This paper follows upon the author’s earlier paper in the preceding issue of the Journal which drew attention to the Court of Appeal’s growing practice of delivering composite judgments. It examines some of the wider issues cast up when courts ring the textual changes, adopting different permutations, and considers the somewhat tendentious matter of ‘judicial style’, a subject dear to some comparatists’ hearts. It explores the knotty question, glossed over even by many writers on precedent: what exactly is the virtue of the concurring judgment? It also considers how the quality of judgments may be affected by collaborative composition in a comparative context, taking in what little comparative evidence there is to inform the debate. It is futile to pretend that this paper offers final answers to any of these questions, for they raise issues of disconcerting complexity. Yet, to pass them over in silence would be scandalous.

This article argues that the express trust should be understood as a species of obligation rather than as a means of organising the ownership of property. Two propositions seem fundamental to the traditional understanding of the trust as an aspect of property law. Firstly, in the nature of the trust, there must be a separation of legal and beneficial ownership. Secondly, there must be trust property. Neither is necessarily true. With many discretionary trusts and other recognised types of express trust it is impossible to locate the beneficial estate. Furthermore, the requirement for there to be trust property is, on closer analysis, a requirement of certainty of obligation in relation to specific subject-matter within which the trust property can be located.

The article explores the implications of understanding the trust as a species of obligation. It allows all express trusts, including charitable trusts, to be explained as resting on the same fundamental concepts. The trust in the common law world may still be distinguished from contract and from the civil law forms of the trust. This new conceptualisation also illuminates what is the irreducible core content of the trust. The article concludes with a new definition of the express trust.

An important rule of criminal evidence is that evidence of a defendant’s previous misconduct (evidence of bad character) is prima facie inadmissible. The usual justification for this rule is that, in most cases, such evidence is either irrelevant or likely to have an unduly prejudicial effect on the fact-finder. This article questions this justification. After reviewing the psychological research on character, it examines statistical data on recidivism. The statistics suggest that those with previous convictions are much more likely to offend than are those without a criminal record, which implies that evidence of bad character will usually be sufficiently probative to justify its admission as proof of guilt. The remainder of the article examines various criticisms which can be levelled at this argument, in particular, that the recidivism data are misleading and that the way in which fact-finders reason renders evidence of bad character uninformative.