Although those sentenced to life imprisonment have no right to release, a life sentence rarely involves imprisonment for the remainder of a convicted offender's natural life. Life prisoners may hope for early release on the so-called “life-licence”, whereby they remain liable to be recalled to prison for the rest of their lives.

The philosophical answer to Milton's problem is, like so many philosophical answers, a counter-question. What do you mean by human life? This could involve further probing of a kind that a pre-Darwinian like John Milton would fail to comprehend. Does he include Neanderthal man, for example, in “human life”, or does he want to start with Homo sapiens?

A resurrected Milton might protest that in writing Paradise Lost he was not concerned with problems of evolution (of which he had not previously heard). His question suggests that he was thinking of the “life” of a particular “human being”; but he knew so little of what we now call biology that he would probably have been as nonplussed by the biological answer to his problem as one given in terms of prehistory.

Tax legislation is probably the lengthiest and most complex legislation enacted in the United Kingdom. But the sheer volume of the legislation has not brought certainty of meaning or predictability of application. The legislation is seriously wanting in clarity and simplicity. The Commissioners of Inland Revenue are responsible for the “collection and management of the inland revenue”, and “have all necessary powers for carrying into execution every Act of Parliament relating to inland revenue”.

The capacity of the common law to develop and evolve is well recognised within both private and public law. This is indeed one of its enduring qualities. The objective of the present article is not, however, to contribute to the jurisprudential debate concerning the nature of the adjudicative process at common law. My object is more modest. It is to consider and place in perspective some of the recent developments which have occurred at common law in relation to the duty of public authorities to provide reasons. It is a well known and oft repeated proposition that there is no general common law duty to furnish the reasons for a decision. It is equally well known that this proposition has been the target of regular attack by those who argue that such a general duty should exist. A reconsideration of both of these propositions is timely in the light of case law developments culminating in the House of Lords' judgment in R. v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex p. Doody.

Floating charges have been an integral part of company financing for over 100 years, and yet their most fundamental characteristic remains the subject of debate: what interest does the floating chargee have prior to crystallisation? The answer to this question is not academic: disputes between the chargee and interested third parties depend for their resolution on the view taken. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to rely upon precedent or statutory provisions for simple rules to resolve these disputes: the complexity of modern commercial transactions and the ingenuity of advisers now give rise to rights which cannot always be equated with more traditional security devices and which may not need to be registered. This makes resort to fundamental principles necessary, and the elucidation of those principles crucial.

In June 1993 in R v. Taylor the Court of Appeal quashed the murder convictions of two young women on grounds (inter alia) of prejudicial press coverage of the original trial. In October 1993 three police officers charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice following the release of the Birmingham Six had their prosecution stayed. The court accepted the argument that adverse publicity made a fair trial impossible.

Any defendant with a criminal record, who takes the witness-stand, must beware the snares of section 1(f) of the Criminal Evidence Act 1898. The shield this statute confers, once described by Viscount Sankey as “one of the most deeply rooted and jealously guarded principles of our criminal law”, which forbids the prosecution or any co-accused from questioning him on his previous convictions and general bad character, can be forfeited in three ways. An accused may variously adduce evidence of his good character, cast imputations on the character of the prosecutor or the witnesses for the Crown, or give evidence against a co-accused: in each of these circumstances, under sub-provisos (ii) and (iii) of section 1(f), cross-examination of the accused on his bad character then becomes permissible with the leave of the judge. Although there is a frail argument that such evidence may go to issue, the overwhelming preponderance of authority holds

In the United Kingdom there has traditionally been little litigation over the award of public contracts. This is largely due to the absence, in the past, of formal rules regulating contract procedures, which might have founded a basis for legal actions. It is also to some extent a product of the reluctance of contractors to “bite the hand that feeds” and jeopardise their chances of future contracts; this factor may have discouraged contractors from taking advantage of the potentiality of common law doctrines for providing protection for bidders in the tendering process.

The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 is much disparaged by today's criminal lawyers. Its provisions have been described as “impenetrable” by the Court of Appeal. The House of Lords could not conceal its dissatisfaction with what is called “the irrational result of this piecemeal legislation”. Andrew Ashworth has written of the “antiquated and illogical structure” of an Act which the Law Commission regards as “unsatisfactory in very many respects”. Most recently Brooke J., launching the latest version of the Commission's reform package, lambasted the operation of the 1861 Act as “a disgrace”, and claimed that this hostile view is shared in every corner of the criminal justice system.

When the coach carrying Mr. and Mrs. Houghland from Ternhill to Cheshire arrived at its destination, Mrs. Houghland's suitcase could not be found. The suitcase had been loaded on to one of Low's coaches at Southampton, but this coach had broken down at Ternhill and the luggage had been transferred by the passengers to the luggage compartment of a relief vehicle which had arrived some three hours later. The coach company was unable to trace the case or to explain how it had disappeared and in a subsequent claim, either for its value or for damages for its loss, the County Court found in Mrs. Houghland's favour. An appeal to the Court of Appeal was dismissed.

Edward Christian has been treated unfairly by history. As the first Downing Professor of the Laws of England and the first lecturer on common law in Cambridge, Christian suffered the chronological misfortune of launching his academic career in the wake of Blackstone's extraordinary achievement. Until recent years Blackstone's brilliance has obscured the intellectual originality and historical significance of all his successors.1 Moreover, Christian's misfortune in following Blackstone was aggravated by a lack of professional success at the Bar and by a seemingly abrasive personality that won him a number of eloquent enemies whose ridicule and comical anecdotes have long outlived their target.

To the annoyance of students and academics alike, the law of tort contains a number of awkward heads of liability which defy classification except under “Miscellaneous” or some similar rubric. This article explores one such: the action on the case for damage to the plaintiffs reversionary interest in a chattel. This oddly obscure head, of liability does not even have a generally-accepted name (in this article it is christened, for brevity, “reversionary damage”). It is traditionally dismissed by the text-books in a paragraph or two; the leading cases on it are rarely cited; and yet in practice it is a highly important aspect of the law of personal property without which the owner's protection would be seriously incomplete.

It is well established that a party seeking an interlocutory or a Mareva injunction is required to give a cross-undertaking in damages as a condition of being granted the order sought. Equally settled is the principle that the undertaking in damages may be invoked in two situations. First, when the injunction is discharged before trial on the ground that it should never have been granted and, secondly, if at the end of the trial the party enjoined obtains a favourable judgment vindicating his claims in the action. Yet the principles governing a decision whether to enforce the undertaking are inadequately articulated. Two reasons have combined to contribute to this state of affairs: the fact that the award of damages is considered to be discretionary and the small number of instances in which the courts have been asked topronounce on the subject. However, the great rise in applications for interlocutory relief, whether by way of interim or Mareva injunctions or Anton Piller orders, has commensurably increased the importance of this subject. A number of recent decisions stand witness to this tendency and underscore the need for a thorough treatment of the topic.

This article seeks to consider whether it is, or should be, possible for companies to give covenants which amount to fetters on their statutory powers. The companies legislation confers many powers on companies but perhaps the most important are the powers to alter objects and articles by special resolution, and the power to alter share capital provided that there is authority to such effect in articles of association. The question whether it is possible to contract out of these statutory powers has received much recent attention because of the decision of the House of Lords in Russell v. Northern Bank Development Corporation Ltd.

The objective of this article is very limited, but if realised, I believe it has far-reaching implications. I want to examine the narrow topic of Unger's approach to rights. In exploring this objective I shall not be concerned with considering Unger's general approach to law, or with other aspects of his legal theory. Nor shall I question the assumptions that Unger may be making about the human condition or the nature of the world in which we live. Ignoring these wider concerns, my objective is to demonstrate that the new rights of Unger's deviationist doctrine in fact embody the old rights of legal formalism that their author has purported to abandon. The implications are twofold. First, for Unger's general enterprise: if it turns out that there is nothing new in his radical showpiece of rights, then some aspersions must be cast on the claims of novelty and radical efficacy made for “the program of empowered democracy” in which this showpiece is set.

Fuller made a leading contribution to the understanding of the adversary system and the process of adjudication. He did not officially publish his paper, “The Forms and Limits of Adjudication”, but distributed it widely and discussed it in his correspondence with prominent academics. His analysis of the limits of adjudication has been influential in both England and North America.