This article seeks to unfold the character, scope and trajectory of justifiable property rights within Hegel’s jurisprudential writings. It does so in order to try to make this reputedly ‘difficult’ and much neglected theorist fit for undergraduate consumption on private law courses.

If we accept the need for an intelligible social theory of private law, why should lawyers consider that of Hegel? Hegel devoted his last book to a ‘Philosophy of Right. This text is, however, barely mentioned by even the more comprehensive of modern textbooks on jurisprudence. There could be little ground for complaint if such neglect of Hegel’s legal writings were based upon a fully reasoned consideration and then subsequent rejection due to certain vital and demonstrable flaws within them.

As Sir Richard Eggleston has justly observed, ‘The whole subject of character evidence in criminal cases is complex and difficult and much has been written about it. Although this rings true for section l(f) of the Criminal Evidence Act 1898, the remoter areas of that provision still remain comparatively unexplored. This paper will concentrate upon the abnormal operation of sub-provisos (ii) and (iii).

Section 1 (f) provides that, if he elects to give evidence, an accused shall neither beasked nor required to answer ‘any question tending to show that he has committed or been convicted of or been charged with any offence other than that wherewith he is then charged, or is of bad character.’ The effect of this general prohibition is, in Cardozo CJ’s words, that ‘in a very real sense a defendant starts his life afresh when he stands before a jury.

In any system of property law a complete specification of rights and duties raises at least two questions. First, allocation of rights and duties inter se between the parties to the transaction; secondly, the rights and duties of the parties to the original transaction against the rest of the world. The traditional common law analysis where a third party wishes to acquire an indefeasible interest in a chattel is to direct the latter to the ‘owner’ and indeed the prerequisite for the enjoyment of most property rights depends upon our ability to acquire it from someone else. Furthermore, inherent in the idea of acquiring an absolute right in property (title) is exclusivity of possession ie superiority over the transferor and third parties.

Lawyers place great stress on the ‘objectivity’ of the law’s approach to agreements. Humpty-Dumpty may claim that ‘when I use a word it means just what I want it to mean, no more and no less’, but a lawyer would advise Humpty that the law, should it interest itself in any promise he made, would be interested not in what he meant by what he said, but in how a reasonable man would understand that which was said. This, the lawyer would explain, is the dichotomy between the subjective and the objective interpretation of words, and it is a dichotomy which has considerable influence on lawyers’ and judges’ thought. Treitel discusses it on the first page of his text, and the very title of one of the chapters of Cheshire, Fifoot and Furmston, ‘The Phenomena of Agreement’, is derived from the law’s concern ‘not with the presence of an inward and mental assent but with its outward and visible signs.

The countries collectively described in this article as the Commonwealth Caribbean, comprise those former British possessions, the islands of the Caribbean archipelago and the mainland states of Belize and Guyana, which now enjoy the status of independent states.

In a major deviation from the Constitution and law obtaining in the United Kingdom and its colonial territories, these states have written constitutions which set up a regime of fundamental rights and freedoms as part of the law of the constitution.

Failure of medical advice by a medical practitioner can vitiate a patient’s consent to treatment giving rise to battery and it can also constitute a breach of the medical practitioner’s duty to inform bringing in negligence. This failure to inform pertains to the two torts of battery and negligence. What then is the distinction between medical trespass and medical negligence? The English cases from Chatterton v Gerson in 1981 to the recent leading case of Sidaway v Bethlem Royal Hospital Governors and Others have drawn a distinction. The distinction between the two torts is useful for the purposes of classification and application of tortious liability and is also necessary for the purpose of establishing the different functions of the two torts. Unfortunately, the distinction drawn is inappropriate. The article will first examine the distinction drawn by the cases between the two torts in this area of failure of medical advice; then it will discuss the difficulties in the distinction employed; and, finally, it will suggest a more appropriate relationship between medical trespass and negligence.

Until recently claims for damages by patients against their doctors were rare in England. Patients who did pursue such claims often found scant sympathy from Her Majesty's judges. The clinical judgment of the medical practitioner was accorded something very like immunity from suit. Since 1980 the pace of medical litigation has quickened dramatically. Patients seem less and less willing to accept without complaint the results of unsuccessful or injurious treatment. They are more and more inclined to question their doctor's judgment. Medical litigation and scrutiny of medical decision making is highly newsworthy in 1987. The practice of medical litigation looks set to become profitable for lawyers. To the cynical oberver all this might look like good news for lawyers and bad news for doctors.

Recent trends in England represent a dramatic erosion of the sanctity of the rule in Woolmington. These developments are of particular significance today, in the light of the virtually open-ended character of some of the contemporary departures from Woolmington’s case.

A decade ago, in Edwards, the Court of Appeal purported to identify in the common law a line of authority which established, as a result of experience and the need to ensure that justice is done both to the community and to the defendants, an exception to the fundamental rule of the criminal law that the prosecution must prove every element of the offence charged. The effect of this exception, which the court sought to extract from rules of pleading, is that where an enactment, on its true construction, prohibits the doing of acts subject to provisos, exceptions and the like, the prosecution is entitled to rely on the exception, with the result that the burden shifts to the defendant to prove that it was lawful for him to do the prohibited act in the circumstances.

The interpreter of a statute ought not, tempted by extraneous considerations, to force the meaning of words or phrases against a reasonable understanding or against the clear intention of the statute as a whole. He ought not, influenced by the tendency of legal practitioners to favour precise and narrow signification, to assume that precise and narrow signification is necessarily the most proper for words or phrases which are found difficult.

Extra-judicial divorces obtainable under some systems of family law are now very familiar to private international lawyers. The most familiar is the Muslim talak, by which a husband may unilaterally divorce his wife, but there are others including other forms of religious divorces and secular divorces obtained by administrative process or simply by mutual agreement. Some of these divorces may be hedged around by legal procedures; others may be extremely informal.

Why does the mens rea of attempt require intention even though some lesser state of mind will suffice for the completed offence? What is the meaning of ‘intention’ in this context? Is intention required for all elements of the crime attempted or only for some? Can one draw a distinction between circumstances and consequences in this connection? Can crimes of negligence or of strict liability be attempted? Why do ‘impossiblc’ attempts cause such difficulty? Is there any meaningful distinction to be drawn between Anderton v Ryan and Shivpuri, or was Shivpuri the last word on the matter? It would be presumptuous to suggest that this article was the answer to all these questions: nevertheless it is suggested that light can be thrown on them by standing back and looking at the nature of a criminal attempt. The key to these and other puzzles, it is suggested, can be found in two concepts, the analysis of attempt as a crime with a missing element, and the notion ofintention as distinct from knowledge or foresight of consequences as stressed in Moloney and more recently by the House of Lords in Hancock and Shankland.

The use of emergency legislation and the accompanying modification of the ordinary criminal justice process in Northern Ireland have formed the subject of prolonged debate in academic and political circles. The authorities have, in turn, responded persistently by reference to the special justificatory circumstances which have grown to prevail since the onset of the present ‘troubles’. The focus of attention of this article, however, will not be that controversial legislation but another aspect of the emergency which is said to remain subject to the ordinary law of the land. This is the use of force by the security forces and in particular those instances where death or serious injury results therefrom. The primary contention of this paper is that the ordinary criminal law has been proven inadequate in this context. Hence, it is submitted, the quest for an alternative and more stringent mechanism of legal control is one which should be undertaken with some urgency.

I yield to none in my admiration of the draft Criminal Code produced by the Law Commission's academic team, but everyone who studies it will have what he regards as improvements to suggest. So here is my item, relating to the team's proposals for omissions. I think the draft provides too great scope for offences of omission, particularly for serious offences of omission.

This article is concerned with pure omissions. I call them ‘pure’ since omissions combined with action are counted as acts - largely because they are not subject to the peculiar difficulties of penalising omissions.

The immediate problem of Plato’s prisoners in the cave, it will be recalled, was understanding what was going on in the cave (for they could see only the shadows on the wall). In our contention, the situation of those who try to operate consistently within the constraints imposed by the traditional exposition of contract (sometimes pejoratively referred to as the ‘black-letter’ approach), is somewhat akin to that of Plato’s prisoners. They may perceive shadows, but they are unable to interpret them from the confines of their position. The purpose of this article is to sketch a framework for the law of contract, which we hope will assist in this interpretive exercise.

At the outset, an exploration of the terms exercise, legal system, and internal logic used in the title of this paper may be useful. The assumption that a legal system has an intrrnal logic, also needs accounting for.

I call this an exercise because it is but a preliminary search for an all-embracing explanation for various specific and isolated observations related to legal systems; an attempt to prove that legal systems unfold in a way predetermined by their internal logic and that every step in this unfolding is a sine qua non of the one before and after. This is also called an exercise, because it is an attempt at analysing only three of the legal families or cultures.

For a number of years there has been considerable criticism of both Donoghue v Stevenson and Anns v London Borough of Merton on the grounds that the prima facie duty doctrine which some believe those cases established is so wide as to be meaningless and obscures more than it reveals. This article seeks to show how the courts have come to accept this criticism and to indicate how the concept of duty should now be viewed. In particular the point is that there are now different levels of proximity required to establish a duty in different situations and that while this means that the various categories of duty must be distinguished from each other, this does not involve ossification of the law, but rather development of the law may be made easier by a pragmatic rather than a conceptual approach. The principle that 'the categories of negligence are never closed’ means both that existing duties may be refined and extended, and also that new duties may be created. How that can be done depends on our understanding of the nature of the concept of duty and how each step should be taken.