As law teachers, we are more reticent about our aims than our colleagues in other countries. It does no harm, therefore, to remind ourselves of what we are expected to do. We must start from the peculiar structure of legal education in England and Wales. The sharp division between the academic stage and the professional stage, each in the hands of institutions totally independent of each other, is almost unique to England and Wales. It does not exist in Scotland or in Northern Ireland, where there are no professional schools, and where the Universities share responsibility with the professions for most of the professional training. And it does not exist with such sharpness on the continent of Europe, or in North America. This distinction is the product of the Report of the House of Commons Committee of Legal Education in 1846. That Committee was set up when it was discovered that there was ‘no Legal Education, worthy of the name, of a public nature, in England or Ireland.

Natural law is discussed by almost every modern writer on jurisprudence; but with a few exceptions - of which John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights is the most substantial - the impression given is that it is of historical interest only, that it has in some way been discredited, or at least superseded, by legal positivism. The implicit idea - and here legal positivism borrows from Comte - is that natural law represented some earlier ‘metaphysical’ stage which was then followed by ‘scientific’ legal positivism. This account requires the existence of a natural law theory that dominated juristic and philosophical thinking until the eighteenth century, when it was overthrown by Hume and Bentham. Hume, the story goes, found the decisive argument against the natural law theory; while Bentham created the new theory oflegal positivism. The argument Hume discovered was that ought cannot be derived from is; and this, it is widely supposed, is fatal to all varieties of natural law.

For the past 75 years the Trade Disputes Act 1906 has been regarded as a statute of fundamental importance, both for its provisions and for the fact that it established that the future of labour relations in Britain was to be placed firmly on the basis of voluntary collective bargaining rather than arbitration. This Act is often regarded as an immutable foundation of principle based on well debated theory, but it would be a mistake to ascribe such grandiose origins to this particular statute, for it was the result of a combination of political pressure by the trade unions, the nascent Labour Party and the Liberal Radicals, the retreat of the government from its own Bill for political expediency, and the opposition's concern with other problems. Accordingly the Bill had a most remarkable journey through Parliament and the story is not only interesting in itself but also it illustrates many of the theoretical difficulties that face any reform of the law of trade disputes today.

There has grown up over the years in the textbooks a considerable body of rules to determine when the benefit of a covenant undertaken by one landowner in favour of another can be passed on to the latter's successor in title. However, no one is now quite sure how these rules are to be reconciled with the widely-drafted but little-litigated section 78 of the Law of Property Act 1925. Although intended, no doubt, to resolve the difficulties over this section, judgments in the Court of Appeal in Federated Homes Ltd v Mill Lodge Properties Ltd have been severely criticised by at least three writers. What I hope to show in this article is firstly that the decision in the case was correct although the authority given for it, partly in the writings of academics and partly in two earlier Court of Appeal cases, is unsatisfactory, since the academics have adopted a false premise and the judgments support the opposite conclusion; and secondly that the body of rules now in the books is not part of the law and ought to be removed from them.

In this article I wish to deal with a problem about the analysis of intention in criminal law. The issue I want to take up has arisen primarily in the context of theft and theft-related offences. However, there is no reason to suppose that it is a problem confined to theft. It could arise in any area of the criminal law which involves intention as constitutive of mens rea.

The general problem can be stated very briefly. How is the law to deal with an accused who intended to perform some act which, if performed with simple intention, would be an offence, when he intended to perform that act only if some contingency occurred? The case law on theft demonstrates that, far from being an arcane question, this is a live issue. This is for the simple reason that a great many intentions are intentions of this conditional nature.

The English choice of law rules for tort cannot be stated with any certainty. The most likely version, as a result of Chplin v Boys, is a double actionability rule, with provision for a proper law or ‘interests’ approach in exceptional cases, but if that is the law there is little cause for satisfaction. The purpose of this article is to consider what shape any future reform ofthe law in this area should take, confining the discussion, however, for reasons of space, to torts wholly committed within a single country.