English opportunities regulation is confused about its relationship to the concepts of ownership and property. Recent reform proposals from the Company Law Review Steering Group would have changed English law's dominant regulatory lens: the way in which it thinks about the opportunities problem, from an approach focused on conflicts of interest to one focused on the ‘ownership’ of opportunities. This ownership approach is commonly referred to as the corporate opportunities doctrine. This article argues that the proposal failed as it did not consider the interpretative possibilities generated by changing the regulatory lens. However, the proposal inadvertently makes a contribution to the debate as it directs our attention to the function and meaning of ownership concepts in the opportunities context. Property in the opportunities setting is simply a label for qualified ownership as between the director and the company. However, the article argues that by understanding references to property in terms of traditional notions of property English law and commentary has obstructed the consideration and development of a long-standing English corporate opportunities doctrine.

This article is an attempt to defend the English rule that an anticipatory breach does not automatically give rise to a right of action for damages unless and until it is ‘accepted’. The article first explores the major arguments for and against the rule and finds that the rule is justifiable on the ground of finality and consistency and that none of its objections are persuasive enough to overturn the rule. The article further observes that the rule must be qualified in two important respects in order to retain its rational force. However, the above rule is currently stated by the courts to the effect that an anticipatory breach is not per se a breach and is only ‘converted’ into a breach when it is ‘accepted’. It is proposed that this statement is historically unwarranted and contradicts sound logic and should thus be discarded.

Citizenship laws provide us with models of membership. They define the terms on which strangers and natives belong to political communities, allocating both the benefits of membership and the brutalities of exclusion. Recent legal changes in Ireland, restricting the right to citizenship by birth and limiting the rights of migrant families, highlight the vulnerability of children in migrant families and the limits of citizenship status. Many other states have grappled in recent times with the right to citizenship by birth and the entitlements to family life that come with such a claim. In both the UK and Australia the jus soli principle has been significantly restricted. In the US, Canada and elsewhere, while the jus soli principle continues to apply, citizen children born to undocumented migrant parents are subject to de facto deportations, their right to membership of the nation-state ‘postponed’ because of the legal status of their parents. In challenges to deportation proceedings involving such children, the perspective of the child as a bearer of rights is marginalised, with disputes turning largely on the balancing of states' interests in immigration control against the residence claims made by migrant parents.

This article argues that professional codes of conduct cannot perform the important task of ensuring that lawyers uphold high ethical standards. Instead, moral behaviour by lawyers requires the development of fixed behavioural attributes relevant to legal practice - what may be called a lawyer's professional moral character. At the same time, however, along with other factors, professional codes are important in that they can either contribute to or detract from the successful development of professional moral character. If so, it is argued that in order to have the best chance of assisting the character development of lawyers, codes should neither take the form of highly detailed or extremely vague, aspirational norms, but should instead guide ethical decision-making by requiring them to consider a wide range of contextual factors when resolving ethical dilemmas.

The following scene as recounted by the English writer James Stern occurred in a German town one week after Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945. A crowd is gathered around a series of photographs which though initially seeming to depict garbage instead reveal dead human bodies. Each photograph has a heading ‘WHO IS GUILTY?’. The spectators are silent, appearing hypnotised, and eventually retreat one by one. The placards are later replaced with clearer photographs and placards proclaiming ‘THIS TOWNISGUILTY! YOUARE GUILTY!’.

The recent spate of cases successfully relying on CPR 19.6 has failed to clarify the content of the ‘same interest’ required by the rule. Interpretation of ‘same interest’ must give effect to the overriding objective set out in CPR 1.1(1), which provides that cases must be dealt with ‘justly’ and ‘fairly’. In line with the aspirations of the new Civil Procedure Rules, the overriding objective emphasises improving access to justice and reducing the costs of litigation. A number of recent decisions permitting reliance on CPR 19.6 make particular reference to the rule's potential to achieve these goals. However, reducing costs is only one goal of civil procedure and it is argued that whether a procedure, or its use in particular circumstances, is just or fair depends on balancing those purposes and principles of civil procedural law which it supports against those which it inhibits. This article demonstrates how balanced reference to the principles of procedure supports a test for ‘same interest’ based on finding ‘a common question of law or fact’.