The centenary of the Cambridge Law Journal represents an important milestone not only for the Journal itself but for the Faculty of Law at Cambridge. As the current Chair of the Faculty Board of Law, it is an honour and a great pleasure to have the opportunity to write the preface to this special issue, in which we celebrate a hundred years of outstanding legal scholarship by republishing – and offering contemporary reflections stimulated by – a series of seminal articles that have featured in the Journal.

It is a remarkable achievement for anyone to be celebrating their 100th birthday, and the Cambridge Law Journal must be one of the few legal journals anywhere to have done so. In this, its 100th year of publication, the Journal continues to enjoy a global reputation, and every congratulation must go to all the editors and contributors over the period of its publication, not to forget the publishers.

This introductory essay reviews the history of the Journal, divided into two stages: the period from 1921 to 1953; and that from 1954 to today. It examines the changing institutional arrangements, personnel, as well as some of the highlights in the content of the Journal. If there is a theme, it is that the Journal was established by and developed its reputation because of the efforts of many of the outstanding scholars at Cambridge who over the decades offered the outputs of their talents to the Journal; and that the Journal has used that reputation more and more to attract the scholars outside Cambridge – indeed from all over the world. Whatever the aims of those who established the Cambridge Law Journal in 1921, and without much self-consciousness, the Journal incrementally acquired the status and practices of a learned journal. Finally, the essay reflects on the future, in particular the challenges of digitisation, open access and inclusivity.

Tunc's inaugural lecture “Tort Law and the Moral Law” in 1972 aimed to set out the moral foundations of tort liability in common law and French law. It triggered exchanges in this Journal with Hamson who challenged Tunc's views. This article explores the context of the debate and then reviews the subsequent developments of English and French law. Both systems have continued on the same path as the protagonists set out in their debate with France deepening its grounding in social solidarity as a justification for tort liability while English law sees its place only in state action or private charity.

Glanville Williams's influential 1989 article on causation, “Finis for Novus Actus?”, addressed two pertinent questions: (1) when, and on what grounds, may a person be judged to bear causal responsibility for harms most immediately brought about by the subsequent action of another person (the locus classicus of the novus actus interveniens doctrine), and (2) how should questions of causation be resolved in cases where the potential cause in question constitutes an omission? This article revisits these questions through an engagement with some of the major causation cases decided in the criminal courts in the past decade. The discussion of these cases is set in the broader context of a critique of H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré's influential doctrinal-theoretical framework for findings of legal causation, the autonomy doctrine, on which Williams had built his arguments.