The impending arrival of the Single European Market and the consequent drive towards European legal integration raise in stark form the future role of the national law school. Should we continue to have national law schools at all, in the sense of law schools with a predominantly national focus? Or should we move towards a system in which the typical law school, though located in a particular country within Europe, encompasses a structure, a body of staff and students and a curriculum which are a national and which focus on European laws and institutions rather than on those of the particular home State? I-f law schools are to retain their essentially national character, how should the growing influence of European law in general and Community law in particular affect their role, organisation and activities?

Money is central to the constitution, whether the focus be effective power, legitimate authority, or both. To map the distribution of power within government it is best to begin by examining the control of money, because little of the business of government can be done without incurring expenditure of some sort. Control of money gives control of policy, either directly - because, in many fields, ‘expenditure is policy; policy is expenditure’ -or indirectly, on the principle that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

John owns a workshop which he wants to redevelop. Securing the necessary financing and obtaining planning permission will take a few months and in the meantime he is happy to let Mike use the workshop for E30 a week. They draw up a simple form of agreement whereby John lets the property to Mark at the agreed rent ‘until John is in a position to proceed with the redevelopment’. John and Mark are content with the arrangement: Mark has the security of knowing he can occupy the premises for several months; John is getting some income from the property.

‘In my view, the criminal law of evidence should be developed along common-sense lines readily comprehensible to the men and women who comprise the jury and bear the responsibility for the major decisions in criminal cases. I believe that most laymen, if told that the criminal law of evidence forbade them even to consider such evidence as we are debating in this appeal, would reply, “Then the law is an ass.”…The hearsay rule was created by our judicial predecessors, and if we find that it no longer serves to do justice in certain conditions then the judges of today should accept the responsibility of reviewing and adapting the rules of evidence to serve present society.’

Are there now any circumstances in which a teenage may effectively withhold her consent to medical treatment? By effectively, I mean not only that she can refuse to consent to treatment but also that this refusal is respected and the treatment prevented.

Consent to medical advice and treatment, the givingofwhich means that a doctor does or does not commit a battery (criminal or civil) on her patient, necessarily involves both the giving of consent and the withholding of consent. Without one the other has no meaning.

In both England and Wales and New Zealand adoption law is under review. A series of discussion papers followed by a Report to Ministers has been published in this country, while New Zealand has published an interim proposal for amendment ofexisting legislation prior to a later full review The time is right therefore, to consider and compare the basis upon which adoption law reform is proceeding. The opportunity to question the nature of adoption as a legal construct and examine the particular patterns offamily morality that it promotes is timely. Equally, it is timely to re-assess the philosophical underpinning of the Adoption Act 1976 in light of the particular ideology imported into family law in England and Wales by the Children Act 1989. The Act stresses the durability of parenthood and establishes the concept of parental responsibility which survives both divorce and a child care order. While containing points of confluence with adoption law, the new ideology nonetheless clashes with the existing concept of adoption in certain fundamental ways.

‘Men are in the habit of taking an erroneous view of what they may be permitted to do in the shape of picketing.’

Throughout its history, the law on picketing has been a matter ofdispute between those who see any interference with an employer’s ability to carry on his business as wrongful, and those who see picketing as an essential and lawful part of that collective strength which is a prerequisite of effective bargaining. Sometimes the issue is seen as one of industrial relations, sometimes as one of civil liabilities and sometimes as one ofeconomic theory, but in the event the resolution of the debate has been mostly political. Over the past 170 years many attempts have been made to set the balance but a permanent answer cannot be achieved, since the economic and political considerations of each era will lead to a re-assessment of the appropriate balance.