‘I am very conscious of the difficulties confronting social workers and others in obtaining hard evidence, which will stand up when challenged in court, of the maltreatment meted out to children behind closed doors. Cruelty and physical abuse are notoriously difficult to prove.”

‘My Lords, I am anxious that the decision of the House in this case may establish the law in an unworkable form to the detriment of many children at risk.’

Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), the freedom enjoyed by the police to detain suspects in custody and to question them in order to obtain incriminating admissions, is made subject to the mandatory duty of the court to exclude any confession that was or may have been obtained by oppression or as a result of conduct likely to render the confession unreliable. The courts are assisted in this duty by the requirement for custodial interviews to be contemporaneously recorded either by verbatim notes or by audio tape.

The requirement to make contemporaneous records appears to have been designed ‘to prevent the police from fabricating confessions or damaging statements [and] to prevent those who have in fact made admissions subsequently retracting them’. Backed by the statute, this requirement is more stringent than that provided for under the old Judges’ Rules.

This is a first revision of the Statement of Standards for University Law Library Provision, first published in A Library for the Modem Law School (see Legal Studies, Special Edition 1995). As promised in the introduction to the Statement (ibid, pp 10-11), this revision updates the comments to the standards in the light of a further survey of library provision again undertaken, on behalf of the Society, by Dr Peter Clinch, Legal Specialist in the Library of the University of Wales, Cardiff. This further survey has been jointly organised with the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL), and the Society is most grateful to BIALL for its collaboration. The updatings reflect, in particular, changes in the key library statistics contained in the comments and offered as measures by which individual libraries might assess their performance. A full report on the survey may be obtained from the Convener, Professor Daintith, at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. The Libraries Committee is much indebted to Dr Clinch and to his institution for this essential input to its work.

In March 1995, amid ongoing Balkan conflict, Britain was forced to respond to hostilities emerging from a seemingly unlikely quarter. Angered by saturation fishing of Greenland halibut (turbot) in the North West Atlantic, especially by the Spanish, Canada dispatched warships to an area just beyond their 200 mile fishing zone. Guns were fired and one Spanish vessel was arrested in international waters and impounded. Spain, antagonised by Canadian actions and accusations, and with the backing of the European Union (EU), refused to withdraw from the area. They argued that their fishing practices, in contrast to Canada's actions, were internationally lawful. Conflict escalated, and media interest intensified on both sides of the Atlantic. The British government, facing increasing domestic support for Canada, attempted to steer a middle path. In particular, it tried to use its unique position, as a member of both Commonweulth and Common Market, to negotiate a compromise.

Is there a general right to a minimum wage in English law? That we even ask this question might prompt a suspicion that we have taken leave of our senses. After all, no general right to a minimum wage exists in statutes or in the common law, and the situation is not altered by the incorporation of European Community (EC) law into domestic law by the European Communities Act 1972 -for, while it is true that the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty may be interpreted as granting a general right to a minimum wage, the UK has opted out of this chapter?

Certainly, the UK is party to international treaties and conventions - most notably the European Social Charter (ESC) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) - that expressly grant a general right to a minimum wage.

Boundaries are of the utmost importance because they establish size and shape. In so far as changes in the law affect the elements making up the boundaries of the firm, such changes can be expected to have an impact on the size and structure of firms. Theories which are capable of explaining how operations within the firm are different from those outside can be used to draw the boundaries of the firm and so to define its essence or nature. In this article three theories which give substance to the boundaries of the firm are presented and analysed.

The major debate in recent corporate legal theory has been between the coercionists and the contractarians. This can be caricatured as a dispute between those who follow institutional arguments, seeing the firm as a concession of the State, and those who follow economic theory, seeing the firm as a nexus of contracts.

Delivering the 1995 Goodman Lecture, David Glencross, the then Chief Executive of the Independent Television Commission (‘ITC’) commented that the Broadcasting Act 1990 did not contain sufficient flexibility to allow the ITC to deal effectively with unforeseen developments such as changing technology and media ownership and control issues. This is an interesting comment on the legislation because the Broadcasting Act 1990 represented a deliberate move towards a rule-based form of regulation away from the flexible, non-specific and discretionary style of the Broadcasting Act 1981 which it replaced. The White Paper which set out the Government's proposals for the new regulatory system emphasised this:

‘The ITC would apply lighter, more objective programme requirements. …The ITC would therefore adopt a less heavy handed and discretionary approach than the IBA necessarily does at present’.

However, the Government recognised that ‘[a] new enabling framework must be flexible enough to allow for technological change’.

Does the law of estoppel remedy reliance loss, or protect and grant expectations? In 1983 it was said that:

‘This is a question that the courts must decide once and for all, and … they must not shirk from providing an answer by pretending that that answer will vary according to the facts of each particular case.’

This article examines a view about this question which I shall call the ‘reliance loss theory’, which states that the normal response to a successful plea of estoppel is to compensate the claimant's reliance loss rather than to fulfil his expectations; in other words, that the court will, if possible, remedy the detriment he has already suffered in reliance upon what the other has said, without going to the lengths of obliging that other to abide by, or fulfil, what he has led the claimant to believe by his conduct or silence. The reliance loss theory has been presented as a description of what actually happens, but it also appears as an argument for what the law should be.

‘One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognise the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run ‘amok’ against society; but I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desperate party. However I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill”

This paper explores the implications for English law of the decision of the European Court of Justice in joined cases C-46/93 Brasserie du Pêcheur v Germany and C-48/93 R v Secretary of State for Transport, ex p Factortame (No 4) and subsequent decisions developing the principles enunciated therein. More specifically, it examines how the English law of torts is to accommodate the European law obligation to compensate, in appropriate circumstances, individuals suffering a loss as a result of a breach by the state of Community law. In confronting this question English law is engaged in the unfamiliar exercise of attempting to match a remedy to an already recognised right: the history of the common law, and the law of torts in particular, is of defining rights in the light of the existing remedies under which they could be asserted.

In December 1996 Classification of Obligations formed the topic of one of a series of SPTL seminars under the general title of Pressing Problems in the Law. It may, perhaps, be asked quite why classification is a pressing problem, for it is by no means clear from the papers themselves that common lawyers have suddenly become more concerned about the internal structure of the ‘seamless web’. Nevertheless the seminar was a valuable opportunity to reflect upon a subject that is at least a useful vehicle for thinking about legal knowledge. Legal classification, in other words, raises questions of an epistemological nature. The purpose of this present paper is to pursue this epistemological point in an attempt to reveal how classification of symbolic knowledge (legal propositions or rules) hides much deeper issues about the role of non-symbolic knowledge (symmetries, images and isomorphs) in the formulation of legal solutions in the law of obligations.

The right to the exclusive services of sports performers is a valuable asset, in team sports, to the clubs which employ them and, in individual sports, to the agents, managers and/or promoters who act for them. This is most visible in professional football's market for players’ services where leading performers are currently ‘sold’ for many millions of pounds. The notion of players as assets is often reflected in clubs’ accounts and enhances clubs’ overall value. Of those clubs which are owned by publicly quoted companies the securing (or loss) of a star player can crucially affect the share price of the controlling company. In a more general sense a player's value to his club is reflected in his capacity to attract larger attendances, an increased volume of pre-season ticket sales and enhanced merchandising and marketing opportunities.

The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct (ACLEC) has recently called upon academic law teachers of the undergraduate degree in law to take more of an interest in professional ethics. This means that academic law teachers can no longer set the subject aside as something to be dealt with during vocational legal education. Professional ethics must be taught pervasively, ie at each stage of legal education. This paper argues, however, that professional ethics must be taught pervasively in a further sense: even within the undergraduate curriculum, the task of educating tomorrow's lawyers in professional ethics cannot be left to one or more specialists in the subject.

Despite having made some important advances in the harmonization of labour law in the European Union, the regulation of strikes continues to differ among the member states. In this article we will investigate the effect of the strike on the contract of employment and the extent of the employer's powers in the context of the strike in Spanish and English law. We will preface these particular issues with a general comparison of the characteristics of the two legal systems and their labour law principles. We will be concerned with the definition given to the strike in each legal system and whether there exists a right or a freedom to strike.

At common law, and whether or not there is default on the part of the debtor, the legal mortgagee enjoys the proprietary right to take actual possession of mortgaged property for any purpose: ‘… before the ink is dry on the mortgage.’ Although technically this is an absolute right, in practice possession will be sought only if the borrower is in breach of the mortgage agreement. The danger remains, however, that such an unqualified right may be arbitrarily used by a capricious mortgagee. Any minor and temporary default might be seized upon by the lender as justification for taking possession and, subsequently, selling the property. This would deprive the mortgagor of any opportunity to remedy the default. The lender could, thereby, render the borrower homeless simply to rid itself of the inconvenience of a problem debtor.

The law's overseeing of administrations of pain-relieving treatment with inevitable life-shortening consequences is of crucial significance in view of the dogmatic approach of English criminal law to active euthanasia. As Lanham states in respect of society's treatment of terminal physical pain:

‘If the euthanasia option is not available, some other method will have to be found. In Britain and Australia that method involves palliative care and the hospice movement. By contrast, in the Netherlands active euthanasia is available and palliative care is poorly developed.’

The recent prosecution in R v Cox made it abundantly clear that causing death in order to relieve a patient of further pain and suffering amounts to murder under current law. By contrast, knowingly shortening life through the administration of pain-killing drugs was recently declared to be lawful by Lord Goff in the House of Lords in Airedale NHS Hospital Trust v Bland.

As the issue is usually framed, the fundamental issue at stake between mainstream liberal jurisprudence and various forms of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is, as Jeffrie Murphy puts it, whether there are ‘neutral principles in law and morality. By neutral principles [are] mean[t] those principles that can be agreed to by all rational beings.’ CLS theorists of all sorts typically hold that there are no neutral principles in a society divided into groups with vastly unequal power and status. Socialist Critics assert the class character of the law and morality. Feminist and Critical Race Theorists hold that these are infected with gender or racial biases. Social conflict between groups translates into irreconcilable conflicts of values. But in rejecting liberal neutrality, Murphy claims, the Critics fall into a radical ‘value relativism or skepticism’, which he regards as pragmatically self-defeating given their political commitments to the interests of subordinate groups.