ARTICLES 29 and 30 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights contain a series of limitations to human rights. Article 29(2) states:

In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

Proudhon got it all wrong. Property is not theft—it is fraud. Few other legal notions operate such gross or systematic deception. Before long I will have sold you a piece of thin air and you will have called it property. But the ultimate fact about property is that it does not really exist: it is mere illusion. It is a vacant concept—oddly enough rather like thin air.

THERE can be little doubt that the spectre of false rape allegations has significantly influenced the development of legal doctrine and its enforcement. The fear of false allegations has been used to justify evidential rules in cases involving sexual offences such as the corroboration warning, the retention of the marital rape immunity and continues to influence police and prosecutorial decision-making.

A central tenet to much ethical argument within medical law is patient autonomy.1 Although we have seen a welcome move away from a system governed by largely unchecked paternalism, there is not universal agreement on the direction in which medical law should advance.2 Competing concerns for greater welfare and individual freedom, complicated by an overarching commitment to value-pluralism, make this a tricky area of policy-development.3 Furthermore, there are distinct understandings of, and justifications for, different conceptions of autonomy.4 In this paper, we argue that in response to these issues, there has been a failure by the courts properly to distinguish political concepts of liberty and moral concepts of autonomy.

Law, of course, exists in society and for society's needs. It is a man-made construct to facilitate social activities. Law is inconceivable without society. Societies vary greatly, and so do legal rules. A perennial question is “Do legal rules reflect a society's desires, needs and aspirations?” The answer which is ordinarily given or is just assumed is positive though minor qualifications are usually urged. And yet, the two most startling, and at the same time most obvious, characteristics of legal rules are the apparent ease with which they can be transplanted from one system or society to another, and their capacity for long life. With transmission or the passing of time modifications may well occur, but frequently the alterations in the rules have only limited significance.

This article considers the extent to which EC and UK equality law are moving away from liberal notions of non-discrimination towards an approach based on substantive equality or equity, not only in the field of sex discrimination but also in respect of race and disability discrimination at a time when the EC is expanding its competence in these areas. The article begins by restating some basic concepts which feature in the forensic and legislative arguments about equality. It then seeks to answer the initial question by providing a critical analysis of recent judicial and legislative developments in three areas: (1) indirect discrimination; (2) the scope of permitted positive action in favour of disadvantaged groups; and (3) the rights of part-time workers to equal treatment with full-timers, and of workers on fixed-term contracts to equal treatment with permanent workers.

One way in which law protects dignity is by enforcing human rights provisions that explicitly prohibit degradation. But, as Lon Fuller and others have observed, law's connection with dignity is also deeper and more pervasive than this. In the way that its requirements are presented, in its procedures, in its sponsorship of argumentation, in treating people as equals, even in the distinctive way in which it makes use of coercion, law treats humans as dignified agents, capable of self-control, with a good sense of their own interests, and an ability to respond intelligently to its demands.

In 1845 a master of English commercial law wrote that there was “no part of the history of English law more obscure than that connected with the maxim that the law merchant is part of the law of the land.” Since then there have been detailed studies of the medieval law merchant and of the later development of English mercantile law, but the precise status of the law merchant in England and the nature of the process by which it supposedly became fused with the common law remain as obscure as they were in 1845. The obscurity begins with the very concept of the “law merchant,” which has been differently understood by different writers and continues to be used in widely divergent senses. Some have regarded it as a distinct and independent system of legal doctrine, akin in status to Civil or Canon law, and perhaps derived from Roman law. Others have supposed it to be a particular aspect of natural law, or the universal ius gentium, and as such akin to international law.

ENGLISH public law has gained in coherence with the gradual disappearance of rigid doctrinal barriers to judicial review. The repudiation of earlier restrictions on review of ministers’ exercise of the royal prerogative marked a particularly significant step towards a more rational system of legal control. It is true that acknowledgement of the susceptibility of prerogative decisions to judicial review, in principle, was accompanied by warnings about the constraints of justiciability in practice; but the various supposed categories of non-justiciable decision-making have been gradually breached and eroded in the course of common law development. When individual rights have required protection, neither the formal source of the power in question nor its intrinsically discretionary character have proved impenetrable barriers to judicial scrutiny.

A Person convicted of a crime suffers punishment—a fine, a community sentence, or perhaps a custodial term. In addition to that sanction, however, conviction of the crime may trigger a variety of disqualifications. The offender may be barred from holding public office, or from serving on a jury. He may be precluded from certain types of employment, or be prevented from driving a vehicle. These consequences may considerably restrict the person's prospects for earning a living or his mobility. Yet the visibility of these measures is low: provisions authorising various disqualifications are scattered throughout the statute books, and are not easy to find. While there is now a considerable body of jurisprudence on sentencing, the principles which should inform the proper use of disqualifications have received little serious attention.

The great South African case of Harris v. Minister of the Interior will have turned the thoughts of many lawyers to the subject of legal sovereignty. Under English law the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament, “ the dominant characteristic of our political institutions,” is supposed to be something very simple and clear—and so indeed it appears in its classic exposition in the pages of Dicey. But the classic exposition is now widely controverted; an example may be taken from the recent remark of the Lord President of the Court of Session

In English law the defence of provocation operates to reduce to manslaughter a killing which would otherwise be murder. The defence is not available on any charge other than murder: provocation is generally regarded as a matter which goes in mitigation of sentence, being insufficiently fundamental to qualify as a complete defence. Even in murder cases the defence ought only to succeed where the jury is left in reasonable doubt that the accused killed during a sudden loss of self-control caused by provocation which was enough to make a reasonable man do as he did, a test which has been criticised as unduly restrictive. The objective standard, embodied in the requirement “enough to make a reasonable man do as he did,” has attracted almost unremitting criticism from the writers. What function is the objective standard intended to perform? Does it perform this function successfully? In searching for the answers to these questions, the two factors isolated by Aristotle—the role of the provoker in causing the incident and the role of perceived injustice in weakening self-restraint —foreshadow the lines of inquiry.

TOWARDS the end of his judgment in R. v. Collins and Ashworth Hospital Authority ex p. Brady,Kay J. (as he then was) delivered the following homily: it would seem to me a matter of deep regret if the law has developed to a point in this area where the rights of a patient count for everything and other ethical values and institutional integrity count for nothing.

English and Scandinavian legal theory have long shared many points of view. Among these are the belief that law is something man-made and made for men; hostility or indifference to doctrines of natural law at least in the scholastic form; and a general disbelief in the capacity of philosophical systems to throw light either on what law is or ought to be. Yet notwithstanding these similarities the principal Scandinavian tradition in legal theory has a different tone from its English counterpart. Though professedly sceptical in aim and empirical in method, it is much more like a kind of philosophy. The work of the founder of this tradition, Axel Hägerstrom, had for its motto Censeo metaphysicam esse delendam and is a sustained effort to show that notions commonly accepted as essential parts of the structure of law such as rights, duties, transfers of rights and validity, are in part composed of superstitious beliefs, “myths,” “fictions,” “magic” or rank confusion. This tradition, continued in the work of his disciples Lundstedt, Olivecrona and Alf Ross, has made contact with both American “rule-scepticism” and contemporary linguistic philosophy. Its latest most sophisticated product is Ross's recently published book On Law and Justice.1

This is in many ways an interesting book, and at points a brilliant one, though by no means free from the fiery dogmatism of Scandinavian “realist” jurisprudence. Ross is less tortuous and obscure than Hägerstrom, less naïve and professorial than Lundstedt; and richer in illuminating examples and concrete detail, if less urbane, than Oliveerona.

This article aims to map the position of academic legal research, using a distinction between “law as a practical discipline”, “law as humanities” and “law as social sciences” as a conceptual framework. Having explained this framework, we address both the “macro” and “micro” level of legal research in the UK. For this purpose, we have collected information on the position of all law schools within the structure of their respective universities. We also introduce “ternary plots” as a new way of explaining individual research preferences. Our general result is that all three categories play a role within the context of UK legal academia, though the relationship between the “macro” and the “micro” level is not always straight-forward. We also provide comparisons with the US and Germany and show that in all three countries law as an academic tradition has been constantly evolving, raising questions such as whether the UK could or should move further to a social science model already dominant in the US.

The notion of private property is endemically problematic and controversial. Although the notion has many defenders its critics have all the best lines: we know, of course, that the institution of private property was denounced as theft and attacked as the product of exploitation and class antagonism. More recently, the notion has been regarded as nothing more than a myth and, in a slight variation on Proudhon's refrain, dismissed as a form of fraud. As if this were not bad enough, it appears that even the thinkers of classical antiquity had severe reservations about the notion although, unusually, their worries were expressed without recourse to pithy rhetoric. Does the notion of private property have any conceptual or normative advantages? Ought we to abandon it altogether? In this essay we offer a negative answer to the first and an affirmative answer to the second question.