, attractively packaged; and language is a major problem in judicial attempts to be inspired by a foreign idea if not to transplant the actual solution. This has led the author to advocate a more co-ordinated use of the different talents that judges, practitioners, and academics bring to the process of creating and interpreting law and to assist the process by provision, in the English language, of easily accessible accounts of relevant foreign material. The approach finds an excellent practical illustration in the judgment of the High Court in Greatorex v. Greatorex.

In Redwood Master Fund Ltd. v. TD Bank Europe Ltd. [2002] EWHC 2703(Ch), [2002] All E.R. (D) 141 (Chancery Division, Rimer J.) the court upheld a clause in a syndicated bank credit agreement empowering a majority to bind a dissentient minority even though the minority were placed in a worse position than the majority.

The effect in summary of the case law on creditor voting clauses—mainly in the context of bond issues—when combined with the case law on shareholder voting, voting on corporate schemes of arrangement and the like, is that the clauses are valid provided that (1) the decision was clearly within the terms of the power, (2) the majority were in good faith, i.e. not motivated solely by malice or vindictiveness, (3) there were no secret advantages to some creditors to procure their votes, e.g. bribes, and (4) most difficult of all, there was no unjust oppression of the minority so as to constitute a fraud on the minority, e.g. by a discriminatory decision denying the minority an advantage granted to the majority.

There is nothing indigenous about the Indian Contract Act of 1872 (hereinafter referred to as “the Act”), which is a comprehensive though not necessarily exhaustive code of the subject. According to the eighteenth-century charters, which established courts of justice for the three Presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, the law there applicable was the English common and statute law then in force, so far as it was appropriate to Indian circumstances. Elsewhere it was the practice to have recourse to justice, equity and good conscience. Appeal to these three precepts was also to be made in the Presidency towns themselves in case no specific rule existed. This was the state of the law of contract in 1866, as briefly described by the Indian Law Commissioners in their report. This commission, which prepared the first draft of the Act, had been appointed in England in 1864, with Lord Romilly M.R. as chairman. The other members were W. M. James q.c., the Chancery leader shortly to become James L.J., Sir Edward Ryan, formerly Chief Justice of Bengal, who at this time often sat as a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Indian appeals, Robert Lowe, as Lord Sherbrooke then was, a politician, later Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary, J. M. Macleod, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and John Henderson, barrister. The commission sat in London, and produced a draft report in 1866. This had still not become law by 1870, largely because of the opposition of Sir Henry Maine, then Law Member of the Governor-General's Council, to the proposals as to specific performance.

Of all legal disciplines, constitutional law is the most affected by the European Communities and their law. It is true that the law of competition and restrictive trade practices (to take an example) has, to an important extent, been altered and is currently regulated by Community law. However, the new elements in the European law of restrictive practices are only indirectly related to the nature or structure of the Community and its law as such. They could (with the exception of the new possibilities of judicial review through the European Court of Justice) just as well have come from a traditional international treaty as from international law. For, when we think of the law of restrictive practices we mainly think of what the rules say and much less of how they are enacted—in other words the content of rules and much less their legal nature.

In the course of their stately opinion in the case of The Wagon Mound the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council declared that “their Lordships have not found it necessary to consider the so-called rule of ‘strict liability’ exemplified in Rylands v. Fletcher and the cases that have followed or distinguished it. Nothing that they have said is intended to reflect on that rule.” The best excuse for the present addition to the controversial literature that is accumulating round this case is that, the courts having yet to pronounce on remoteness in cases of strict liability, there seems to be still some room for speculation, especially with reference to policy. It is therefore hoped that the fall, as it were, of yet another leaf in the forest will at least do no harm.