This is a first revision of the Statement of Standards for University Law Library Provision, first published in A Library for the Modem Law School (see Legal Studies, Special Edition 1995). As promised in the introduction to the Statement (ibid, pp 10-11), this revision updates the comments to the standards in the light of a further survey of library provision again undertaken, on behalf of the Society, by Dr Peter Clinch, Legal Specialist in the Library of the University of Wales, Cardiff. This further survey has been jointly organised with the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL), and the Society is most grateful to BIALL for its collaboration. The updatings reflect, in particular, changes in the key library statistics contained in the comments and offered as measures by which individual libraries might assess their performance. A full report on the survey may be obtained from the Convener, Professor Daintith, at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. The Libraries Committee is much indebted to Dr Clinch and to his institution for this essential input to its work.

In March 1995, amid ongoing Balkan conflict, Britain was forced to respond to hostilities emerging from a seemingly unlikely quarter. Angered by saturation fishing of Greenland halibut (turbot) in the North West Atlantic, especially by the Spanish, Canada dispatched warships to an area just beyond their 200 mile fishing zone. Guns were fired and one Spanish vessel was arrested in international waters and impounded. Spain, antagonised by Canadian actions and accusations, and with the backing of the European Union (EU), refused to withdraw from the area. They argued that their fishing practices, in contrast to Canada's actions, were internationally lawful. Conflict escalated, and media interest intensified on both sides of the Atlantic. The British government, facing increasing domestic support for Canada, attempted to steer a middle path. In particular, it tried to use its unique position, as a member of both Commonweulth and Common Market, to negotiate a compromise.

‘One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognise the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run ‘amok’ against society; but I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desperate party. However I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill”

In December 1996 Classification of Obligations formed the topic of one of a series of SPTL seminars under the general title of Pressing Problems in the Law. It may, perhaps, be asked quite why classification is a pressing problem, for it is by no means clear from the papers themselves that common lawyers have suddenly become more concerned about the internal structure of the ‘seamless web’. Nevertheless the seminar was a valuable opportunity to reflect upon a subject that is at least a useful vehicle for thinking about legal knowledge. Legal classification, in other words, raises questions of an epistemological nature. The purpose of this present paper is to pursue this epistemological point in an attempt to reveal how classification of symbolic knowledge (legal propositions or rules) hides much deeper issues about the role of non-symbolic knowledge (symmetries, images and isomorphs) in the formulation of legal solutions in the law of obligations.

At common law, and whether or not there is default on the part of the debtor, the legal mortgagee enjoys the proprietary right to take actual possession of mortgaged property for any purpose: ‘… before the ink is dry on the mortgage.’ Although technically this is an absolute right, in practice possession will be sought only if the borrower is in breach of the mortgage agreement. The danger remains, however, that such an unqualified right may be arbitrarily used by a capricious mortgagee. Any minor and temporary default might be seized upon by the lender as justification for taking possession and, subsequently, selling the property. This would deprive the mortgagor of any opportunity to remedy the default. The lender could, thereby, render the borrower homeless simply to rid itself of the inconvenience of a problem debtor.