A principal concern of inheritance law is defining the relatedness of individuals. In this context the posthumously born child has to be defined in or out of a kinship network for inheritance purposes. Historically the concerns were ones of paternity and, with it, legitimacy. For the posthumously born child these were vital questions, as the illegitimate child was nullius filius, the son of nobody, and disentitled from inheritance. While modern inheritance law has moved away from the disabilities that illegitimacy once entailed, the responses to questions of relatedness in the context of children born through the new reproductive technologies suggest a different approach - one of exclusion. The frozen embryo which is implanted and born after the father's death raises anew the question of the validity of discriminating between children because of the circumstances of their birth. There is a struggle between the practicalities of the administration of an estate and the philosophy of equality which underpins the modern non-discriminatory approach to children born outside of marriage. This paper explores some of the issues and assesses some of the solutions in contemporary debate.

The article assesses the interaction between the United Kingdom's traditional constitutional principles and the innovative Human Rights Act 1998, which introduces a range of substantive, constitutional values through ‘Convention rights. These values are compatible with collective as well as individual interests, and the scheme of the Act accommodates existing constitutional principles. The Act should therefore generate evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. The limited measure of judicial review of primary legislation should not threaten parliamentary sovereignty. In its technical detail the Act represents a small step beyond the principle of dualism of national and international law, subtly affecting national sovereignty and influencing the research agenda of legal practitioners and academics. The main constitutional effect of the Act, however, will be to bolster Rule of Law principles, with new remedies focusing attention on the notion of equality before the law and putting the conceptual distinction between public and private law under increasing pressure.

The need for the statutory regulation of business tenancies was officially recognised towards the end of the nineteenth century. The mischief complained of was that some landlords held their tenants to ransom by demanding an inflated rent as a condition of a lease renewal. This was particularly harsh for the tenant who had built up business goodwill and carried out improvements to the premises. Despite the organisation of commercial tenants and the growth of political lobbying, it was not until Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 that controls emerged which provided compensation for loss of goodwill and improvements. The inadequacy of these provisions, however, entailed that tenant discontent and lobbying persisted until the enactment of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954. This paper charts the social and political change which brought about this significant retreat from market forces and the gradual recognition that security of tenure, as opposed to financial safeguards, was the necessary response. The controls established in 1954 have, remarkably, survived almost intact and, subject to some fine tuning, will continue to do so. This paper addresses the issue why the commercial code has, in marked distinction to its residential and agricultural counterparts, remained immune to shifts in political policy during a sustained period of deregulation in landlord and tenant law.

This paper examines the justificatory arguments that the UK Law Commission advances in support of privity reform (Law Com no 242) (1996). The Commission believes that its proposed reforms will not cut across the ‘underpinning principles’ of the common law. This is borne out by the Commission's primary justificatory argument - that the privity rule undermines the intentions of the contracting parties - and by its proposal that consideration remain as the test of enforceability of contracts. But given the substantive change to privity that is proposed, and the prospect of the crystallisation of the third party right, it is argued that the Commission in fact favours the more modern reliance-based account of contractual obligation. The effect of this is to create an independent third party right to sue for the performance of the promise, ie a right that does not arise out of the contractual relationship between the parties, but from the third party's own reliance on the promise. This may have implications for enforcement of promises by gratuitous promisees.

The paper explores two fiscal devices which, while falling short of the ideal which economists have advocated, may induce behavioural change and thus operate effectively as regulatory instruments: the ‘nudging’ tax, which is calculated according to what level of payment is likely to reduce undesired activity; and the ‘rectificatory’ tax, which relates the sum payable to part of the harm caused by the activity. The former has been widely used, and with some success, but there is tension between its regulatory and revenue-raising functions. The latter seems better designed to meet goals of corrective justice than to modify conduct in an economically appropriated way.