One of the problems which arises in the tort of negligence is where the plaintiff is aware of certain characteristics of the defendant which indicate that the defendant is incapable of achieving the usual standard of care, and yet the plaintiff enters into or continues a relationship with that person. Entering a car driven by a drunk driver is a simple example. There seems to be a common feeling that such a plaintiff is ‘less deserving’ and that it is a necessary consequence of the fault system that he should bear at least part of the responsibility for his loss. Recent developments, particularly in Australia, have suggested different approaches to this problem which raise issues about the nature and role of the standard of care, as well as about the relationship between the standard of care and various defences to negligence.

It may or may not be possible to develop an Artificial Intelligence model of legal reasoning that accurately reflects the processes of the legal mind, but one positive result that could well emerge from all the research into such modelling is a fundamental reassessment of legal theory. The paradigm that legal reasoning is essentially a rule based activity may well have to be discarded in favour of an epistemological model that is very much more complex, in the systems sense of this term, than the hierarchical structure traditionally associated with jurists since the Enlightenment (if not since the Byzantines) and represented in one of its most perfect theoretical forms today in Kelsen's model. It is the purpose of this paper to examine, if only briefly, this challenge to conventional legal theory (Part I) and, using systems theory, historical jurisprudence and Justinian's Digest (Part II), to suggest an alternative epistemological model (Part III).

The enforceability of the convenants in a lease after an assignment, whether by the landlord or the tenant or both, is a matter of considerable practical importance. In the case of long leases, assignments of the leasehold estate and of the reversion are a common occurrence; both will often change hands many times before the end of the term, creating a welter of potential parties to any action on the covenants. In addition, there may be sureties who have undertaken to guarantee performance of the tenant's covenants. The basic principles governing the parties' rights and liabilities in this field under the present law are well known, centring upon privity of contract, privity of estate and upon statutory rules found in ss 141 and 142 of the Law of Property Act 1925. The area is one of vital commercial significance to landlords, and which potentially affects the residential security and amenity enjoyed by tenants (in the case, for example, of landlords' covenants to renew or to repair). It is also a field in which many of the issues and concepts have been the subject of judicial and academic consideration for more than a century, yet a surprising number of uncertainties remain. The law consists of a complex set of rules, which together form something resembling an intellectual jigsaw puzzle, and one from which several pieces are still missing. The aim of the first part of this article is to highlight some of these gaps.

In this essay I consider the reception, perception and construction of deaths by disaster. Catastrophies such as those at Aberfan, Zeebrugge and Hillsborough present a challenge to legal and political systems. They prompt immediate and long-term responses. Some of these are concerned with establishing the cause, some with preventing their recurrence and others with blame allocation. There have been public and not so public inquiries into them. In some cases there have been criminal prosecutions with suggestions of scapegoating, but all these disasters have one thing in common. They have been the subject of an inquest. To be more precise, each death has been the subject of an inquest, as are the 18,000 deaths from external causes, injuries or poisoning, which occur every year. Here I focus in particular on the role of the coroner's inquest and its relationship with other forms of public investigation in shaping public perceptions of disasters.

It was generally accepted that the House of Lords in Anns v Merton LBC introduced an ‘entirely new type of product liability’ into the law of tort by expanding liability in negligence in relation to the construction of defective buildings. The novelty of the action was to introduce liability in tort for the construction of the defective product itself and to allow a claim for economic loss resulting from the defect. The consequence was to blur some of the traditional boundaries between contract and tort claims and to cause controversy in relation to the nature of the allowable loss recoverable from the negligent act. In particular it led to the question of whether such claims fell into the category of ‘pure economic loss’: a loss not easily accepted in conventional tort jurisprudence.