Intellectual Property is not a term with a standard meaning. Traditionally it was used to describe the copyright protection of authors and to distinguish this from industrial property, i.e., Patents for inventions, industrial design rights, plant variety rights, trade marks and the like. Recently it has become an umbrella for copyright, rights related to it and the various forms of industrial property. The new generic grouping has been needed for a world where demand for these rights has risen to an altogether new pitch. In part this is the consequence of extraordinary advances in technologies which make recorded information easily and precisely reproducible; and partly it supports the quest of advanced economies to conserve superior knowledge as a weapon in international trade.

It is good that the Cambridge Law Faculty has established a Centre for European Legal Studies. In the first place because it is plain that practising lawyers in the future will need to be increasingly aware of European Community Law—whether they are taught it as a separate subject or as a part of specialist areas of the law. In the second place because if, as I also think, Britain should be not only at the heart but also at the head of Europe, if it is in it at all, there are few better ways of preparing our future political and administrative leaders than by a grounding in Community law.

Two important themes in Ronald Dworkin's work have contributed much to an understanding of Anglo-American law. He has insisted on the inter-connection between law and morality, emphasising the role of the judge's political morality in his judgments about the law. He has also argued that individual rights should be understood as anti-utilitarian or anti-majoritarian in character: they operate as constraints on majority decisions about the public interest or general welfare. In combination, these theories have provided an explanation of the legitimacy, in a democracy, of leaving undeniably “political” questions to unelected judges. Judges determine legal rights by applying (legal and political) principle. Matters of policy—understood as raising questions of the general welfare or the public interest— are primarily the concern of the other branches of government. Though policy questions are of concern to judges in the context of statutory construction, where the courts must decide what the legislature has in its wisdom enacted, it is their creative and evaluative role in respect of principle—concerning the moral and legal rights of individuals—which is the hallmark of adjudication, properly understood.1

In the history of the modern company the shareholder has held a privileged position, for although the company's separate identity is the fundamental tenet of company law the shareholder's place as proprietor has only recently been questioned. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that for nearly a century the unanimous assent of shareholders has held the status of an overriding authority, able to cure procedural defects, overcome statutory requirements and validate almost any act within the capacity of the company. In its most recent application in Brick and Pipe Industries Ltd. v. Occidental Life Nominees Pty. Ltd., where the consent of shareholders was held to bind the company to a guarantee, we have a striking example of the authority accorded to the wishes of shareholders.

It is doubtful whether there is a more famous court in Europe than the European Court of Human Rights. The town in which it is located, Strasbourg, has become a rallying cry for disappointed litigants from Iceland to Istanbul. Through its application of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Court is seen to have played an important role in the protection of individual freedom in western Europe, and its case-law has ballooned dramatically in recent years. So successful has it been that the Court's jurisdiction is coveted by the newly emerging democracies in eastern and central Europe as a badge of legitimacy and a bulwark against future tyranny. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Bulgaria already have judges on the Court and representatives from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are expected in the not too distant future. There is even talk of Russian membership. Moves are afoot to rationalise the Court's procedures, and to incorporate its law within the European Community.1 Some- time in the next few years it will have a fine new building, designed by Sir Richard Rogers. All the signs are that its jurisprudence will continue to grow at a hectic pace. It is not improbable that the Court will emerge over time as a supreme court of Europe, at least so far as human rights are concerned.

Wallie Nangle was an executive officer in the Lord Chancellor's Department. In November 1989, it was alleged that he had sexually harassed a female colleague. Following an investigation in which the complaint was upheld, Mr. Nangle was transferred to another department with a loss of increments for 12 months. This decision was upheld after an appeal to the permanent secretary in the department, though the loss of increments was reduced from 12 to three months. Alleging that these decisions had been taken in breach of the rules of natural justice and with procedural impropriety Nangle sought judicial review. But the application failed, with the Divisional Court holding that despite his status as a civil servant, the plaintiff was engaged under a contract of service and that he should seek relief in contract rather than public law to remedy any loss which he had suffered.1 The question which arose in this case was precisely what remedies could Nangle secure in private law? He might recover damages for any loss of increments if the employer had in fact failed to comply with the terms of the disciplinary code. But it is difficult to see what contractual remedy would have been available at the time against the Crown to restrain a disciplinary transfer on the ground that the disciplinary proceedings were conducted in breach of the rules of natural justice, that is to say in breach of rules applying more usually in public law which the courts have shown little desire to apply in the context of employment.

Governmental liability used to be on the retreat, especially but not only in the field of negligence liability. In Bourgoin S.A. v. Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food the majority of the Court of Appeal flatly stated that not every infringement of Community law was a tort. Moreover, in the recent decision in Murphy v. Brentwood District Council the House of Lords, departing from Anns v. Merton London Borough Council, dramatically curtailed any hope—or fear, it depends on the point of view—of development of governmental liability in the field of economic loss.