In this article we examine the issue of the standing of individuals and pressure groups in judicial review proceedings, with particular emphasis on standing in planning and environmental law litigation. We begin by developing a particular conception of liberalism to justify a broad, ‘citizen action’ model of standing. The article then proceeds to examine English domestic law on access to the courts against the background of this liberal model.

It is right to say at the outset that the choice of planning and environmental materials is not intended to point up issues in standing which are exclusive to that context. Instead, our purpose is to make some more general arguments about standing in public law and then, through an examination of case law in planning/environmental litigation–which features relatively frequently in the law reports–to test for coherence and contradiction in the judicial reasoning there encountered

The mainly social nature of humanity's existence has necessitated an apparatus of ideas for evaluating, amongst other things, the acceptability of personal interactions. The idea of consent is an important part of this apparatus. We find it a valuable ingredient in our thinking about such activities as physical, sexual, or psychic invasion, and the transfer or use of property. We commonly say that if someone performs one of these activities without the consent of another person whom we identify as having rights in the matter, they do a wrong; and, albeit perhaps a little less commonly, that if the other person does consent, they do not do a wrong. And we go on to articulate at least some of this thinking in the form of rules of the criminal law.

Comparative legal studies have been haunted by many unresolved scholarly problems of a methodological and theoretical nature which too often continue to be ignored within the literature. The deficiencies in theory and method of comparative legal studies have rightly been often blamed for marginalisation of this subject in legal education and practice. The aim of the present article is to contribute to this general debate by identifying and then analysing certain deficiencies of approach to the task of comparing western and socialist legal systems and cultures. Our main preoccupation is to address critically the methodology of comparative law not only for its own sake but also in response to the challenge raised by Bell's recent claim that legal theory has much to learn from reflecting upon the issues raised by the comparative enterprise.

In company law usually the difficulties in determining whether a putative contractual obligation is binding on the company are matters of agency. The issue is whether the person who purported to commit the company to the contract had the requisite authority under the common law rules of agency as modified for companies by statute. At one time it was necessary also to consider whether the contract was beyond the capacity of the company under the ultra vires doctrine, which limited the capacity of the company to the range of business activities defined in the objects clause of its memorandum. Now, following the Companies Act 1989, the capacity of the company is no longer limited in this way to a certain range of activities.

Conciliation has formed an integral part of the New Zealand Family Court’s management of family disputes since 1980. The Family Court is a tiered structure, designed to encourage the parties to resolve their own disputes by providing opportunities for conciliation within a statutory process. The first two tiers, counselling and judicial mediation, are procedures intended to empower the parties, enable self-determination, and encourage a conciliatory rather than combative attitude towards both each other and the dispute. Consequently, the parties are compulsorily channelled through the conciliation tiers of the court even if the ultimate goal of one of them is a court room battle. The hope is that the third tier, adjudication by a Family Court judge in the Family Court, will be avoided.

In this journal Harry McVea recently has asked ‘What's Wrong with Insider Dealing?’ One imagines that many readers will have thought the question rather supererogatory, but Mr McVea more than adequately shows that just this question is very live in many of the leading works on the economics of stock markets. One is here dealing with seminal works such as those of Easterbrook, Fischel, Hirshleifer and Manne which are identified with the discipline of financial economics as such. Mr McVea, in my opinion rightly, concludes that insider dealing is wrong, but does so in a way that I think is wrong headed, particularly in the way that one fears his conclusion will be interpreted by most readers of this journal. Though there is much that is admirable in Mr McVea's paper, his conclusion is uncompelling, and is so for a reason with which I think it important to take issue.

The leading recent authority on beneficial interests in shared homes is Lloyds Bank plc v Rosset, where the House of Lords clarified what had become rather a confused area of law. By no means all the problems were resolved, however, and the House proceeded on the basis of a now commonly-held but nevertheless fundamental misapprehension, that common intention is relevant to the creation of a trust. It is our contention that once it is clear precisely whose intention is relevant, and why, many of the conceptual difficulties in this area disappear.

For the purposes of the discussion, we consider the two situations, where legal title to a home is vested in A alone, and where it is vested in A and B jointly. In each case, the question is whether B can claim a beneficial interest, and if so, what is its nature and extent.

There are various angles from which the role of intention in the creation of proprietary rights can be approached. First, since proprietary rights are rights which are legally enforceable, rights which are established by a particular transaction or arrangement cannot take effect as proprietary rights unless the parties intend to create legal relations. So, even in a case where Y is in exclusive occupation of land owned by X and pays X a periodic sum in return for use of the land there is no tenancy - and no contractual licence - if the parties do not intend to enter legal relations.

The case of Copelund v Greenhalf has puzzled students of land law for over forty years. It is usually taken as authority for the proposition that a claim to an easement will fail if it amounts, in effect, to a claim of exclusive possession of the servient land. The plaintiff, the owner of a strip of land leading to an orchard, had sought to restrain the defendant, a wheelwright with premises across the road from the orchard, from leaving vehicles awaiting repair on the strip of land. The defendant countered that he and his father had used the strip (save for enough space to allow access to the orchard) for storage of vehicles for 50 years; he therefore claimed a prescriptive easement, under s 2 of the Prescription Act 1832, to do so.

The rules governing the acquisition of beneficial interests in family homes have generated a great deal of academic literature since their restatement, and apparent clarification, by the House of Lords in Lloyds Bank plc v Rosset. In what has become an all too familiar passage, Lord Bridge outlined the two methods by which such an interest can be acquired in the absence of writing. For a claimant to succeed under the first of these (the only one with which this article will be concerned), the court must be satisfied that there has been: (a) an ‘agreement, arrangement or understanding’ between the claimant and the legal owner to share the beneficial interest, evidenced by oral discussions between them; and (b) that the claimant has acted to her detriment, or significantly altered her position, in reliance on the agreement. If these requirements are satisfied the claimant will obtain an interest, according to Lord Bridge, by way of constructive trust or proprietary estoppel.

The assertion was recently made in the House of Commons that ministers have the right, in certain circumstances, to mislead Parliament, either by telling an outright lie, or by keeping quiet. This astonishing statement concerns a central aspect of the British constitution: namely the essential ability of Parliament to acquire accurate information about government, even (or perhaps especially) when the government does not want to give it. Despite popular cynicism as to the ability of politicians ever to tell the truth, not lying to Parliament has long been regarded as being of the utmost importance. The very survival of politicians in office has often been made dependent on whether it can be shown that they have misled Parliament: ‘John Profumo lost office not because of his sexual misbehaviour but because he lied to Parliament. When Mrs Thatcher narrowly survived the Westland affair the debate was on whether Parliament had been deceived’. The ability to ensure the effective acquisition of relevant information is essential to Parliament's key tasks of engaging in meaningful and effective debate, and of scrutinising the work of the executive:

In the last twenty-five years consent has emerged as central to ethical and legal thinking on medical treatment. The meaning of consent and its importance and applicability in the medical context has been tested by scholars and judges in most western jurisdictions. This essay seeks to re-examine the role of consent in medical law in England having regard to a recent series of cases concerning the refusal of treatment. By linking the law, as it has emerged from these decisions, with that developed in the 1980s concerning the doctrine of informed consent it should be possible to draw some conclusions regarding the role of law and the courts in medicine. Throughout we shall be contrasting the supposedly traditional and outdated paternalism of the medical profession with the liberal, pro-autonomy strategies of (mainly) academic commentators.

The judgment of the House of Lords in Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority appeared to usher in an era ofjudicial respect for children's rights and the autonomy of the older child. Just a decade later the decisions of the Court of Appeal in Re R and Re W were perceived as signalling a reversion to judicial paternalism and dealing a near fatal blow to adolescent autonomy. The fundamental philosophy of the Children Act 1989 itself, in which the wishes of children and the ‘rights’ of the more mature minor play such a central part, came under attack in a continuing series of cases at first instance where judges overruled the judgments of older children in favour of the judgment of their doctors.

In recent cases English, Australian, and New Zealand courts have been called on to deal with apparently similar fact situations of a woman entering into a mortgage, guarantee or joint loan contract with respect to a husband’s, partner’s or child's business debts, placing her home at risk. Yet the results and reasoning in the cases appear to be markedly different. The question is whether the apparent differences can be resolved to yield a coherent policy approach. It will be argued, drawing on an economic-feminist perspective that the cases can be resolved in terms of the courts’ preparedness to acknowledge only limited categories of behaviour and circumstances, when measured against the paradigm of the ‘rational economic man’, as displacing the assumption that contracting increases welfare.

It is apt to say that Europe, or at least the Europe of the European Union, is currently experiencing a comparative moment. To quote from Nietzsche, ours is the ‘age of comparisons’. For the first time, the two legal traditions represented in Western Europe – known to anglophones as the ‘civil law’ and the common law - find themselves interacting with one another within a general legal framework, that of the Treaty of Rome. Of course, there has long been mutual influences and interferences. For instance, one can convincingly argue that the ancient common law was but a by-product of an earlier form of the civil law. In the words of Raoul van Caenegem:

As Millett LJ recently remarked, there can be no doubt that ‘the most difficult question’ to be solved in the law of restitution is the exact circumstances in which a proprietary restitutionary remedy will be available to a restitutionary claimant. The boundary between restitution and property is still largely unmapped and continues to generate controversy. What is needed is a comprehensive and systematic enquiry into the effects that the various restitutionary factors (mistake, duress, failure of consideration and so on) have on the passing of property between plaintiff and defendant. That, however, would require a whole book, or, at the very least, a series of articles. This article takes a modest step in that direction by concentrating on one specific topic within the area of restitution and property, viz, the inter-relationship between the law of restitution and resulting trusts.

In 1995, the highest courts in two Commonwealth jurisdictions - Canada and Australia - squarely faced the issue of the liability of builders of defective and, in the case of the Canadian Supreme Court, dangerous premises in tort.’ The determination in both cases that the builders were liable to the remote purchasers for the cost of repair, based on a duty of care owed to them, can be contrasted to the current state of tort law in this country dealing with defective and dangerous premises. In fact, the articulation of the reasons why a duty of care was imposed in these cases - as reflecting considerations both of principle and policy - provides a more compelling analysis than has been seen to date in the British law of negligence.