At one of the first meetings of the Society of Public Teachers of Law that I attended a senior member declared that too much law reform was going on and that he proposed to form a law conservation group. That sentiment would now be widely shared by practitioners and perhaps even by some members of this Society, re-writing their lecture notes for the umpteenth time. Yet, by the nature of our job, most of us are continually looking at ways in which the law might be reformed. A university teacher cannot discuss any legal institution or rule of law without considering with his students whether it works fairly and efficiently and, this often leads naturally to a consideration of how it might be improved. At the very least we must send our students away with some ideas on law reform. Many of us are not content to stop there but seek to reach a wider, or more immediately influential, audience. In this paper I propose to discuss some personal views and experiences, more or less related to the subject.

‘The existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit another. Of all the sayings of John Austin, none seems to make a simpler appeal to the plain fact of the matter than that one. We can argue for days about the merits or demerits of the Income Tax Acts or the latest effusion of trade union legislation. That such enactments are however laws is not a subject for lengthy nor inconclusive debates.

As to income tax, some may agree with Robert Nozick. They may think that state-imposed taxes on income are equivalent to slavery. The individual who is forced to pay two fifths of his earned income in tax is working as a slave two days in every week, for the fruits of his labours on those days are compulsorily exacted from him and paid over to other people in cash or in kind.

The joinder by the prosecution of two or more co-accused in the same indictment is of common occurrence in criminal trials. Where offences they have committed are linked one to another or are a product of joint concert, it makes both economic and practical sense to try the defendants jointly. In those cases where joint trial would cause serious injustice to one or more of the parties, the judge may order separate trials. However, severance of indictments in such cases is governed by rules which, perhaps uncharacteristically, would seem to favour the prosecution rather than the defence and defence applications for separate trials are seldom successful. The initiative, therefore, lies principally with the prosecution when it comes to deciding whether or not defendants will be tried jointly. In addition, it should be added that it is the prosecution which decides in which order co-defendants' names appear in the indictment. Although at first sight this may appear a purely routine matter, this decision, too, can have important repercussions on the course of the trial for, although the trial judge retains a residual discretion to order matters in his court as he thinks proper, Halsbury informs us that:- ‘If there are more defendants than one, they address the jury, cross-examine witnesses and give evidence in the order in which their names appear on the indictment’.

When the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community in 1973, the English bench and bar must have perceived only dimly the challenges before them. Like contemporary descendants of Noah, they dropped into a Babel of languages and legal terms indispensable to the operation of the European Commission and the Court of Justice. Membership in the European Economic Community entailed the substantive harmonisation of English laws with those of other member states, and England's common law tradition could not have made the process easy. But the scope of the harmonisation task reached beyond substantive law to deeply rooted judicial attitudes toward the role of legislation and techniques of interpretation. In a recent editorial, Dr C. D. Ehlermann, Director of Legal Services for the European Commission, offered reasons for the English judiciary's potential resistance towards harmonisation of interpretative techniques.

It is well known that the United States of America has had a mechanism designed to secure the compulsory recognition of trade unions by law since the mid-thirties. Such procedure is part of the bedrock of American labour law. In Great Britain, however, no attempt at compulsion was made until 1971, when the Industrial Relations Act was passed. This Act was repealed three years later, although the operation of the recognition provisions hardly contributed to the factors leading to repeal. Another attempt at compulsion was made by the 1975 Employment Protection Act. However, the relevant sections have now been repealed by the 1980 Employment Act. Furthermore this repeal had at least some support both from the Labour opposition and from the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, the statutory body charged with operating the procedure.