In Mills v. Armstrong Lord Bramwell, in commenting on the judgments in Thorogood v. Bryan, said: ‘At present I will only observe that the four judges were great lawyers, and I believe that an experienced lawyer may be, as it were, instinctively right without at the moment being able to give a good reason for his opinion.’ Although such intuitive judgments may be satisfactory as doing justice between the litigants in a particular case, there is always the danger that they may prove to be misleading from the standpoint of the further development of the law, for it is natural to assume that as the judge has reached conclusion X by means of reason Y, therefore if conclusion X is correct then reason Y must be correct also. In future cases reason Y is accepted without further consideration because it has in the precedent case apparently led to a desirable result, even though, in fact, there may be no valid connexion between the reason given and the result. It may be suggested with all respect that the recent case of Cutler v. United Dairies (London), Ltd. may in the future have such an effect on the development of English law for, although the conclusion reached in it is obviously just and in accordance with established law, nevertheless some of the reasons advanced by the Lords Justices in support of their judgment are of doubtful validity, and may, if accepted apart from the facts of the particular case, lead to unfortunate results.

Just as all the best titles have already been used, so have all the best opening lines. To begin, I can do no better than quote the opening words of the inaugural lecture given by my predecessor, Peter Stein, when he took up the Chair of Jurisprudence in the University of Aberdeen. I have changed the names. “When a pupil is appointed to succeed his master in any office it is natural that his feeling of honour should be tempered by humility. But when the master is a scholar of the calibre of Peter Stein, the pupil must exert himself to prevent his humility from degenerating into despair.”

One of my famous predecessors, Francis Bacon, once said that the office of Attorney-General was “the painfullest task in the realm.” It fell to another Attorney-General a few centuries later, Sir Patrick Hastings, to say that to be a law officer was to be in hell. I am happy to say that it is only occasionally that I feel like that about it.

Although it became a great office of state, its early history is wrapped in obscurity. The basis of the office appears to have been that as the sovereign could not appear in person in his own courts to plead in any case in which he had an interest, an attorney appeared on his behalf. As early as 1243 one Lawrence Del Brok, a professional attorney, was prosecuting pleas of particular concern to the sovereign. In the year 1247 he was paid a regular fee of £20 a year for “suing the King's affairs of his pleas before him.” As the functions of sovereignty became more complex and more extensive, and acquired a more public character, so the role and duties of the Attorney-General became wider. Already by the end of the thirteenth century the duties attaching to the King's Attorney's office had become burden-some. When Richard de Brettiville performed the duties, a medieval clerk added the postscript at the foot of a list of cases in which the King's Attorney was engaged, “Oh Lord, have pity upon Brettiville.”

In medieval times the political duties which now fall upon the Attorney-General werecompletely absent.

The law describing vendor's and purchaser's liens over personal property can only be described as baffling: there are cases to “prove” and “disprove” almost any proposition. This uncertainty is surprising. A contract of sale is one of the most basic forms of commercial activity, and an equitable lien would convert a vendor or purchaser into a secured creditor by operation of law. The advantages of such a position are self-evident, yet it remains unacceptably difficult to say when such advantages accrue. Fundamental equitable principles seem to support a simple analysis of vendor's and purchaser's liens which might eliminate some of the current uncertainties. This article describes that analysis. It concludes that one party to a sale contract has a lien over identified sale property whenever, and as soon as, all the contractual obligations assumed by that party have been carried out.

We are met here this evening in memory of Stanley de Smith to pay a tribute to his labours in the field of English public law. His name will always be associated with the constitutional law of the British Commonwealth in its decline and the administrative law of England in its renaissance. It was in connection with the first of these topics in the nineteen fifties that I first met him when he was a brilliant young law don at the London School of Economics and I was a fairly senior silk instructed on behalf of the Kabaka in the constitutional dispute about Buganda. The depth of knowledge on constitutional matters which he then displayed encouraged me to seek his help in the last constitutional case in which I was engaged before I went on to the High Court bench. It involved appearing before the Federal Court in Pakistan and, unless my memory plays me false, it was de Smith who drew my attention to opinions given by the Law Officers in the seventeenth century about the government of the Plantations, that supplied the basis for the argument that was ultimately accepted by that court.

The rapid constitutional changes which followed on the attainment of independence by former colonial territories have, perhaps, converted into legal history much of de Smith's work in this particular field of public law. So I propose to take as the subject of this memorial lecture that other field of public law which he was to make his own: administrative law and, in particular, judicial review of administrative action.

THE comparatively recent case of Collins v. Associated Greyhound Racecourses, Ltd. has raised in a forcible manner two old difficulties—namely, the legal position of undis–closed principals, and, as a corollary, the meaning of ‘person–ality,’especially in contracts involving undisclosed principals.

We are here concerned with a situation in which A, an undisclosed principal, employs B, an agent, to contract with C, a third party, in B's own name. By ‘undisclosed principals’ here are meant principals whose existence is not known to the third party and not principals who, known to be existent by the third party, are nevertheless not identified by name. By ‘agent’ is meant a person who in his own name contracts ostensibly for his own account, but behind whom there stands an undisclosed principal.

Before discussing Collins' Case we propose first to examine the general position of undisclosed principals.

When “ratification” is raised as an issue in relation to directors' breaches of duty, the difficulty which is most commonly discussed is how to draw the line between ratifiable and non-ratifiable breaches.

What has received considerably less attention is the meaning of “ratification” itself. This is evidenced, not the least, by the variety of other names attributed to the process performed by the general meeting when it “ratifies” a breach of duty. This has variously been described as “adoption,” “confirmation,” “affirmation,” or mere “approval.” Ironically, it is clear that the concept has nothing to do with “ratification” as it is understood in the law of agency, though this is the name most widely used.

I.—Until quite modern times the expression ‘Criminal Science’ was taken to mean no more than study of criminal law. The nature and the method of criminal science at this stage is best illustrated by the well-known dictum of Carrara, one of the chief exponents of the classical school of criminal law, that ‘crime is not an entity in fact but an entity in law; it is not action but infraction’ (‘il delitto non è un ente di fatto ma un ente giuridico, è una infrazione e non un’azione’). The personality of the delinquent, the origin of crime, the nature and the efficacy of punishment, the relationship between society and criminal justice,—problems which now constitute such an important part of criminal research—for many decades remained completely outside the scope of criminal science as then understood.

It is a commonplace that statements of legal doctrine sound both more determinate and more authoritative than they necessarily are. And this must be especially true of the maxims of equity,1 which possess a peculiarly Delphic quality, wrapped as they are in metaphor, grandly unqualified, and acknowledging no authority but transcendent wisdom. Therein may have lain their particular usefulness to the law.2 But therein too lies a worry. For it follows that reasoning based on a maxim especially facilitates the introduction of unarticulated valuejudgments; and indeed that such reasoning carries an unusually high risk of actual error, as the judges themselves miss their way.