Why should a Law Commissioner be interested in family courts? Family courts were an item in the Commission’s first programme but the Commission has made no proposals on the subject. A working party was set up in 1971 and seemed on the point of producing a working paper when it was learnt that the Finer Committee intended, not merely to make some general observations, but to lay down broad principles and work them out in some detail. The Commission therefore suspended operations indefinitely. Since then, it has taken the view that the issue must be left to the responsible government departments, who have recently begun their own consideration of the subject.

The relationship between trade unions and the courts has always been a sensitive one, and no less so when the issue is how to deal with a union’s refusal to obey court orders. During most of this century enforcement has not been a serious problem because the nature of trade dispute law has meant that the courts have rarely had to establish their authority over trade unions; but during the era of the Industrial Relations Act 1971 and also since 1980 the situation has been rather different. This is because statute has drastically curtailed the ambit of lawful industrial action, and has also rendered unions directly liable, thus making conflict between unions and the courts inevitable.

The ‘rights’, if any, which belong to trade union members who refuse to participate in industrial action have been the subject of debate and controversy recently. A number of factors account for this. The first is the legal action maintained by members of the National Union of Mineworkers who refused to participate in the recent industrial action in the coalfields. Secondly, recent debates over the wisdom of introducing a ‘positive’ right to strike in place of the existing system of ‘immunities’ have, as Lord Wedderburn has remarked, ‘opened up… the prospect of a prohibition on unions disciplining members who refuse to strike, on the basis of the fallacy that a positive ‘‘right to strike’’ implies the negative ‘‘right not to strike’’’.

The legal tradition is a written tradition and is consequently centred upon the study of textual meanings. From the earliest times law, both religious and secular, has been inscribed and codified, be it chiselled in stone, carved in wood, scratched on vellum or written in books. While the law codes and law books are certainly not the only forms of law they are in historical terms the dominant ones. The law is ideally promulgated in books and is found in books, it being of the historical essence of sacred and secular legal power to take a written form.

Trade marks, business names and get-up, like products, can be important commercial assets, carefully chosen for the appropriate image and impact, projected by advertising and capitalised through goodwill. As such, they represent a significant investment for which businesses expect adequate legal protection. In these days of worldwide travel, communications and media exposure the reputation acquired by a name or mark may transcend national boundaries and even precede commercial activities in a particular country. The temptation to cash-in on the reputation of another business through imitation of a name, mark or get-up has never been greater and piracy has reached epidemic proportions.

In an earlier paper, we had occasion to examine the French and English law of forenames. Possibly to his surprise, the English lawyer will have discovered that, certain minor reforms apart, legislation of the Revolutionary era still governs this aspect of French life, purportedly restricting the forenames a person may bear, and, after registration of birth, all but forbidding their subsequent modification or substitution. Such a position contrasts dramatically with the received wisdom of English law, where forenames can be freely acquired and abandoned by use and reputation, the French rigidity of outlook being utterly alien to an English lawyer’s relativist attitude in the matter.