It is not often that cases concerning bankers' commercial credits reach the Court of Appeal; such a case was W. J. Alan & Co. Ltd. v. El Nasr Export and Import Co. hereafter referred to as the El Nasr case. It would be regrettable that such a case should pass without comment, particularly as the decision also touched important principles of the general law of Contract. This paper will consider firstly the opening of a bankers' commercial credit in two respects: (i) it has recently been contended that whether the credit binds the issuing bank to the seller depends on whether the buyer's duty to procure the credit is a condition precedent to the contract of sale; it will be suggested that the buyer's duty is usually no more than an ordinary term of the contract. (ii) It has been argued that the procuring of a credit by the buyer discharges absolutely his duty to pay the seller under the contract of sale. It will be seen that the courts have now rejected this argument and for good reason. The second part of this paper considers the waiver of duties under the credit, leading to an appreciation of the doctrine sometimes called equitable or promissory estoppel. In particular it will be contended that (i) he who benefits from the waiver must suffer a detriment, although of a rather diluted kind; and (ii) that the waiver may not always be withdrawn, even after the giving of reasonable notice.

The legal status of contracts tainted by the restraint of trade rules is by no means clear. It has been judicially stated that such contracts are “not ‘illegal’, in the sense that a contract to do a prohibited or immoral act is illegal, [and] not ‘unenforceable’, in the sense that a contract within the Statute of Frauds is unenforceable for want of writing. These covenants lie somewhere in between. They are invalid and unenforceable. The law does not punish them. It simply takes no notice of them. They are void, not illegal.” This article discusses the legal position if a claim is made for the recovery of money paid or securities delivered under such contracts, in the particular context of pension rights.

The Defective Premises Act 1972—which did not come into force until 1 January 1974—was intended to do three things: first, it was intended to create a new civil remedy against incompetent architects and jerry builders who design or build bad dwelling-houses; secondly, it was intended to abolish the anomalous immunity of vendors and lessors from negligence actions; and thirdly, it was intended to widen the liability of landlords for defects in the premises which they let. The Act is based on the draft Bill annexed to the Law Commission's fortieth report, “Civil Liability of Vendors and Lessors of Defective Premises”—although in the Act the Law Commission's proposals have been considerably watered down. During the passage of the Act through Parliament the Law Commission was congratulated on its “remarkable piece of work,” and comentators have since welcomed it, either without criticism or else with fulsome praise. So excited was everyone by the label “law reform” that no one seems to have pointed out a number of obvious defects in the Law Commission's original proposals, defects which were multiplied when those proposals were heavily watered down. The final measure is open to a number of criticisms. It is, with all due respect to the Law Commission and to the sponsors of the Bill, a measure which adopts excessively cumbrous means to achieve relatively modest ends; which is drafted in terms which are longwinded, ugly and obscure; and which ultimately changes little—a poor show in view of the complications it creates in the process.

That it takes three persons, a plaintiff, a defendant and a judge, to make a case and reach a judgment, was clear to the earliest writers on English law, and implicit in such a proposition was the understanding that a judgment was not properly attainable unless the three persons of the trinity were kept distinct. A fundamental idea of this nature is not, of course, the peculiar property of English law, and being axiomatic it has long been enshrined in the maxim that no one may be judge in his own cause. As might be expected, Coke turned the notion into a phrase. “It is,” he wrote, “a maxim in law aliquis non debet esse iudex in propria causa.”

The notion that a real consensus ad idem is necessary in the formation of a contract valid at common law is currently an unfashionable one. It is, perhaps, for this reason that in recent years little attention has been paid to the effect of duress on the validity of contracts.

The EEC rules concerning restrictive business combinations are sanctioned not only by the imposition of substantial penalties in the event of intentional or negligent infringement but also by depriving offending agreements of their validity in civil law. Thus Article 85 (2) of the Treaty provides in uncompromising terms: “Any agreements or decisions prohibited pursuant to this Article shall be automatically void.” This is a directly effective provision which has become part of the law of the member states and must be applied as such by their courts. It must be stressed that the nullifying force of the Article operates automatically, rendering agreements void without the need for a decision by the Commission or by a court. This contrasts with the position under United Kingdom legislation where agreements within Part I of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1956 only become void following a decision of the Restrictive Practices Court that the provisions in question are contrary to the public interest.

In recent years, there has been increasing support for the view that at least some irreversibly comatose individuals should be considered dead. In this article, an attempt is made to ascertain whether the English courts should at present regard any irreversibly comatose individual as dead for the purpose of any rule of law.

No account of the history of English legal literature can omit the name of Littleton. Sir Thomas Littleton's treatise on tenures made the family name almost synonymous with the common law itself. But it is not generally known that another member of that illustrious family left unfinished a work which, had it been completed and published, would have earned him a position of importance in the history, not only of English, but of universal jurisprudence. In so far as the will ought to be taken for the deed, perhaps some measure of recognition may justifiably be afforded to his work even after three centuries of oblivion. The author was Edward Littleton (1589–1645), Baron Littleton of Munslow, a direct descendant of Sir Thomas. Educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, he entered the Inner Temple in 1608; and there, like his near-contemporary John Selden (1584–1654), he developed a taste for comparative jurisprudence, legal history, and the study of records. His reputation for learning brought him in 1640 to the seat of Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and within a year he was made Lord Keeper. The transition to high office was a personal disaster, since Littleton's nature did not suit him for a position of political delicacy, and his brief tenure of the Seal was scarcely less miserable than that of his predecessor Finch—who had fled to Holland in 1640. Among Littleton's first tasks was to preside over the preliminaries to the proposed impeachments of Finch and the ship-money judges, and the lengthy preparations for the trial of Strafford. Within months he became ill, and from February until August 1641 he absented himself from the House of Lords. The following year, either from fear or high-mindedness, he quit London, following the King to York and thence to Oxford. In his hurried flight he apparently left behind some of his goods and papers in the “Black Lodgings” in the Inner Temple. His health continued to deteriorate, and he died (aged 56) on 27 August 1645.