As someone who has spent a lot of time examining the underlying economic and social factors which affect lawyers and the services which they provide, I have to admit that I have no special insights which inform me how the legal profession will alter over the next few years. So much has happened in the recent past, such is the state of flux in the wake of the government's green and white papers that it would be a very foolish person who would confidently predict developments. Even the enactment of the Courts and Legal Services Bill will only provide a limited framework for the changes which are now taking place and further legislation may be necessary within a short period.

The legal system is not a system of co-ordinate norms, found at one and the same level. Rather, it is a hierarchical structure of superordinate and subordinate legal norms, whose reciprocal relations are illuminated by the structural analysis undertaken by the Pure Theory of Law. The enquiry into the hierarchical structure of the legal system has significant consequences for the problem of interpretation. Interpretation is an intellectual activity accompanying the law-creating process as it moves from a higher level of the hierarchical structure to the lower level governed by this higher level. In the standard case, that of interpreting statutes, the question to be answered is how, in applying the general norm (the statute) to a concrete material fact, one is to arrive at a corresponding individual norm (a judicial decision or an administrative act).

In carrying out their functions government bodies frequently enter into contractual arrangements, both with private persons and with other public authorities. Like private individuals, for example, they make leases, employment contracts, and contracts of procurement to obtain the goods and services they require. Frequently they make contracts with the public in the course ofproviding public services and amenities – for example, in running public transport services, or in providing facilities such as recreation centres or museums to the public on payment of a fee. In addition, the government uses contract as a method ofcontrolling behaviour as an alternative to enacting regulations. It may, for instance, control the behaviour of those granted licences to trade or carry on other activities through contractually stipulated conditions

‘English law, having committed itself to a rather technical and schematic doctrine of contract, in application takes a practical approach, often at the cost of forcing the facts to fit uneasily into the marked slots of offer, acceptance and consideration. Although the context of these remarks was the necessity to analyse the complex of relations between the parties involved in a carriage of goods by sea- cargo owners, carriers, stevedores, and so on- into classical offer and acceptance, with identifiable consideration, this was not, as such, the root of Lord Wilberforce's difficulty. Rather, the source of the problem was the notoriously inconvenient doctrine of privity of contract which, in The Eurymedon, prevented the negligent stevedores from being able to rely straightforwardly upon the time limit provisions in the contract of carriage.

A number of writers have invited attention to the fact that Kelsen, in a long and extraordinarily productive career, gave very little attention to questions of legal interpretation. Kelsen's younger colleague in the Vienna School of Legal Theory, Fritz Schreier, himself a legal philosopher of note, remarked in 1929 that the Vienna School had neglected interpretation. Michael Thaler made the same point a half century later, writing that Kelsen devoted himself ‘entirely to an elucidation of the object of interpretation’, that is to say, the legal norm itself, without providing any details on ‘ how interpretation is to be done’. Other recent writers go further: Klaus Adomeit dismisses Kelsen's theory of interpretation as ‘methodological nihilism’ Günther Winkler writes that Kelsen’s theory, although ‘simple’, is both ‘mistaken and misleading’. Indeed, most recent writers who have examined the Pure Theory of Law on questions of legal interpretation take a dim view of Kelsen's work in the field.

The law of complicity and conspiracy should neither be used nor be capable of being used to subvert the intentions of Parliament when it framed offences. To explain the ramifications of this simple message will take a little space.

The law of complicity and conspiracy is wide, but it is well known, and normally the legislature may fairly be presumed to intend it to apply to new edicts unless it is expressly excluded. Occasionally, however, the court may feel able to collect from the statute a legislative policy exempting from responsibility people who would otherwise have been accomplices or conspirators.

This article is a response to a series of articles on contract law and distributive justice. In the first article, published in the Yale Law Journal, Professor A. T. Kronman put forward the thesis that the law of contract is necessarily concerned with distributive justice – that is, with the ‘fair division of wealth among the members of society’. In the second article, published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, W. N. R. Lucy rejected that thesis and argued that limits on contracting are based on freedom rather than distributive justice. In this article I argue that contract law is and should be concerned both with freedom and with the substantive fairness of the distribution effected between the parties.

Whether or not the events of 1992 will have significant effects on the criminal law, there is good reason for looking hard at those respects in which English criminal laws differ in scope from those of our European neighbours and partners. One obvious example concerns crimes of omission, especially those founded on public duties. German law has long had offences of failing to render assistance to a person in peril and similar offences are to be found in other countries such as Denmark, Finland, Italy, Russia and Spain. These laws stand in contrast to the English position, which remains essentially the same as Sir James Fitzjames Stephen described it in 1883:

I am going to attack a particular type of undergraduate Criminal Law course. I do not have in mind any particular course currently taught. I do not assume that it is the textbooks which provide the model from which courses proceed. The sort ofcourse upon which I want to make an attack has many features, amongst which the following are to be found:

Aiding and abetting requires an ‘intention’ to assist the commission of the relevant offence. But what should ‘intention’ mean in this context? Does D have that intention just so long as she acts in a way which she knows will facilitate the commission of the offence which P intends to commit, or must she act in order to assist the commission of that offence?

On one view knowledge is sufficient, since D need only have ‘intended to do the acts which he knew to be capable of assisting or encouraging the commission of the crime’. A brewer who knowingly sells beer to someone who intends to resell it without a licence is guilty of aiding and abetting, as is a person who lends her car to someone who intends, she knows, to use it for a criminal venture.

A Turk is fined and recommended for deportation by a magistrate for breach of the Aliens Order 1953. The magistrate recommends that he not be detained in custody pending the Home Office’ decision on the recommendation for deportation. The Turk appeals to the Crown Court against the recommendation for his deportation. The judge rules that he has no jurisidiction to hear the appeal and dismisses it. On seeing the erstwhile appellant about to leave the court premises the judge cries ‘stop him’, on which the appellant Turk is arrested by the police and detained in custody. The Divisional Court of the Queens Bench issues an order of habeas corpus for the release of the Turk on the ground that the judge in the Crown Court had been functus officio before be began to consider whether the Turk should be detained or not. The Turk consequently brings an action against the Crown Court judge and the police, claiming damages for assault and false imprisonment. It is decided that the judge is immune from liability because he had acted in his capacity as a judge.

English common law is often understood to provide for the resolution of social disputes predominantly by resort to legal rules. Whilst there may be initially reasons for a rule which do not constitute legal reasons, once the rule becomes promulgated in a statute or is embodied in a judgment of a higher court then the application of the rule in future cases is justified by that very promulgation or embodiment. No further appeal to the social reasons originally behind the rule, what might be referred to as the ‘primary reason’ for a rule, is necessary. According to the theory any subsequent dispute to which the rule is addressed will be resolved one way or the other because there exists a distinctly legal reason for reaching that decision which is independent of the content of law and independent of, for example, social or moral considerations.

Problems relating to the admixture of goods have arisen in many contexts. An up-to-date example is where the supplier of goods subject to a reservation of title clause lays claim to materials in which the goods supplied have been incorporated. Notwithstanding the practical importance of the subject, the matter has not perhaps attracted the degree of discussion that it deserves. This article attempts to redress the balance somewhat but firstly an effort is made to put terminological inexactitude and imprecision at rest.

The orthodox rules on validity of marriage at common law are that formal validity of marriage is governed by the lex loci celebrationis and essential validity of marriage (or capacity to marry) is governed by the personal law, ie the law of domicile. Neither the lex loci celebrationis nor the lex fori ought to have any interest in such questions of essential validity.

According to such orthodoxy there are two rules of English law that are suspect and in need of reconsideration. First, there is (arguably) the rule that the parties to a marriage do not need to have capacity to marry by the lex loci celebrationis when they marry abroad but do need such capacity when the marriage takes place in England. The second rule subject to attack is the notorious ‘exception’ based on Sottomayer v de Barros (No 2)2 which allows a foreign incapacity to be ignored when an English domiciliary marries in England, but not when the marriage takes place abroad.

At common law, the primary remedy for a successful plaintiff in an action in tort is an award of damages. The plaintiff must be put in the position in which he was before the tort was committed so far as money can do this. In many actions the principle of restitutio in integrum is a sufficient guide to the quantum of damages. But, in other cases, for example, actions for damages for personal injuries or defamation, a highly subjective element is involved. Neither personal injury nor loss of reputation is easily convertible by the use of any yardstick into an exact monetary figure.

In some cases, the damages are said to be ‘at large’. This signifies that the award is not limited to the pecuniary loss that can be precisely proved. Where damages are ‘at large’, as they are, for example, in assault, false imprisonment or malicious prosecution, trespass and defamation, they may be conveniently divided into three separate elements. First, there is the compensation for the actual harm caused to the plaintiff by the defendant; in addition to any pecuniary loss specifically proved, the assessment will involve putting a monetary value on the physical hurt in assault, on curtailment of liberty in false imprisonment or malicious prosecution, on injury to reputation in defamation and on inconvenience and disturbance in trespass.

Should those who have served as members of the jury in a newsworthy trial be restrained by the criminal law from recounting what transpired in the jury room?

The issues surrounding the legitimacy or otherwise of jury room disclosures pose peculiar problems in the administration of justice. They do so because such disclosures are made, not by journalists assigned to cover the trial (as at present), nor via the medium of televising the event (as may shortly be the case), nor simply by those most intimately involved in the conduct and outcome ofthe trial (such as the accused or counsel). The special feature which sets jury room disclosures apart is the fact that they emanate from those who are directly responsible for the verdict in the case. Viewed in this way, the accounts given by ex-jurors should perhaps be considered in broadly the same light as the recollections of the person less directly responsible for the outcome, namely the trial judge. And, indeed, we do have a wellknown instance of the latter type of account in Lord Devlin's Easing the Passing , the story of the trial for murder in 1957 of Dr John Bodkin Adams.

Mounting concern over the burgeoning growth and impact of the tort of negligence has, as is well known, led to a backlash in recent years. The higher courts have re-imposed more restrictive approaches to the question of the duty of care, culminating in the assertion that ‘close and direct proximity’ is the pre–condition for the imposition of a duty of care, by the Privy Council in Yuen Kun Yeu v A–G .f Hong Kong. However, this attention, focussed on what are generally cases peripheral to the mainstream of tortious liability, has diverted many commentators away from the issue of breach of duty, which lies at the heart of the great preponderance of tortious litigation

It is generally agreed that the law of murder is in need of reform. The scope of the reform necessary has however become the subject of increasingly robust debate. The retreat from Hyam, it has been argued, leaves us with a law of murder which is both too wide and too narrow to justify the continued bifurcation of murder and manslaughter. believe this objection to be justified but consider equally that the substantive aims of a two-tiered law of homicide are not, as some believe, incompatible with doctrinal rationality. The task of criminal lawyers therefore must be to attempt to effect the necessary reconciliation of substance with form. I shall argue that central to this enterprise is the maintenance of the dividing line between intentional and reckless killings but that a definition of intention must be adopted which incorporates certain categories of risk-taking. As the definition now stands, the wrong categories are incorporated at the expense of the right ones.

The Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 has radically altered the law relating to the formalities required in respect of a contract for the sale of land. It has repealed s 40 of the Law of Property Act 1925 and in its place s 2( 1) of the 1989 Act provides:

‘A contract for the sale or other disposition of an interest in land can only be made in writing and only by incorporating all the terms which the parties have expressly agreed in one document or, where contracts are exchanged, in each.’