In carrying out their functions government bodies frequently enter into contractual arrangements, both with private persons and with other public authorities. Like private individuals, for example, they make leases, employment contracts, and contracts of procurement to obtain the goods and services they require. Frequently they make contracts with the public in the course ofproviding public services and amenities – for example, in running public transport services, or in providing facilities such as recreation centres or museums to the public on payment of a fee. In addition, the government uses contract as a method ofcontrolling behaviour as an alternative to enacting regulations. It may, for instance, control the behaviour of those granted licences to trade or carry on other activities through contractually stipulated conditions

The law of complicity and conspiracy should neither be used nor be capable of being used to subvert the intentions of Parliament when it framed offences. To explain the ramifications of this simple message will take a little space.

The law of complicity and conspiracy is wide, but it is well known, and normally the legislature may fairly be presumed to intend it to apply to new edicts unless it is expressly excluded. Occasionally, however, the court may feel able to collect from the statute a legislative policy exempting from responsibility people who would otherwise have been accomplices or conspirators.

This article is a response to a series of articles on contract law and distributive justice. In the first article, published in the Yale Law Journal, Professor A. T. Kronman put forward the thesis that the law of contract is necessarily concerned with distributive justice – that is, with the ‘fair division of wealth among the members of society’. In the second article, published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, W. N. R. Lucy rejected that thesis and argued that limits on contracting are based on freedom rather than distributive justice. In this article I argue that contract law is and should be concerned both with freedom and with the substantive fairness of the distribution effected between the parties.

A Turk is fined and recommended for deportation by a magistrate for breach of the Aliens Order 1953. The magistrate recommends that he not be detained in custody pending the Home Office’ decision on the recommendation for deportation. The Turk appeals to the Crown Court against the recommendation for his deportation. The judge rules that he has no jurisidiction to hear the appeal and dismisses it. On seeing the erstwhile appellant about to leave the court premises the judge cries ‘stop him’, on which the appellant Turk is arrested by the police and detained in custody. The Divisional Court of the Queens Bench issues an order of habeas corpus for the release of the Turk on the ground that the judge in the Crown Court had been functus officio before be began to consider whether the Turk should be detained or not. The Turk consequently brings an action against the Crown Court judge and the police, claiming damages for assault and false imprisonment. It is decided that the judge is immune from liability because he had acted in his capacity as a judge.

Problems relating to the admixture of goods have arisen in many contexts. An up-to-date example is where the supplier of goods subject to a reservation of title clause lays claim to materials in which the goods supplied have been incorporated. Notwithstanding the practical importance of the subject, the matter has not perhaps attracted the degree of discussion that it deserves. This article attempts to redress the balance somewhat but firstly an effort is made to put terminological inexactitude and imprecision at rest.

It is generally agreed that the law of murder is in need of reform. The scope of the reform necessary has however become the subject of increasingly robust debate. The retreat from Hyam, it has been argued, leaves us with a law of murder which is both too wide and too narrow to justify the continued bifurcation of murder and manslaughter. believe this objection to be justified but consider equally that the substantive aims of a two-tiered law of homicide are not, as some believe, incompatible with doctrinal rationality. The task of criminal lawyers therefore must be to attempt to effect the necessary reconciliation of substance with form. I shall argue that central to this enterprise is the maintenance of the dividing line between intentional and reckless killings but that a definition of intention must be adopted which incorporates certain categories of risk-taking. As the definition now stands, the wrong categories are incorporated at the expense of the right ones.

The Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 has radically altered the law relating to the formalities required in respect of a contract for the sale of land. It has repealed s 40 of the Law of Property Act 1925 and in its place s 2( 1) of the 1989 Act provides:

‘A contract for the sale or other disposition of an interest in land can only be made in writing and only by incorporating all the terms which the parties have expressly agreed in one document or, where contracts are exchanged, in each.’