The English courts have often incurred the reproach of undue insularity in their attitude to foreign law.1 A common gripe is that they have failed to recognise that there is a world elsewhere, and that England is not “a legal island”.2 Savigny, we are told,3 was moved to lament over the fact that although in other branches of knowledge there was an internationalist outlook in England, in the field of jurisprudence alone it “remained divided from the rest of the world, as if by a Chinese wall”. Recently it has been suggested that “The foundation of this Chinese wall… lay … in an unquestioning belief in the superiority of the common law and its institutions, at least in England.”4 It would be unsafe to affirm that the charge of insularity has always been without foundation. The “Little England”5 attitude of mind, Roskill LJ reminds us,6 was “once proclaimed in the phrase ‘Athanasius contra mundum’”. And it should occasion no surprise that the examples commonly advanced to substantiate the charge are usually drawn from private international law.7

Policy-making in the European Community in the area of education for migrants is driven by two conflicting pressures. On one side, the principle of effectiveness requires that the rights of free movement within the Community be supported by the best possible education for the children of migrants. However, on the other side is the importance of primary education to the member States as a political and cultural matter. This pressure is reinforced by the principle of subsidiarity. Member States have been relatively willing to support co-operative action by the Community in the area of higher education, such as in the ERASMUS exchange programmes. However, member States have been active in protecting their jurisdiction over education policy, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. As result, Community laws protecting the education rights of migrants have been most effective where two factors are present: first, that the rules are closely attached to the rights of free movement within the single market; and second, that the rules interfere as little as possible with substantive education policy. The first factor constitutes a significant weakness in Community education rights because it has created a distinction between Community migrants and those from third countries. The second factor has meant that the only Community policy on the education of migrants which could be described as an education right is the guarantee of equality of access to education within a member State.

This article discusses the European Commission's and European Court of Justice's control of member States' privatisation operations under the State aid and free movement rules. In particular, it is concerned with the question whether and to what extent such control is compatible with the EC Treaty' s “neutrality” towards member States' choices as to the private or public character of their national economies.

This article considers the development in several Commonwealth jurisdictions of the law relating to “horizontal subdivisions”2, or subdivided buildings. The latter expression describes the situation where title to land can relate to a slice of defined area or cubic space, which is not grounded on the surface layer of the earth, and is divided not only horizontally, but vertically as well.

The State enterprise was the most conspicuous symbol of the socialist economy. In the late 1980s the gradual demise of the command system based on State ownership and the restructuring of economic relations were accompanied by the introduction of a variety of new forms of commercial organisation into the Soviet legal system.

Part III of The Private International Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1995 entered into force on 1 May 19961. As from that date2, the choice of law rules for tort developed in the common law will be abolished, in respect of most causes of action in tort3, and will be replaced by statutory rules of a radically different character4. The new choice of law rules essentially provide that, as a general rule, the law applicable to a tort is the law of the country5 in which the events constituting the tort in question occur6. This general rule may be subject to displacement where, in the light of a comparison between the significance of the factors connecting the tort with the country whose law is applicable under the general rule, and the significance of the factors connecting the tort with another country, it appears substantially more appropriate for the applicable law to be the law of that other country7. The express abolition of the common law rules is (with one significant exception)8 effected by section 10 of the Act. That section provides: the rules of the common law, in so far as they—

(a) require actionability under both the law of the forum and the law of another country for the purpose of determining whether a tort or delict is actionable; or

(b) allow (as an exception from the rules falling within paragraph (a) above) for the law of a single country to be applied for the purpose of determining the issues, or any of the issues, arising in the case in question,

are hereby abolished so far as they apply to any claim in tort or delict which is not excluded from the operation of this Part by section 13 below.

It is clear that there is no doctrine of anticipatory breach as such in French contract law.1 How then does it deal with the facts which in English law give rise to the application of this doctrine? In answering this question, it is helpful to bear in mind that the two situations which English law treats as anticipatory breach are where a party declares in words or demonstrates by conduct his unwillingness to perform and where a party has “disabled” himself from performance owing to his own “act or default”.2

International sports law is more than a static set of rules and principles: it is better described as a process for avoiding and resolving disputes. Recent cases highlight its significance. The Swiss Equestrian case,1 decided by the Swiss Federal Tribunal, demonstrates the efficacy of using this process in cases involving issues of eligibility for competition. By contrast, the Reynolds case,2 decided by US federal courts, shows the folly of ignoring non-judicial remedies prescribed by international sports law. As a result, Reynolds became a sort of Dickensian struggle involving three years of litigation and some nine decisions before the case was finally dismissed. The courts could have, and should have, reached the same result by simply enforcing decisions of the appropriate international sports federation and the arbitral tribunal that had upheld the federation's decision. The Harding case,3 which was also decided in the United States, demonstrates that adjudication outside the prescribed process of international sports law is fundamentally unstable.

In U.S. v. All Funds on Deposit in Any Accounts Maintained in the Names of Meza or de Castro1 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed that US federal courts have jurisdiction, in civil proceedings brought by the US government, to order the forfeiture to that government of funds held in English bank accounts. An understanding of this decision requires some background in US forfeiture law and also in the history of the particular proceedings.

In three important decisions,1 handed down on the same day in October 1994, the Australian High Court continued its exploration of the implied constitutional guarantee of freedom of political communication. Two years previously, in the judgments in Nationwide News Pty Ltd v. Wills2 and Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v. The Commonwealth,3 a majority of the High Court had distilled an implication of freedom of political communication from the provisions and structure of the Australian Constitution.4 This was not an implication of freedom of expression generally, since it was derived from the concept of representative government which the majority considered to be enshrined in the Constitution: “not all speech can claim the protection of the constitutional implication of freedom … identified in order to ensure the efficacious working of representative democracy and government”.5 The extent of this implied constitutional guarantee was left rather unclear, since a number of different views were expressed. As Justice Toohey has now explained,6 there were two possibilities. The first was a more limited “implied freedom on the part of the people of the Commonwealth to communicate information, opinions and ideas relating to the system of representative government”. The second was a rather more expansive “freedom to communicate in relation to public affairs and political matters generally”. In the recent trilogy of cases a majority of the High Court was prepared to endorse the second of these alternatives.7 In Cunliffe v. The Commonwealth Chief Justice Mason concluded that it would be too restrictive to limit the implied freedom to “communications for the purposes of the political processes in a representative democracy”.8

The Council should not commit itself to procedures which in practice might prove to be excessively rigid, since each dispute with which the Council has to deal has unique characteristics. Attention has been drawn to the danger that any premature formalization of the procedures of the Council might impede the latter in the discharge of its responsibilities under the Charter.1

In Scotland, like England, possession plays a part in landownership. In Scotland a non-owner may acquire a title to land by the operation of prescription;1 in England the title of an owner may be lost by limitation2 but an easement can be acquired by prescription,3 as can a servitude in Scotland.4 Because the acquisition of ownership in Scots law is by the operation of prescription, both a title and possession are necessary,5 whereas in England only possession is required. Although the theory behind and the purpose of adverse possession are different in each jurisdiction, as are the periods of possession, the result in many cases will be similar. The purpose of this article is to look at the similarities and the differences, and to consider recent cases on possession in each jurisdiction to show to what extent, if at all, one jurisdiction may learn from the other. The Prescription & Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973 codified the law and, although it shortened the period of prescription, cases decided under the previous law, notably those on the requisites of possession, are still relevant.

The recent decision of the House of Lords in Kuwait Airways Corporation v. Iraqi Airways Company1 has done little to help resolve one of the most difficult questions relating to the practical application of the 1978 State Immunity Act. Indeed, it highlights the near intractable nature of the question at the heart of the case: was the seizure and subsequent operation by the respondent (IAC) of ten aircraft belonging to the applicant (KAC) an act—or action (and the distinction is important)—which attracted immunity under the Act? The answer to such a question is difficult enough when the acts involved are done by a State. When, as in this case, they are done not by the State but at the behest of the State, it becomes even more difficult to resolve and the principal problem with the decision of the majority in the House of Lords is that it fails fully to appreciate the full effect of this point of difference. Moreover, in order to return to the position abandoned by their interpretation of the Act, the majority raise the spectre of justiciability, which not only introduces additional complications but also distorts the frame of reference.

It is rather distressing, if not tragic, that the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, with a relatively large legal population and a somewhat litigious reputation, has earned itself the dubious distinction of having the most archaic, if not the most inequitable, succession laws in the English-speaking Caribbean, second only to the Bahamas.

In the early evening hours of Saturday, 26 June 1993, the United States launched a missile attack on Iraq. Twenty-three Tomahawk sea-to-ground missiles were fired from two US warships, the USS Chancellorsville and the USS Peterson, located in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea respectively.1 Sixteen of those launched hit their desired military target, the Military Intelligence Headquarters, situated just outside the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. A further four missiles fell within the compound of the intelligence service complex. Conflicting reports put the death toll at between six and eight civilians, with 20 injured, when the remaining three missile warheads went astray.2 The Venezuelan Embassy was also reported to have been damaged.3

The ouster of the Siad Barre regime in January 1991 and the civil war which followed led to a complete breakdown of law and order in Somalia. The human tragedy of the situation has been well publicised; less well known is the complete collapse of the institutions associated with constitutional governance and the administration of justice in Somalia, namely the federal and regional governments, legislatures, courts, the police and prisons.

The genius of the century is also changing the conditions of our action overseas, leading us to bring an end to colonization. It is entirely natural that one should feel nostalgia for what was the Empire, just as one may regret the gentle light of oil lamps, the splendour of the navy under sail. But there is no valid politics outside realities.

Recent cases before the High Court of Australia have raised the question as to the appropriate degree to which international law should influence Australian law and politics.1 Crucial to the reasoning in the leading judgment of the landmark 1992 Mabo case,2 by which the Australian judiciary recognised for the first time a native title to land, was the finding that Australia had not been terra nullius at the time of colonisation. The leading judgment accepted the categorisation of Australia as a settled colony which had been established by the Privy Council in Cooper v. Stuart.3 In this judgment Lord Watson had held that Australia, as a “settled” colony, had received transplanted British law “except where explicitly changed or considered irrelevant”.4 This had given rise to the assumption, confirmed by Milurrpum v. Nabalco Ltd (the Gove Land Rights case of 1971) that, since no legal rights to land of indigenous people existed in British law and none had been explicitly acknowledged in relation to Australia, no basis existed for their later recognition.5 The leading judgment in Mabo went on to declare, however, that the notion that British law had been transplanted into a settled colony had been based on the assumption that the “indigenous people of a settled colony were … without laws, without a sovereign and primitive in their social organisation”.6 Since “the facts as we know them today” do not “fit this theory” the leading judgment asserted there to be “no warrant for applying in these times rules of the English common law which were a product of that theory”.7

A great deal has happened since the first Polish Commissioner for Citizens' Rights Protection discussed the role of her office in this journal in January 1990.1 At that time, the communist regime had given place to Eastern Europe's first non-communist government, led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, after the elections of June 1989. Following the Polish United Workers' Party's defeat then, communism collapsed throughout Eastern Europe. Poland itself has since moved somewhat shakily towards a pluralist democratic regime, with a directly elected president and two chambers of Parliament in which multi-party systems now operate. However, despite some suggestions that the institutions created during the communist period should be swept away after communism fell, several of them have made the transition to the new liberal-democratic State. These institutions include three that were created by the Jaruszelski regime during the 1980s in order to try to win back its fading popular legitimacy: the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC), the Constitutional Tribunal (CT) and the Commissioner for Citizens' Rights Protection (CCRP), or Ombudsman. Since the fall of communism, the need for administrative adjudication has both changed and become greater, especially because there has not yet been any agreement on a new Polish constitution. The number of complaints sent to the CCRP's office rose from 22,764 in 1990 to 29,273 in 1993. This short article gives an account of the principal developments in the Commissioner's role since 1990. Professor Letowska was replaced in the office in 1991 by Professor Tadeusz Zielinski, from the University of Krakow, and the change in incumbent has produced significant changes in practice as well as continuity.

In Re A Company (No.007946 of 1993)1 it was held that a company incorporated in Northern Ireland was an “unregistered company” within section 220 of the Insolvency Act 1986 and, accordingly, was amenable to the winding-up jurisdiction of the English court. In so holding Morritt J specifically declined to follow the view expressed in Dicey and Morris,2 a view which had been adhered to by a number of writers on both English and Scottish law.3 Prior to his Lordship's determination it was considered as a general proposition that a company incorporated in one part of the United Kingdom could be wound up only in the place of incorporation (such judicial authority as there was in respect of Northern Irish companies4 was to this effect—although it was not brought to the attention of Morritt J). Whilst as a matter of precedent it was undoubtedly open to Morritt J to hold that there was jurisdiction to wind up a Northern Irish company, such a conclusion is completely at odds with the history and underlying intention of the relevant statutory provisions.