On 30 April 1982, after almost a decade of careful negotiations at the Third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea, the Law of the Sea Convention was adopted by the positive votes of 130 States. In one of its main sections, Part XI, the Convention sets out a detailed regime for the exploration and exploitation of the deep seabed and its resources and firmly places deep seabed mining under the regulatory control of the International Seabed Authority, to be established in Jamaica. However, as is well known, the United States and certain other Western countries have adopted a negative posture towards various aspects of Part XI and, for this reason, they are unlikely to ratify the 1982 Convention in the near future. Against this background, the question whether the provisions in Part XI may be binding even vis-à-vis non-parties to the LOSC has assumed considerable importance in contemporary international law.

In what circumstances can a person be liable to a pecuniary remedy for conduct which has not caused the plaintiff any harm? This question lies at the heart of the present topic, in which the plaintiff seeks to disgorge a benefit acquired by the defendant through the latter's wrongful act, even though the wrong has not actually caused him loss or injury. Consider, for example, a trespasser who has benefited by using a track across the plaintiff's land without reducing the value of the land; the plaintiff, who might never have been willing to consent to such use of his land, now seeks payment as if his permission for that user had been sought at a price. In terms of “unjust enrichment,“ the plaintiff's claim is that the defendant's enrichment is “ “unjust” by virtue of the wrong committed, without showing that the enrichment is at his expense.

Law is practical. Legal reasoning is practical reasoning. We could make nothing of a judge who having listened to counsel's arguments and reflected about the law governing his case thought that the state of knowledge that he had achieved was the natural termination of his enterprise and submitted his conclusions to the editors of Halsbury's Laws of England rather than performed the action of giving judgment. The parties would be outraged, and rightly. And if the judge continued to do such a thing he would be dismissed. Legal reasoning is practical in the sense that its natural conclusion is an action (in the judge's case the action of giving judgment) rather than a state of knowledge. This is taking “practical” in a strong sense. By this definition thought is practical whose natural conclusion is an action (or decision against action): its strongest contrast is with theoretical thought whose natural conclusion is knowledge. But it also contrasts with hypothetical thought about action (say, my thinking it would be good to play cricket again). I do not call this practical because it does not conclude in an action or decision against action (others do; for example John Finnis in Fundamentals of Ethics; my reasons for differing in this matter will emerge). A judge's practical reasoning towards the action of giving judgment has priority for our understanding of law over that vast range of practically idle things that lawyers do, from the construction of digests like Halsbury to casual reflection about the rule in Shelley's case (of course there is one sort of doing involved in both these, but not legal doing). It is important here to be clear about this priority. It is a priority of practicality, not a priority of judges or lawyers.

This article attempts to investigate an aspect of the English law on limitation of actions which has received little academic attention—its application to restitutionary claims. It will be suggested that, as the essence of a plaintiff's claim is the injustice of the defendant retaining a benefit gained at his expense, the running of time should be a defence to a restitutionary action where its passing has sufficiently eroded the injustice of that retention. In theory this should be a matter for decision purely on the facts of each case, but additionally the societal need to discourage stale litigation often requires an overall time bar based on the Limitation Act 1980. This perspective suggests a number of particular conclusions which are summarised at the end of the discussion.

The anonymity of the year books has puzzled historians for over a century, and generated an extensive literature. Contemporary users of the year books cannot have been much interested in the identity of their authors; and this in itself is a historical fact of some interest. By 1600 there was an obvious difference in quality and authority between the reports of judges, or distinguished lawyers such as Plowden, and the scrappy notes of students below the bar. Both kinds of report circulated in manuscript, but their users were well aware of their relative merits and took notice of the reporters' identities. Why, then, did the medieval lawyer not show the same interest in names? Was it because the production of year books was so much a collaborative effort that identification of individual reporters would have been meaningless? Or was it, on the contrary, because so few reporters were involved that everyone knew who they were? Or was there simply no notion of authority, either legal or historical, to which the reporters' qualities might be relevant? In other words, were the reports evaluated solely on their intrinsic merits as books of potential arguments and procedural moves?

One of the principal features in the development of private law in recent years has been the dramatic increase in the variety of circumstances in which courts are willing to hold that one party owes a duty of care in tort to another. The view that the categories of relationship which attract a duty of care at common law are immutably fixed by precedent and that any decision to extend them must be left to the legislature, expressed by one Law Lord as recently as 1970, now seems somewhat quaint and it is generally accepted that courts can, in appropriate cases, extend the scope of liability for negligence to embrace new types of relationships, conduct and harm. As the boundaries of liability have been rolled back, old immunities have been removed and duties of care (albeit sometimes restricted) have been established in areas previously considered to be beyond the scope of the law of tort. But there are still areas of confusion and difficulty, perhaps the most prominent of which in recent years have been the extent of liability for economic loss and for nervous shock. Another area of doubt, however, is the extent of liability for omissions. While it has not attracted as much attention as economic loss or nervous shock, the distinction between acts and omissions still exercises a powerful influence on judicial decision making on the question of tortious liability. This article considers the question of liability for one such omission, namely liability for a failure to warn someone of imminent danger. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to clarify exactly what is meant by an “omission.”