In Spain in 1981, near Seville, there was a spectacular discovery. It allows us to see back to the reign of Domitian, third and last of the Flavian emperors (AD 81–96), and to recreate a vivid picture of the little local senate of Irni meeting in the very shadow of the municipality's newly acquired constitution. Ten bronze tablets, each nearly a metre wide and rather more than half a metre high, were fixed along the wall of its council-chamber, presumably at a level at which letters about half a centimetre high could be clearly read from ground level. Each rectangular tablet carried three columns of writing, each column about fifty lines, each line an average of about ten words. At five hundred words a column and thirty columns, the Statute of Irni— the lex Irnitana—was thus a massive document. The discovery in 1981, by people using metal detectors to search for coins, was of no less than six of the ten tablets. Later excavation discovered a few more fragments. The last tablet bears at its end the date 11th October, AD 91.

In the field of criminal law we should be used to the House of Lords changing its mind. In the course of the past three years the House has fundamentally altered its view on the meaning of intention, on the relationship between statutory and common law conspiracy and on the law of impossible attempts. Now we have another about turn. In R. v. Howe and Bannister the House of Lords has unanimously decided that duress can never be a defence to murder. Yet elsewhere in the criminal law (with the exception of some forms of treason) duress operates as a complete defence, leading to acquittal if raised successfully. In making murder an exception to this general rule the House, using its power under the Practice Statement of 1966, has departed from its previous decision in D.P.P. for Northern Ireland v. Lynch which allowed the defence of duress to be raised by principals in the second degree to murder. The Lynch decision, which had stood as part of the common law for some twelve years, is now consigned to the legal scrapheap.

What is it to make a promise? What its conceptual ingredients? How do promises compare with other statements? How exactly do they relate to agreements or basic contract theory? These, broadly, are the major, if not quite the only, questions we shall here try to elucidate.

Almost everyone seems to agree that the system under which married people are now taxed in the United Kingdom is in need of fundamental restructuring. But there is less than total agreement on the form which such restructuring should take.

Companies depend upon loan finance as one of their major sources of capital. However, banks and other financial institutions involved in the business of lending money to companies generally ensure that their exposure to the risk of non-repayment is minimised by taking security over the debtor company's property. One particularly important type of security which is available when money is lent to a company is the floating charge.

1988 is a presidential election year in the United States. As in previous presidential and congressional campaigns, millions of dollars will be spent by candidates seeking elected office. Campaign financing in the United States, as in other western democracies, raises a question which strikes at the moral basis of the system of government. Thus, how do we secure and guarantee political equality in a society of deep-rooted economic inequality? It may well be that de Tocqueville was right when he wrote that “Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.” Yet the integrity of these institutions demands that control of economic resources does not permit domination of the political process on the simple expedient of unrestrained liberty for all in the political arena. If political equality is to mean anything in practice, the political machine must not be the preserve of the few who are ready, willing, and able to exploit private or personal economic resources. The purpose of this paper is to consider how this problem has been addressed in the United States. The paper traces the origins of the modern legislation and examines the tension between the legislative and the judicial branches of government. A particularly disturbing tendency has been the unwillingness on the part of the courts to sustain the legislation in the face of constitutional challenge, thereby facilitating the continued domination of the political process by moneyed interests. Given the growing movement for a Bill of Rights in Britain, these developments may yet be of some practical significance in this country.

One of the most useful and most-used powers that criminal courts1 have is the power to bind people over to be of good behaviour or to keep the peace. Magistrates form the view that a person (“the principal”), who might be a person of previously unblemished reputation, is likely to breach the peace or commit criminal offences. They require him to enter into a recognisance, in form a voluntary covenant or agreement, to keep the peace, or to be of good behaviour, sometimes in a set sum (say £100) for a set period. If he refuses, he can be imprisoned, regardless of the seriousness or triviality, lawfulness or unlawfulness, of the behaviour that originally brought him to court, perhaps as a witness. He may also be required to find sureties, other people who are prepared to promise that they will forfeit a sum of money (say £50 each) if their principal fails to behave. If the principal misbehaves, debts to the Crown arise of £100 from the principal and £50 from each surety. The mechanics are therefore rather similar to bail. Binding over operates today in two ways. First, it can be used after conviction for an offence as an alternative to sentence. The accused enters into a recognisance to keep the peace or be of good behaviour. If he breaches his undertaking, he can be summoned back to court to be sentenced for the original offence. Secondly, it can be used after conviction for an offence as an alternative to sentence. The accused enters into a recognisance to keep the peace or be of good behaviour. If he breaches his undertaking, he can be summoned back to court to be sentenced for the original offence. Secondly, it can be used as a preventive measure to deal with people who are before the court but have not been convicted. This latter use provides a flexible way to deal with cases arising out of disputes between neighbours and minor public order problems without the need for a full hearing. It saves time and money.

The concept of legitimate expectation first stepped onto the English law stage eighteen years ago in Schmidt v. Secretary of State for Home Affairs. There Lord Denning said obiter that an alien who had been given leave to enter the United Kingdom for a limited period had a “legitimate expectation of being allowed to stay for the permitted time” and, hence, if that permission was “revoked before the time limit expires, [the alien] ought to be given an opportunity of making representations [to the Home Secretary]”. Since then “legitimate expectation” has played an important part in numerous decisions in both the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth (particularly Australasia).

Property owners in modern common-law jurisdictions have a wide variety of legal instruments at their disposal to effect the inter-generational transfer of wealth. Indeed the object of much reform in the area of estate transmission in the course of this century has been to reduce the formality required to execute the comprehensive succession arrangements which anthropologists and historians have termed “strategies.” Yet the process of relaxation of formality has not produced a law devoid of requirement, because societal interest is thought at times to conflict with unimpinged informality of transfer. For example, legislatures and courts believe that some formality protects the property owner (who at the time his act has legal effect may be dead) from those who seek to influence or subvert the succession process. Moreover, because nearly all members of society partake of the process, the administrative burden on the judicial system is lessened when law provides a clear set of hurdles for a disposition to surmount in order to be valid. Likewise, the more detailed and tailored to these aims the requirements for validity are constructed, the less likely disputes regarding dispositions will arise. Thus, in modern law, the virtue of simplification is balanced with protective concerns, creating a law of wills and trusts on the one hand sufficiently complex both to embarrass practitioners and confound students, but leaving individuals relatively free to craft estate plans consistent with their own desires.

The rule of practice that requires judges to direct juries that it is dangerous to act on the uncorroborated evidence of certain categories of witness, namely accomplices, the alleged victims of sexual offences and children, has been diluted in certain jurisdictions, and subjected to rigorous criticism by a number of academic commentators. In this article it is proposed to consider whether a mandatory corroboration warning can ever be justified in respect of a particular category of witness. Rather than consider in detail the arguments in favour of retaining the warning for each of the present categories of witness, it is proposed to examine the case for the very idea of a corroboration warning in respect of any category of witness. We shall approach this question by first considering what it is that a corroboration warning requires a jury to do, over and above their ordinary task of determining the credibility of the evidence against the accused and deciding whether the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Attention has focused on the “enormous superstructure” that has been erected on the basic proposition that the evidence of some witnesses should be approached with caution and on the heavy burden that this imposes on a trial judge summing up to the jury. But another matter to consider is the demands that a corroboration warning imposes on the jury and whether it can ever be justified to make these demands in respect of particular categories of witness.

Every so often the Appeal Committee of the House of Lords produces a decision that sets back the rational development of the criminal law for several years or decades.

Other courts do this too. But when the lords are at fault it is particularly disappointing: because they should be the élite of the judiciary; because they have the time to consider their decisions properly; because counsel who argue cases before them (having thrashed them out in two lower courts) should be unusually well-prepared; because the lords have the authority to overrule ill-considered decisions of the lower courts; and because their own pronouncements are (if things go wrong) especially hard to overturn. What makes these aberrational decisions particularly disconcerting is that the lords commonly show no appreciation of, and make no attempt to answer, the powerful arguments in the existing literature against the position they adopt.