There is nothing new about legal rules which provide that a person who is in control of land owes a duty of care to entrants thereto. These occupiers’ liability rules are often seen as something primarily to do with tort, but their content and substance are also likely to reveal a good deal about the ‘property policy’ of the legal system in question, in the sense that they will indicate the respective weight and importance attachkd to various kinds of competing claim over land. A legal system containing rules that restrict the circumstances in which those with individual, controlling claims over land owe a duty of care to other persons entering that land would appear to indicate a policy preference for supporting and protecting ‘private property’ claims to land above others. On the other hand, a system which imposes on those controlling land a greater degree of legal responsibility for persons entering thereon may be one based on a policy of recognising, protecting and supporting a range of claims in land beyond those of a narrow, private nature.

It is a general principle that interests in property are transferred consensually. Of course, the law may provide that in certain circumstances property may be expropriated by the state or that a person's property should be transferred to another independently of the owner's will; for example, when a person becomes bankrupt his assets vest automatically in the trustee in bankruptcy. Nevertheless, dealings between individuals with regard to property are premised on the notion that property entitlements are transferred by consensual arrangements. A sale, for example, requires the agreement of the buyer and the seller. The position with regard to gifts is slightly more difficult because English law does not require any actual acceptance by the donee. However, as Lawson and Rudden point out, ‘since [the donee] is at liberty to refuse the gift, from his failure to do so it may be presumed that he is willing to acquire the property in question.’

The House of Lords has now handed down decisions in six cases which have involved extended discussions of the scope of liability to compensate another for pure economic loss under the Hedley Byme principle. It seems reasonable to suppose that we can now arrive, on the basis of those decisions, at some conclusions as to when and why such liability arises. In this article we attempt to amve at such conclusions. In so doing we avoid using the usual terminology- ‘duty of care’, ‘proximity’, ‘just and reasonable’, ‘policy’, ‘reliance’, ‘assumption of responsibility’, ‘equivalent to contract’, even ‘negligence’-which an analysis of the scope and rationale of liability under Hedley Byme would be expected to employ.

If there is one fact about which critics (deregulators) and proponents (regulators) of anti-insider dealing laws are certain to agree, it is that rules designed to prohibit trading on inside information are popular. Virtually every country with a developed securities market has implemented legislation regulating insider dealing and in the vast majority of cases criminal sanctions have been imposed. Britain is no exception, and has recently reaffirmed its policy commitment in the Criminal Justice Act 1993, Part V (CJA). Regulators claim that legislation is justified on the basis of a range of different arguments, the most consistently cited of which is that insider dealing jeopardises the development of fair and orderly markets and by so doing undermines investor confidence. Other justifications include allegations that insider dealing is immoral, and contrary to ‘good business ethic’; that it hurts corporations (and their shareholders), investors, and market-makers;

The law of negligence has long been concerned not to countenance liability ‘in an indeterminate amount for an indeterminate time to an indeterminate class’. Nowhere, except perhaps in relation to pure economic loss, has this reluctance been more pronounced than in the context of negligently inflicted psychiatric harm. Without aiming to advocate a system of law that would create an increase in the workload of personal injury practitioners, this article attempts a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the bases of liability for psychiatric harm. More particularly, its primary aim is to accommodate liability for such harm within the current, tripartite framework governing the duty of care: that harm to the plaintiff be foreseeable, that there be a relationship of proximity between the plaintiff and the defendant and, that it be just and reasonable to impose a duty. Such an endeavour is both timely and necessary in view of the House of Lords’ recent insistence that in all cases-even those involving physical harm-all three limbs of the duty formula must explicitly be demonstrated.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 (HFE Act) has been described as a ‘milestone in biomedical regulation’. Yet as a milestone, it marks out the frontier of medical science as it stood at 1990. It was always accepted that the Act would not be the ‘last word on the subject’ of embryology. Five years on and, inevitably, the frontiers of the reproductive revolution have been pushed forward by scientific and clinical developments, and, again inevitably, those developments have thrown up new social, ethical and legal problems. Thanks to the passing of the 1990 Act, the new techniques do not exist in a vacuum: one of the achievements of the HFE Act is that it provides the institutional and legal framework in which new problems can be debated and resolved as they arise. The key element in that framework is the statutory licensing authority created by the 1990 Act-the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).