Two recent successful appeals to the Privy Council from the Court of Appeal of New Zealand have once again emphasised the importance of proprietary claims in conferring priority in insolvency over the claims of the general creditors of a bankrupt. Attorney-General for Hong Kong v. Reid1 concerned land in New Zealand purchased with the proceeds of bribes accepted by a Hong Kong Public Prosecutor as an inducement to exploit his official position to obstruct the prosecution of certain criminals. The Privy Council imposed a constructive trust where the Court of Appeal of New Zealand had, in accordance with precedent,2 denied one and thus enabled the Government of Hong Kong to recover the land in priority to any other creditors of the Public Prosecutor. In Re Goldcorp Exchange3 concerned the liquidation of a gold-dealer which had offered its purchasers the option of leaving their gold in its custody as “non-allocated bullion”.

Various authors have drawn attention to the fact that a new European law of civil procedure is in the process of being created. The kernel of this new law is the 1968 Brussels Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters. Further areas of law are in part harmonised by the 1965 Hague Service Convention and the 1970 Hague Evidence Convention. While a certain set of “core” European rules has been established, there remains a penumbra: an area within which it is unclear how far traditional national rules may retain a role.

The use of legislative history by the courts as an aid to the construction and interpretation of statutory provisions has an extensive common law history. This has encompassed significant variation in judicial approach, perhaps reflecting changing constitutional relationships. Where principles have emerged they have been somewhat inconsistently applied, no doubt because courts have a residual competence to regulate their own procedure which is only loosely regulated by superior courts.

Traditionally, common lawyers are used to examining other jurisdictions of their legal family as a source of inspiration for law reform or even as persuasive authority for the development of case law. Developments in continental civil law jurisdictions are less noted. However, particularly in the field of public law, English law is now being influenced by civil law concepts through the mediation of Community law.1 Product liability provides an example in private law of rules shared by the civil and common law jurisdictions of the European Union due to harmonisation by the Product Liability Directive. An important new area of non-contractual liability is environmental liability. Firmly established in the United States, liability for damage to the environment is increasingly being introduced in many countries around the world.3 In the European Union, the first step towards Community-wide legislation was taken in March 1993 with the publication of a Green Paper by the Commission.4 One of the many controversial aspects of a possible environmental liability regime is the issue of standing to sue.

BRITISH commercial law scholars, of whom Prof. Roy Goode and Prof. Aubrey Diamond are two conspicuous examples, have long been attracted to the possibility of using Article 9 of the American Uniform Commercial Code as a basis for modernising and restructuring the English law of chattel security. As readers of Part V of the Crowther Report1 will know, this was the road to reform which the Crowther Committee recommended to the British government as long ago as 1971. In the course of his eighth Crowther Memorial Lecture, given at Queen Mary College in 1983,2 Prof. Goode expressed the hope that before the end of the decade England and Wales would enact the recommendations in the Crowther Report. We know now that he was too sanguine but our hopes were revived when Prof. Diamond submitted his lucid, and in the view of this writer and many others, highly persuasive recommendations to the Department of Trade and Industry in 1989.3

Restitution has always been part of the common law. Yet in recent years a startling transformation has taken place: an active and determined group of scholars have collected together the hitherto scattered materials, insisting that this is the only way in which these materials can be understood; and have claimed that despite the apparent diversity they are all bound together by a single notion, that of “unjust enrichment”. A great deal of attention has been paid to elaborating this notion, and to defending particular conceptions of it.

There is something peculiar, perverse and extravagant about the behaviour of the courts when confronted with drink-driving offences under the Road Traffic Act 1988. Drivers who have manifestly committed such offences all too often escape conviction, or have their convictions overturned on appeal, as a result of trivial, bona fide and otherwise inconsequential procedural errors supposedly made by the police when obtaining specimens of breath or blood for analysis.* This is peculiar, in that trivial or inconsequential procedural errors in the gathering of evidence do not ordinarily lead to acquittals in criminal cases. It is perverse, in that it largely ignores a major redrafting of the drink-driving law, which was specifically intended to prevent such unmeritorious acquittals; and it is extravagant, in that it wastes court time and public money, whilst generating an excessive amount of highly technical case law. Worst of all, it leads to glaring and absurd failures of justice, which can only drag the law into disrepute.