The European desire to ensure that bearers of EU rights are adequately compensated for any infringement of these rights, particularly in cases where the harm is widely diffused, and perhaps not even noticed by those affected by it, collides with another desire: to avoid the perceived excesses of an American-style system of class actions. The excesses of these American class actions are in European discourse presented as a sort of bogeyman, which is a source of irrational fear, often presented by parental or other authority figures. But when looked at critically, the bogeyman disappears. In this paper, I examine the European (and UK) proposals for collective action. I compare them to the American regime. The flaws and purported excesses of the American regime, I argue, are exaggerated. A close, objective examination of the American regime shows this. I conclude that it is not the mythical bogeyman of a US class action that is the barrier to effective collective redress; rather, the barriers to effective, wide-ranging group actions lie within European legal culture and traditions, particularly those mandating individual control over litigation.

The Australian government has launched a consultation on the possible reform of domestic contract law. The Attorney-General's Department is currently seeking stakeholder views on the need to reduce inconsistencies and/or remove outdated rules, and on ways to improve legal certainty generally both for businesses and consumers alike. Its current discussion paper, though open-ended as regards next steps, appears to be talking the language of simplification and coherence that has resonated particularly in the EU for well over a decade. Yet, the ongoing, high-profile project aimed at delivering a more coherent and uniform contract law for Europe's internal market has to date proved controversial, and recent concrete initiatives have generated much adverse commentary, particularly from law-and-economics scholars. The European experience therefore offers a series of signposts but equally a number of hazard markers for the Attorney-General's Department. Indeed, many of the broad assumptions underlying developments in the EU rest on weak foundations. The European institutions have further followed a number of dead ends in the pursuit of ‘coherence’ that ought reasonably to be avoided. This paper explores potential risks underlying the current Australian reform process and offers a number of suggestions on a possible way forward.

This examination of this case from the perspectives afforded by State Papers in the respective National Archives shows the anger felt in British political and official circles reflected in its reaction, strategy and tactics. It illuminates the roles of the Commission of Human Rights in seeking to effect a friendly settlement. The case enabled Ireland at relatively little cost to do, and to be very visibly seen to be doing, something to help the Nationalist minority community in Northern Ireland, thus fulfilling a role as its protector and assuaging an outraged Irish public opinion, while furthering just governance in Northern Ireland and promoting unification by consent.

It is over 10 years since the Court of Appeal confirmed the legitimacy of the public interest defence in copyright law in Ashdown v Telegraph Group Ltd. However, remarkably little is still known about the defence's function and scope. Indeed, acknowledgement of its unfathomability has become something of a commonplace of copyright jurisprudence and scholarship. This situation contrasts sharply with the position in other related areas of law, such as breach of confidence and defamation, in which courts have made dramatic strides in recasting doctrine to protect ‘public interest’ disclosures. Developments in EU copyright law have also plunged the defence into a renewed crisis of legitimacy. The time is therefore ripe for a reconsideration of the role of the public interest defence in UK copyright law. In this paper, an attempt is made to understand its implicit rationale and scope. It is argued that the existing jurisprudence reflects a persistent concern about copyright's potential to subvert policy outcomes generated by alternative regulatory systems and that the defence is to be viewed as a form of pre-emption doctrine, allowing courts to avoid the explicit rules established under the CDPA in circumstances in which their application would frustrate the outcomes of other more appropriate forms of regulation.

The landmark decision of Gillick v West Norfolk Area Health Authority was a victory for advocates of adolescent autonomy. It established a test by which the court could measure children's competence with a view to them authorising medical treatment. However, application of the test by clinicians reveals a number of ambiguities which are compounded by subsequent interpretation of Gillick in the law courts. What must be understood by minors in order for them to be deemed competent? At what point in the consent process should competence be assessed? Does competence confer on minors the authority to refuse as well as to accept medical treatment? These are questions which vex clinicians, minors and their families. A growing number of commentators favour application of parts of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 to minors. In this paper, the limitations of this approach are exposed and more radical reform is proposed.

In the Statute of Westminster II (1285) c. 34, it was enacted that a widow could lose her action of dower, and the possibility of claiming the usual proportion of her deceased husband's real property, if, while he was alive, she had left him for a lover, and the married couple had not been reconciled during the husband's life. This new exception to the action of dower represented an important change in the balance between a widow and her husband's heir, or others with an interest in lands she might claim as her dower, and is therefore of great significance to the history of women, law and property in the common law world. The exception remained part of the law of England until dower itself was abolished in 1925, but, although the early years of the exception have been explored, its later history is less well known. As this paper will show, there was a slow and contested move away from the early literal and relatively ‘widow-friendly’ interpretation of c. 34 to a purposive, more moralising and much more ‘widow-unfriendly’ view, influenced by the opinion of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), and encouraged by a number of other legal and social factors.

The need for courts and the judiciary to operate in public and for their activities to be open to public scrutiny is a well-established goal of liberal democracies. One of its recent policy manifestations is in debates about confidence in the justice system and initiatives designed to improve confidence. In the majority of cases, public scrutiny of court and judicial activity relies upon the media. Reports in regional and national newspapers have long been – and research suggests continue to be – an important source of information, shaping public knowledge and facilitating public scrutiny of the justice system. Unlike in some other common law jurisdictions, in the UK there is almost no scholarship on these representations, past or present. The result is that little is known about the representation of courts and the judiciary in Press reports. The aim of this paper is to take a first step towards changing that state of affairs. It uses a data set made up of 205 contemporary newspaper reports of court and judicial activity. These come from a sample of 24 daily newspapers: 10 national newspapers and 14 from the regions. All were published on Thursday 16 February 2012, an unexceptional day in the life of the justice system and the Press. The modest goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of this snapshot of the courts and the judiciary in the Press in England and Wales.