It has been observed justly that few legal doctrines have given rise to so vigorous and sustained a conflict of judicial attitudes as the concept of strict penal responsibility. The theory of mens rea which preceded the origins of the common law, is ingrained in English criminal jurisprudence. An English court has asserted that ‘It is contrary to the whole established law of England (unless the legislation on the subject has clearly enacted it) to say that a person can be guilty of a crime in England without a wrongful intent’. In circumstances involving technical guilt bereft of moral blame English judges have looked askance at invocation of the criminal process. The American Law Institute has recently declared that ‘No principle is more broadly accepted than that the criminal law, involving as it does both punishment and condemnation, should be concerned with conduct that is morally reprehensible or culpable’.

Any discipline or body of knowledge operates within the confines of a set of criteria as to what constitutes its object and equally as to how that object is to be known. The two sets of criteria, of object and method, are obviously interrelated. How we know an object is in large part constitutive of what that object is taken to be. At the same time, if there is in some sense an object external to how we come to know it, this presupposed or preconstructed object is going to act as a powerful limit upon what can be knowledge of it, without at some point transgressing the boundaries of the common sense of the object. There comes a point, in other words, when divergent statements are no longer concerned with the same object. It is my contention here that positivist jurisprudence, a certain tradition of statements about what law ‘is’, has already arrived at this point.

In recent years various developments in the system of trial by jury in England and Wales have given rise to comment and concern. One such development was the abolition by s. 13 of the Criminal Justice Act 1967 of the rule, said to have existed for over 600 years, that a jury must be unanimous in order to reach a verdict. These provisions are now contained in s. 17 of the Juries Act 1974 which allows for majority verdicts where there are no more than two dissentient voices to be returned under certain circumstances. The change in the unanimity rule has been criticised as striking at the root of the principle of proof of guilt beyond reasonable doubt and has been interpreted by some as being the first step on the slippery slope to jury verdicts by simple majority, a development which would do even more to undermine the principle of proof beyond reasonable doubt and might also lead to the complete abolition of trial by jury.

In most branches of the law where statute dominates, such as taxation, social security and employment protection, the legislation is nowadays quite frequently revised. Often this is because a new government requires important changes of a political character, although the oportunity can be taken to remove ambiguous, anomalous or antiquated phrasing. But from time to time, perhaps as a result of a Law Commission report, a statute is revised for social, administrative or even juridical reasons. At all events, what may be called the operational art of our statute book dating from before 1945 is comparatively small.

I shall not attempt to give more than the briefest summary of the founding of the Society, for the story has already been ably told by someone with first-hand knowledge, namely, A. D. Bowers, Emeritus Member, Extraordinary, of the Society, whose account appears in the June 1959 issue of the Journal. It is not clear whether the originator of the idea of the Society's foundation was Edward Jenks, then Principal and Director of Legal Studies to The Law Society and later first holder of the Chair of English Law at the London School of Economics, or Henry Goudy, Regius Professor of the University of Oxford. What is clear, however, is that Jenks was the one who really got things moving. Indeed in the early days the Society was apparently sometimes referred to as ‘Jenks’ Trade Union’, to Jenks’ disgust.

The English jury has recently been undergoing various alterations. These changes have their roots in assumptions, often not clearly identified, about the nature and purpose of the jury within the criminal justice system. Once the purpose and ideals of the jury system are identified, and there may be arguments about what they are, it becomes apparent that there may be a conflict about how they should be put into practice. The state and its agencies may take one view whilst others may differ. An example of one such conflict is the controversy over the newly discovered practice of ‘jury vetting’.

For the first time in nearly 40 years the House of Lords has examined the basis for liability for negligently inflicted nervous shock. The primary conclusion of their Lordships in Mcbughlin v O’Brian, that liability depends upon foresight of shock in the absence of considerations relevant to negative the duty of care, confirms the earlier approach of the House in Bourhill v Young, but the decision for the plaintiff makes it clear that the known scope of the tort of negligence has undoubtedly been expanded. Mrs McLoughlin was two miles away when the accident in which her family was injured occurred and the shock she suffered came not from seeing the accident but from coming upon its after math sometime later at the local hospital. In no other English case had there been liability where there was such a separation of time and places’.

In terms of the history of the social sciences, the latter quarter of the nineteenth century was characterised in no uncertain manner by neo-Kantianism. The revival in question was aimed at rehabilitating the Kantian concept of science as a system, unified essentially by the idea of a system rather than by any more realistic or historical classification of its subject matter. The most notable and far-reaching effects of this revival were to be the constitution of the sciences of linguistics and of law. In both cases the major portion of the nineteenth century had been dominated by attacks upon the received orthodoxies of universal grammar and of exegetical legal studies, respectively, and their displacement by the uncertainties of creationist and historical methodologies.

It is a commonplace of the law of mitigation and remoteness in tort that if a plaintiff who has suffered tortiously inflicted personal injuries unreasonably refuses medical treatment he will be regarded as having failed to mitigate. Tersely stated this may seem almost self-evident though case law here and in Australia shows that it involves a number of difficult issues.

Workmen's Compensation supplied a prologue to the present law. Though the statutes nowhere required an injured workman to mitigate by undergoing treatment, the courts held that any incapacity which could be regarded as resulting from a workman's unreasonable refusal of treatment was not proximately caused by the accident on which the claim was based and hence did not qualify for compensation.

The maxim ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse” has much to answer for. Defendants arguing that they did not know or misunderstood the law have been told that their ignorance or mistake made no difference to their liability. The institutional writers have laid down as much. The courts have repeatedly emphasised it.

However, it is here submitted that this blanket approach, characterised by the very existence of such a general maxim, is misconceived. No such general principle exists, nor should it. Although the judges have spoken in general terms, their remarks really depend on the context of the particular offences in question, where no knowledge of the law has been necessary, and liability has been (in this respect at least) ‘strict’.

In Torquay Hotel Co Ltd v Cousins Lord Denning MR asserted: ‘I have always understood that if one person deliberately interferes with the trade or business of another, and does so by unlawful means … then he is acting unlawfully, even though he does not procure or induce any actual breach of contract’. Although during the parliamentary debate over what became the Employment Act 1980, Lord Hailsham stated that no such tort existed, Lord Wedderburn replied that ‘a student of today must be affected by legal myopia if he did not understand the existence of this tort’. The purpose of this article is to examine the existence and scope of this tort – which I shall refer to as unlawful interference with trade – to place it in the context of the known economic torts, to discover its common law background and to outline its present and possible future role in commercial and industrial law.

The substance of this article revolves around Kenny's rhetorical question. It is a widely held view among lawyers and legal philosophers that the idea of criminal justice involves the presupposition of the freedom of the will, but there are good grounds for accepting some version of determinism as a working hypothesis to explain criminal behaviour. Judges themselves on occasion do this. Unless it can be shown, therefore, that determinism is either compatible with free will, or is itself an incoherent doctrine, the whole rationale of the criminal law as a form of social control stands exposed to criticism.

In 1908 international law governed relations between ‘civilised states’ only. It applied exclusively to those states within the Family ofNations - 45 fully sovereign states according to the first edition of Oppenheim's International Law. These 45 included the six ‘Great Powers’, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Russia, various lesser European states, the United States of America and 20 Latin American states. In Africa ‘The Negro Republic of Liberia and the Congo Free State were the only real and full members ofthe Family of Nations’, in Asia only Japan. The position ofsuch states as Persia, Siam, China, Korea and Abyssinia was doubtful; ‘These states are certainly civilised states, and Abyssinia is even a Christian state.

In the 75 years since the Society of Public Teachers of Law came into being there has been a revolution in the conduct of business operations. Methods of transport have been transformed; commercial transactions have increased vastly in size, in number and in complexity; a whole range of new contract structures and financing techniques has evolved; and the receipt, storage and transmission of information and instructions have been completely changed by new technology.

If it be right that commercial law is rooted in the customs and practices of merchants we could reasonably expect to find a parallel transformation in English commercial law, a reappraisal of fundamental concepts, a wholesale jettisoning of nineteenth century statutes and case law. It is a matter for some astonishment that this has not occurred.

Ten years ago, the House of Lords decided the case of The Atlantic Star. Hitherto it had been clear beyond argument that English law denied the idea that an action brought in English courts could be stayed on the ground (however the criteria be formulated) that a foreign court was more suitable for the case to be adjudicated in. That case, however, touched off the process of reconsideration: a process which continues today, and which shows no clear signs of settling down to a coherent and well-founded body of law applicable to motions for stays. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the progress which has been made so far, and to demonstrate that it does contain the raw material from which an entirely satisfactory restatement of English law could be made.

It was not within the terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Legal Services to bring under review either procedure or the administration of justice. Nevertheless, the Commission received so much evidence on these subjects that it saw fit to publish a summary of that evidence and to recommend that ‘a full appraisal of procedure and the operation in practice of our system of justice, in particular in all civil courts’ should be carried out. Since then, the Committee on Procedure and Practice in the Chancery Division has reported, its recommendations have been largely implemented, and numerous changes of practice in the High Court and the Court of Appeal have been introduced by rule of court and practice direction.