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.

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.”