‘The principle of elegance’ means that the law should be internally consistent with itself, and while it is in no sense an overriding principle it is preferable that rules should be logical rather than illogical within the parameters of the system. The principle cannot of course be an absolute one for there is nothing wrong with inelegance if the state ofaffairs comes about for good reasons of pragmatism or policy. However a consequence of the principle is that where in practical terms the rules of law become inelegant or dislocated, the situation should not be resolved by covering up the disjunction that has occurred by a bland generalisation which hides what is truly happening. The situation arises because of the continual struggle between principle and practical justice, and where a gap opens between the two, the principle of elegance suggests (but does not require) that the problem should be resolved, usually by refining principle to take account of variations of practice and developments of theory. In this way the cases and principles derived from them are re-interpreted or re-defined so as to re-establish a consistent system.

Even the casual observer of trends in estoppel jurisprudence may have noted that discussions of promissory estoppel have recently become less ubiquitous in reported decisions. What may have been less apparent, but of no less significance, is that during this period there has been an upsurge of interest in estoppel by convention as a basis for judicial action. Although this doctrine was once referred to as being ‘as old as the hills’, it had languished in judicial and academic obscurity for many years prior to current interest. More recently it has been hailed as ‘an essential arrow in the quiver of every commercial counsel’. This phenomenon has occurred against the backdrop of a proliferation of so-called ‘equitable’ and proprietary estoppels, and judicial and scholarly exasperation at the disorder into which estoppel issues generally appeared to have fallen.

After years of debate, and pages of parliamentary reports, the House of Commons has agreed in principle to allow the televising of its proceedings, both in the Chamber and in Select Committee hearings.’ The purpose of this article is to consider the application of parliamentary privilege to the broadcasting of Parliament by radio or television. The issue of parliamentary privilege arises because of the absolute privilege’ of freedom of speech for Members, which enables them in the course of ‘proceedings in Parliament’ to say or do something which, had it been said or done elsewhere, could have given rise to civil or criminal liability by the person concerned. Absolute privilege exists because it is of outstanding public importance that Members should be able to speak their minds, and this outweighs any consequential harm that may be suffered by an individual or the State. Examples of the use of the protection of absolute privilege are the making of a statement that appears to be defamatory, and the oral commission of one of a variety of criminal offences.

Duty of care is in dire straits. Until recently, Lord Atkin's ‘neighbour principle’ was ‘the very foundation of the law of negligence’. It was a simple, all-purpose test for the existence of a duty of care. However, times have changed. There has been a loss of confidence in the neighbour principle. Its suitability as a general test for duty of care has been questioned, in a way that would have been unthinkable only a decade ago. In 1970, it was still possible to say that the principle ‘ought to apply unless there is some justification or valid explanation for its exclusion’. By 1984, apostasy had set in, and it was said that the principle ‘has long been recognised as not intended to afford a comprehensive definition’ In 1978, Lord Wilberforce attempted to make the principle more workable by marrying it to policy considerations in a two-state test for duty. Even this modified version of the principle has now fallen out of favour. In 1987, it was said of Lord Wilberforce's two-stage test that it ‘is not to be regarded as in all circumstances a suitable guide to the existence of a duty of care.’

The idea that psychoanalysis might be of use in the study oflaw and legal activity is by no means anything new. At the beginning of this century, the Russo-Polish jurist Leon Petrazycki proposed a theory of legal psychology, arguing that law, as an intuitively intelligible component of the human mental process, is in essence constituted by individual feelings of moral obligation and responsibility. Around the same time, psychoanalytical theory was beginning to make a slight impact on American and European jurisprudential thinking. This impact was to become all the more significant when, in the 1930s, Thurman Arnold and Jerome Frank presented arguments about the nature oflegal reasoning, and the roles of both academic lawyers and judges, which were very clearly founded upon broad interpretations of psychoanalytic ideas and concepts. In the continental tradition, Hans Kelsen, though in his early work drawing a distinction ‘between pure legal theory and psychological-sociological speculation,’ nevertheless attempted on occasion to conceive of the sovereignty of the state in Freudian psychoanalytic terms