This paper considers the principle that it is sufficient to establish causation in fact in tort to show that the defendant's act or omission made a material contribution to the harm. It examines the leading case, Bonnington Castings v Wardlaw, and other authorities and argues that the principle involves an application of the but-for test and not an exception to it. If exceptions to the but-for test are to be made, they should be clearly articulated and justified, as, for example, in Fairchild. A broad interpretation of ‘material contribution’ as establishing in some cases such an exception provides insufficient clarity and is certainly to be supported.

The usual excuse for regulation is the failure of market provision. This paper examines legal services and suggests that, in the case of provision of commercial legal services to corporate clients, true events of market failure, to support the case for regulation, and more particularly self-regulation, are hard to locate. It further argues that the market for legal services is heavily stratified with a commercial legal services market effectively operating quite separately to that of professional legal services for private clients. In consequence, it may be more effective and proportionate to adopt differentiated strategies of regulation. This might be achieved by shifting the focus of regulation away from the individual practitioner, as is historically the case, towards law firms as such. This simple step, it is suggested, could facilitate much greater liberalisation of the market for legal services. This proposal is explored with particular reference to freedom of services within the European single market and, as a backdrop to the paper, progress to date in facilitating cross-border legal services in Europe is reviewed.

This paper examines the recent resurgence of interest in the legal biography among legal scholars. It argues that the legal biography has traditionally been treated with suspicion within the English law school due to ideological and methodological concerns about the intellectual validity and robustness of the form, and because of reservations about its true disciplinary province. Through a literary survey of legal biography, it claims a tension between intellectual and empirical approaches that parody the tension between the internal and external traditions in legal history. More recent biographies, however, have succeeded in bridging these divides and in demonstrating the potential value of legal biography in deepening our understanding of the human context of legal phenomena.

This paper addresses the criminalisation of fabricated images of child pornography. Focusing on the new offence of possessing ‘non-photographic pornographic images of children’ (NPPIC) under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, it assesses whether harm- and morality-based arguments legitimate the extension of the criminal law to this activity. I contend that harm may be caused to children by NPPIC that are depictions of real child sexual abuse, and images that depict the fantasy sexual abuse of a real, recognisable child. However, it is extremely difficult to find a legitimate basis for prohibiting the possession of fantasy, completely fabricated NPPIC through a reasoned application of the harm principle and thus criminalisation of such images is not justified. Adopting a liberal perspective, I argue that moral harm-based arguments ultimately fail to convince, since legal moralism or moral paternalism should not be acceptable grounds for criminalisation. I conclude that a stronger case for criminalisation would have been made had the offence been limited to NPPIC depicting real child sexual abuse, or featuring real, recognisable children, or targeted at creators and distributors rather than possessors.

The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice state that there should be ‘a close relationship between the notion of responsibility for delinquent or criminal behaviour and other social rights and responsibilities’. If healthcare autonomy, or the ‘right to be responsible for making decisions about our own medical welfare’, is accepted as one of these social rights then, in England, the age gap between criminal responsibility and healthcare right is considerable. It has been suggested that this age difference might be explained in terms of the attribution of responsibility; in essence that there is a difference in the timing and nature of the responsibility being ascribed. The aim of this paper is to examine the concept of responsibility, particularly as it relates to adolescent decisions concerning death; the refusal of life-saving treatment, on the one hand, and the commission of homicidal acts, on the other. It would appear that there is considerable overlap in the types of responsibility alluded to in both situations, most particularly in the notions of capacity responsibility and prospective responsibility. If this is so, then having a wide gap between the two ages of responsibility would seem to lack a secure jurisprudential basis.

This paper identifies and considers difficulties that gave rise to successful appeals from prosecutions where expert evidence was relied upon to demonstrate that defendants had killed or caused harm to infants in their care. It evaluates the extent to which these difficulties may be addressed by measures which have been introduced or proposed by way of tackling problems associated with expert evidence. Part of the paper is dedicated to an analysis of the Law Commission's consultation paper on the admissibility of expert evidence in criminal proceedings. The paper argues that trial judges may not be best placed to discharge the Law Commission's proposed gate-keeping test for screening the reliability of expert evidence. Expert evidence will often be ‘outcome determinative’ in prosecutions for infant harm, which is why we argue for the introduction of a specialist gate-keeping panel instead to determine the reliability of new theories and techniques.

This paper questions Thomas Poole's assertion that judicial review is not ‘value orientated’ (see (2005) 25(1) Legal Studies 146). In doing so, the paper seeks to demonstrate that the account of judicial review given by common law constitutionalist writers provides an accurate description of the approach taken by the courts in the last 10 years. The paper first considers Poole's objections to common law constitutionalism. It then proceeds to assess the writings of those relied upon by Poole against the case-law of the last decade. This is done by reference to three ‘themes’– the basis of judicial review; a substantive rule of law; fundamental values and constitutional rights. The paper concludes by suggesting that when a thematic approach to the theory is adopted, the case-law of the last decade provides vindication for the main tenets of common law constitutionalism.