The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 may lead to considerable forced change in a contract. In some cases a contract term can be rendered automatically ineffective and in others a term can become ineffective unless it satisfies the requirement of reasonableness. Obviously the boundaries of such powerful provisions are of great significance and, for the most part, the sections which produce those effects are stated to apply to terms which ‘exclude or restrict liability.

While much has been written about American legal realism, the nature of its decline is comparably less carefully documented. Jurisprudential lore has it that ‘we are all realists now’. Although it is far from clear who ‘we’ might be, the statement is commonly taken to mean at least three things: that academic and practising lawyers alike have heard and heeded the message that law is not a certain system of rules; that legal doctrine is nowadays conceived in the context of the wider legal process; and that the legal process is nowadays understood to be part of the wider social system. The supposition, in essence, is that modern lawyers think like realists, even if they do not commonly consider themselves to be realists. While the weaker ideas and arguments developed by so-called realists have been discarded, the better ones have been absorbed into modern legal thought.

Regulation as a legal form of social engineering has been subjected to much analysis in the last decade or so. The importance of the topic to contemporary law cannot be overstated: on the one hand, it has been the avowed aim of government to ‘deregulate’ industry; on the other hand, and paradoxically, both the concomitant policy of privatisation and the evolution towards a Single European Market have increased the need for regulation in appropriate areas. The efforts to explore the strengths and weaknesses of different regulatory forms have brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Administrative lawyers have been concerned with how the power of decision-making is allocated between institutions and the general problems of accountability and control of discretion to which this gives rise. Socio-legal researchers have critically examined the practices of regulatory agencies as regards rule formulation and enforcement.

No statute defines indecency, yet this is the element that makes the difference between common assault (a summary offence, maximum six months) and indecent assault (maximum now ten years). In gross cases no question arises; the trouble is with the marginals. The courts solve them, as they solve so many problems on jury trial, by leaving the question of indecency pretty well at large to the jury. This long-established rule was reaffirmed by the lords in Court. Lord Ackner, with the concurrence on this point of all the other lords, said ‘The prosecution must prove & that the assault, or the assault and the circumstances accompanying it, are capable of being considered by right-minded persons as indecent’.

There has been considerable litigation concerning the law of confidence in recent years. This includes claims brought by private individuals to restrain the disclosure of medical information and personal secrets, actions by employers against employees to restrain unauthorised use of trade secrets and actions by the government in respect of state secrets. Unfortunately, although the existence of a jurisdiction to restrain breaches of confidence has long been established, there still remains some uncertainty as to the conceptual basis of the action. The conceptual uncertainty has not, however, prevented the courts from recognising the existence of the jurisdiction and establishing the basic criterion of the action.

Ever since November 1974, when the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, announced his ‘Draconian’ Prevention of Terrorism Bill, strong emotions have been aroused by the legislation. On the one hand, ardent supporters claim that the Acts have been ‘increasingly useful and necessary for the police’ and ‘the most powerful weapon in our counter-terrorist armoury’. On the other hand, there have been strident critics who not only denounce the Acts as a ‘flagrant violation of basic civil liberties’ but also support ‘the struggle against British imperialism [even if it] inflicts violence on citizens and can have tragic consequence’. This clash of opinions has persisted during the most recent re-enactment of the legislation in Parliamentary session 1988–89.

The recent refusal by the Appeal Committee of the House of Lords to grant leave to appeal to their Lordships' House in the case of Agip (Africa) Ltd v Jackson means that an opportunity has been lost to clarify the law with regard to the liability of a third party who helps a fiduciary commit a breach of trust. The difficulty is further compounded when one bears in mind that the ultimate appeal in Lipkin Goman v Karpnale did not involve one of the original defendants, Lloyds Bank, whose liability for enabling the gambling-addicted solicitor to sustain his predilection by cashing cheques for him was considered only by Alliott J and the Court of Appeal.

The Court of Session decision in Pringle, Petitioner again raises the issue of what constitutional effect, if any, is to be attributed to the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England. Specifically, is it competent for the Court of Session to find that an Act or a provision in an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament is invalid because of an inconsistency with an Article of the Treaty of Union as enacted in Scots law by the former Scottish Parliament in the Union With England Act 1707 (c 7)? This is the first case since MacCormick v Lord Advocate in which the Inner House of the Court of Session has commented on this favourite question of Scottish constitutional lawyers and, although hardly answering the question any more revealingly than it did in that case, the court's latest reservation of opinion on the answer is worthy of some further discussion.

Reservations of title clauses have enjoyed mixed fortunes in recent times at the hands of the courts in Britain. On the one hand, the House of Lords has upheld the validity and effectiveness of an ‘all-liabilities’ reservation of title clause. On the other hand, claims on the part of a supplier to resale proceeds have been rejected in a string offirst instance decisions. Reservation of title has however been viewed more favourably as a phenomenon in New Zealand. In the leading New Zealand case Len Vidgen Ski and Leisure Ltd u Timam Marine Supplies Ltd. a tracing claim succeeded. Moreover in Coleman u Harvey the New Zealand Court of Appeal gave vent to the view that the title of the supplier is not necessarily lost when mixing of goods, which are the subject matter of a reservation of title clause, has occurred. There are now a series of more recent New Zealand decisions, some of them unreported, dealing with many aspects of reservation of title.

In October 1985, the Nugee Committee produced a well-received Report. It drew attention to a number of diverse problems relating to the management of leasehold flats, most especially those faced by lessees. These were said to include excessive delays in carrying out repairs, complaints as to the level of service charges and difficulties in the enforcement of lessors' obligations. It goes without saying that the slow and inevitable structural deterioration which inevitably takes place as a building ‘ages’ will risk being accelerated by any dilapidations caused by the neglect ofthe lessor regularly to comply with his repairing obligations. In this and similar circumstances of mismanagement (such as a failure regularly to collect service charges) the value, credit-worthiness and saleability of the lessees' interests are all put at risk.

The concept of defectiveness is undoubtedly of crucial importance in the structure of the Consumer Protection Act 1987. The definition of the term ‘defect’, upon which will depend the actionability ofdamage caused by a product, is set out in s 3, which reads as follows:

(1) Subject to the following provisions of this section, there is a defect in a product for the purposes of this Part if the safety of the product is not such as persons generally are entitled to expect; and for those purposes ‘safety’, in relation to a product, shall include safety with respect to products comprised in that product and safety in the context of risks of damage to property, as well as in the context of risks of death or personal injury.

In leases it is not uncommon to make provision for periodic reviews of the rent and to impose on a lessor, who wishes to take advantage of such a provision, the necessity of his initiating, or ‘triggering’, the review by a notice served on the lessee at or before a certain date or within a certain period. In this article, we respectfully submit the House of Lords to have mistaken the nature of such impositions; and that it is because, and only because, of that mistake that the House has held such time limits to be, in the absence of the grossest indications to the contrary, merely ‘directory’ and so freely to be disregarded by lessors.

The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of two recent decisions on an immigrant’s right of appeal: Secretary of State for the Home Department v Sonia Mahli was decided in the Court of Appeal in December 1989 and R v Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex p Oladehinde was decided by the House of Lords in October 1990. Both cases raised other substantive issues of considerable importance for public lawyers: Oldehinde made the important point that the Secretary of State for the Home Department could delegate to senior immigration officers his powers to make deportation decisions; Malhi demonstrated how limited are the natural justice rights of overstayers.

It is easily assumed that the use of the language of fundamental rights protection by the European Court of Justice translates directly into an extension of the actual protection of those rights within the European Community. It is the purpose of this paper to question that assumption.

Whilst it would appear to be widely accepted that the initial motivation for the adoption of the terminology of fundamental rights by the European Court of Justice was a desire to defend the supremacy of Community law over national law, a close analysis of certain recent cases in the European Court shows that the court has begun to use rights talk in a different way.

Advocates of the legal equality of women and men must, sooner or later, address the issues raised by the biological differences between the sexes. Even those who would argue for a completely sexually egalitarian society which does not recognise differences based on sex cannot avoid this issue. Women are child-bearers: this a a biological fact. They are also perceived as child-rearers: a view with origins that are clearly more complex than mere biology. These particular functions have an impact on all aspects of a woman's life within and outside the home. In the workplace pregnancy is treated as a deviation from the male norm or as the price to be paid by the employer for employing women. It is women who are expected to make concessions and it is unsurprising that the claim has been made that ‘the heart of woman's oppression is her child-bearing and child-rearing role’.

It is clear that several members of the judiciary are unhappy about some of the moral implications of Caldwell recklessness. In particular, there is concern about the accused whose capacities, mental or physical, are appreciably more restricted than those of the ordinary person. Such person may not just fail to foresee risks obvious to rcasonable people, they may plausibly be seen as being incapable of so doing. Judicial anxiety about this first surfaced in Elliott v C. There, the Queen's Bench Divisional Court allowed a prosecution appeal against the acquittal of a 14 year old girl (who was in a remedial class at school) for the criminal destruction of a garden shed and its contents.

There is an increasing awareness of the need to save man's environment for current and future generations, both on the part of governments and of the populace generally. This has resulted in a number of enactments, both national and international, which purport to protect the environment in a number of ways - by controlling, for instance, the release of pollutants into the atmosphere, the dumping of waste products in the sea, the killing of marine life, the export of endangered species and so on.