The way in which the courts in the United Kingdom have interpreted and applied the Ullah principle has created problems in the national application of the European Convention on Human Rights. As is evident particularly in Ambrose, this is partly because Lord Bingham's approach in Ullah has been misunderstood. The article analyses these issues in relation to the notion of binding precedent, finding that judicial authority belongs to principles. The national courts ought not, though that is what the Ullah–Ambrose approach enjoins, to expend their energies seeking to align the case before them with the least dissimilar of the reported cases. Rather they should stand back from the case law of the European Court, and apply the broad principles upon which the jurisprudence is founded.

This article addresses and challenges recent comments to the effect that the common law rules about unmarried couples' property rights are uncertain, and (or but) that these rules yield an unfair result in a common scenario. It goes on to consider the Law Commission's proposed scheme aimed at reform of this area, raising the concern that this would violate Article 1 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights.

In Edwards v Chesterfield Royal Hospital N.H.S. Foundation Trust the majority of a seven-justice Supreme Court held that a common law claim for breach of express contractual disciplinary procedures was pre-empted by the statutory right to claim for unfair dismissal. Further, they held that one express term (the notice clause) should be prioritised over another (the contractual disciplinary procedure). In this article we argue that the application of the idea of statutory “trumping” of the common law misunderstands the complex evolution of the common law in this field and its interplay with statute. We also argue that the traditional pre-eminence given to notice clauses over all other express terms needs to be reconsidered.

This paper explores the circumstances in which a change in the land register should be stigmatised as a mistake and thereby introduce the discretionary power to correct it. Recognising the importance of clarifying the concept of mistake, due to its role in controlling the reliability of the register, the paper reviews and rejects various possible determinants for mistake. It proposes an account of mistake which rests on a set of rigid legal constructs about entitlement and registration and which pays respect to various traditional attributes of property.

This article examines and responds to a doctrinal claim, made by an increasing number of commentators, that English administrative law is in the midst of a “reformation” or “reinvention”, with the notion of “rights” at the heart of this radical recalibration. The article is critical of such claims on several grounds. First, these claims are steeped in ambiguity, such that the nature and doctrinal scope of the claimed metamorphosis are not clear. Second, these commentators have not undertaken the sort of detailed doctrinal analysis which is required to make credible claims about the development of the law, meaning their broad claims have a strong propensity to mislead, and pass over the nuances and complexities of doctrine. An analysis of significant features of doctrine tends to tell against a wholesale recalibration of administrative law around rights, and indicates an increasingly pluralistic rather than unitary legal order. Third, despite the centrality of the idea of “rights” to their claims, these commentators do not squarely address what they mean by “rights”, in general using the term indiscriminately, and thereby plunging their claims into uncertainty. The article demonstrates the importance of conceptual clarity in analysing “rights”-based developments through a doctrinal analysis of “rights” in administrative law, conducted through the prism of W.N. Hohfeld's analytical scheme.