Four hundred years ago this April, Edward Coke of Trinity College, Cambridge, was admitted to the Inner Temple, an event momentous not merely in the history of the Inn but also in the history of the common law. For it was in 1572 that young Coke began to attend the courts and to observe the decisions there, to listen to Bendlowes and Plowden and Dyer as they opened for him the secrets of jurisprudence. He was to continue his attendance at Westminster Hall for forty-four years, and from 1579 to record all the important cases which came to his notice, It is, therefore, an auspicious moment to remember Coke's achievement as a reporter of cases, a matter of particular interest in “that famous University of Cambridge, alma mea mater,” to whose legal offspring Coke's literary works were especially addressed.

The sharp contrast between the vast number of detailed statutory provisions defining particular offences and the small handful of widely phrased provisions concerned with the general principles of criminal liability is, perhaps, the most striking feature of English criminal law, and, like the continued co-existence of both common law and statutory offences, one of the unhappy consequences of England's failure to enact a penal code. Among the few statutory provisions laying down general principles of liability or excuse there is none which comprehends a defence of necessity, and so commentators have inevitably looked to the case law for an answer to the question: Is there in English criminal law a defence of necessity? by which they have meant: Is there a defence of necessity in the sense in which there is a defence of, for instance, insanity, or infancy, or duress or prevention of crime? To the question understood in that sense, the answer returned must, it is thought, be a plain No. To ask and to answer the question in that sense may, however, be misleading: it may be more revealing (as this paper suggests) to ask, How does English law handle the plea of necessity when it arises? What, in other words, is the juristic technique employed?

The purpose of this article is to review some of the numerous problems facing the new Family Division of the High Court which arise out of the reception of large numbers of Muslim immigrants into this country. The appearance of the Law Commission's Report on Polygamous Marriages and the debate in the House of Lords on Lord Simon's proposed amendment to the Recognition of Divorces and Legal Separations Act highlight the importance of the subject for the profession.

That much-flogged unruly horse, public policy, is still at large. It is therefore the purpose of this article to examine the nature, justification and operation of public policy and to consider whether this is an area of law ripe for reform. It clearly would be unrealistic to attempt to do this on a broad front in the space available, and so this survey will be limited mainly to the crude and superficially obvious case where a contract is tainted with criminality or where the party seeking a contractual remedy relies on his own criminal act. It will primarily be concerned with such statements of principle as “no man shall be permitted to profit from his own wrong” or “ex turpi causa non oritur actio.” This immediately raises a problem for the common lawyer, for such general statements are not readily recognisable as working law, and he will wish to reduce them to a more precise set of rules. Such an attempt will lead us, however, into the centre of a major jurisprudential debate.