Given that the modern law of contract is geared to the protection of reasonable expectation, is this approach capable of extension to contracting in electronic environments, particularly to mass consumer contracting via the Internet? The position taken in this paper is that the gearing of the modern law is largely appropriate. Applying such a modern approach to the provision of dedicated legal regimes for electronic commerce, the principle of ‘medium neutrality’ puts electronic environments on the same footing as traditional contracting environments; and the principles of fair dealing developed for traditional consumer marketplaces are copied across to virtual shopping sites. Whilst we contend that a revolution in the technology of contracting does not imply a revolution in contractual principles, we accept that it will not always be straightforward for the law to implement or respond to the reasonable expectations of Internet contractors (particularly so where, as is increasingly the case, contractors from radically different cultures are connected by the Internet).

Considering whether law students receive a legal education that is meaningful and relevant to them raises interesting questions about what education is, what it's for, how we teach, how we learn and, essentially, how we know what we know. This article examines ideology and the law lecturer and student, and how these intersect, interact and conflict to inform the teaching, learning and understanding of law. These are not inconsequential questions considering the range of diversity among students now studying law. These issues are explored by examining the purposes of legal education in light of the overall objectives of higher education. The article then looks at the impact of ideology on our understanding of the world in general and of law in particular, and how ideology influences how we learn and what we learn. The manner in which ideology influences a particular interpretation of information, and especially legal information, is explored, as are the consequences to those outside that ideological and interpretive commonality. Thus, it is argued that some groups of students are excluded from a legal education that is meaningful and relevant to them. Lastly, the article considers ways in which law may be understood and taught otherwise to reflect both our students' reality and the social context in which law operates.

A principal concern of inheritance law is defining the relatedness of individuals. In this context the posthumously born child has to be defined in or out of a kinship network for inheritance purposes. Historically the concerns were ones of paternity and, with it, legitimacy. For the posthumously born child these were vital questions, as the illegitimate child was nullius filius, the son of nobody, and disentitled from inheritance. While modern inheritance law has moved away from the disabilities that illegitimacy once entailed, the responses to questions of relatedness in the context of children born through the new reproductive technologies suggest a different approach - one of exclusion. The frozen embryo which is implanted and born after the father's death raises anew the question of the validity of discriminating between children because of the circumstances of their birth. There is a struggle between the practicalities of the administration of an estate and the philosophy of equality which underpins the modern non-discriminatory approach to children born outside of marriage. This paper explores some of the issues and assesses some of the solutions in contemporary debate.

Despite recent attempts at judicial reformulation, the question of the effect of a plaintiffs illegal conduct on his right to pursue a common law negligence action for personal injury damages remains largely unsettled, and on an uncertain policy and doctrinal foundation. There is a continued obsession with public policy, whether expressed, as it is in England, as a matter of public conscience, or in Australia, as a proximity consideration preventing the finding of a duty of care. However formulated, public policy, in particular the public conscience, as an ad hoc means of determining the effect of a plaintiff's illegality, is unsatisfactory for this purpose, and has proved problematic and unmanageable for the courts. It is here submitted that personal injury negligence law, properly understood and deployed, does not require, nor is served by, the continued application of the illegality defence.

The current law of resulting and constructive trusts and proprietary estoppel is acknowledged to provide uncertain and often unsatisfactory remedies to disputes concerning the allocation of property rights in the family home. This article reviews these inadequacies, particularly as they affect the growing numbers of cohabitants, and puts forward radical proposals for reform. It is argued that the special nature of the family home - where the parties' relationship is based on ‘trust and collaboration’ rather than commercial principles - requires reform which takes account of the broader contributions of both parties to the home and to the family in allocating property rights. The law should strive to treat all family homes in a consistent way, provide greater certainty of outcome, and yet do justice between the parties. A system of modified community property is therefore proposed. Broadly, this will provide a sliding scale of allocation of property rights over time for non-owner partners and a presumption of enhancement of the interest of the primary carer of children of the relationship. However, contracting out should be permitted; and a discretion to adjust the presumptive rights retained by the court where ‘manifest injustice’ is demonstrated.

The article assesses the interaction between the United Kingdom's traditional constitutional principles and the innovative Human Rights Act 1998, which introduces a range of substantive, constitutional values through ‘Convention rights. These values are compatible with collective as well as individual interests, and the scheme of the Act accommodates existing constitutional principles. The Act should therefore generate evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. The limited measure of judicial review of primary legislation should not threaten parliamentary sovereignty. In its technical detail the Act represents a small step beyond the principle of dualism of national and international law, subtly affecting national sovereignty and influencing the research agenda of legal practitioners and academics. The main constitutional effect of the Act, however, will be to bolster Rule of Law principles, with new remedies focusing attention on the notion of equality before the law and putting the conceptual distinction between public and private law under increasing pressure.

Recent years have seen a rise in the number of manslaughter prosecutions following deaths caused by improper medical treatment. Such prosecutions of individual doctors are problematic because, in many cases, a complex pattern of failures has contributed to the death. One alternative approach would be that of pursuing corporate manslaughter prosecutions against hospital trusts, but current law makes such prosecutions difficult. The Law Commission's proposed offence of corporate killing could, if adopted, form the basis of prosecutions following some hospital deaths. The article considers arguments for and against the use of criminal law in response to deaths caused by medical negligence.

The need for the statutory regulation of business tenancies was officially recognised towards the end of the nineteenth century. The mischief complained of was that some landlords held their tenants to ransom by demanding an inflated rent as a condition of a lease renewal. This was particularly harsh for the tenant who had built up business goodwill and carried out improvements to the premises. Despite the organisation of commercial tenants and the growth of political lobbying, it was not until Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 that controls emerged which provided compensation for loss of goodwill and improvements. The inadequacy of these provisions, however, entailed that tenant discontent and lobbying persisted until the enactment of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954. This paper charts the social and political change which brought about this significant retreat from market forces and the gradual recognition that security of tenure, as opposed to financial safeguards, was the necessary response. The controls established in 1954 have, remarkably, survived almost intact and, subject to some fine tuning, will continue to do so. This paper addresses the issue why the commercial code has, in marked distinction to its residential and agricultural counterparts, remained immune to shifts in political policy during a sustained period of deregulation in landlord and tenant law.

This paper is intended to contribute to an understanding of how Jews and Judaism have been constructed in English case law. Using an analysis of law as ‘racialised’, the paper observes not just ‘the Jews’ of English law, but also the complex production of ‘Englishness’ (and English law) itself: The specific focus of the paper is upon the law of trusts; in particular, legal judgments adjudicating testamentary dispositions where the Jewish settlor has insisted upon progeny ‘marrying in’ in order to inherit. Jewishness is constructed as both ‘faith’ and ‘race’, and the paper considers these categories and their interaction. While the judges tend to find the wills in question uncertain, it is argued that it is in fact ‘Jews’ and ‘Judaism’ with which the courts are unable to come to terms.

There is a real need to clarify the scope of the doctrine of joint tortfeasance, in view of the constant attempts by plaintifs to widen liability in the search, for the deepest pockets. Part of this clarification involves a reaction to the growing use of ‘accessory liability’ terminology in the civil IUMI generally. There Lire those who argue that whatever the limits of joint tortfeasance liability, the law implicitly accepts liability for ‘facilitators’ us secondary parties to all civil wrongs. The aim of this paper is to clarify the doctrine of joint tortfeasance, to distinguish the liability of those who cause or conspire from those who merely facilitate, and to deny the existence of a wide concept of secondary civil liability.

The term ‘constitutional convention’ tends to be attached indiscriminately to any regularity of conduct that is observed in the process of government. It is here argued, however, that constitutional conventions as properly understood are social rules which govern the relations between political parties or the institutions of government. Furthermore, this term is to be confined only to those social rules that are constitutional in character. Intra- party standards of conduct, in particular, have wrongly been accorded the status of constitutional convention. These considerations, together with a detailed examination of the precise status of constitutional conventions as part of the ‘morality’ of the constitution, lead to a re-assessment of the conditions under which constitutional conventions both come into existence and cease to exist.

The scope of duty of care concept developed by Lord Hoffmann in South Australia Asset Management v York Montagu (1997) AC 191 seeks to limit a valuer's responsibility for a lender's losses arising from his negligent valuation report. The limitation device stems from a laudable motivation. As the valuer provides only one of the considerations on which the lender relies to assess the loan proposal, it is intuitively unappealing to thrust the full loss onto the valuer. However, this limitation technique operates in a mechanical manner and does not deal with the loss attributable to the market fall in a cogent and principled manner. This article suggests that the key to a principled restriction on the valuer's responsibility lies in identifying the kinds of risks the parties were willing to assume. The author develops two techniques - the Constructive Alternative Transaction Discount and the Constructive Actualised Risk Discount - for reducing the valuer's extent of responsibility in a principled and cogent manner.

This paper examines the justificatory arguments that the UK Law Commission advances in support of privity reform (Law Com no 242) (1996). The Commission believes that its proposed reforms will not cut across the ‘underpinning principles’ of the common law. This is borne out by the Commission's primary justificatory argument - that the privity rule undermines the intentions of the contracting parties - and by its proposal that consideration remain as the test of enforceability of contracts. But given the substantive change to privity that is proposed, and the prospect of the crystallisation of the third party right, it is argued that the Commission in fact favours the more modern reliance-based account of contractual obligation. The effect of this is to create an independent third party right to sue for the performance of the promise, ie a right that does not arise out of the contractual relationship between the parties, but from the third party's own reliance on the promise. This may have implications for enforcement of promises by gratuitous promisees.

This article critically appraises the UK government's recently published Consultation Paper on the future of the anti-terrorism laws. The author considers the likely effect of the Human Rights Act 1998 on the impact of any legislation that might flow from the government's proposals. The interaction between human rights law and anti-terrorism legislation provides a useful case study of the likely effects of incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. The author argues that many of these effects have not been anticipated by the drafters of the anti-terrorism proposals, with the result that many of their suggested changes to the law will be vulnerable to legal challenge if not sharply modified before enactment. The author concludes by considering the likelihood that, over time, successive governments will learn to tailor their legislation to the requirements of the Convention, even in the anti-terrorism field, but that in the short-term a period of legislative instability is to be expected.

Corporate governance is ‘hot’ in the United Kingdom and legal academics have written widely on the subject. Still, the topic has been virtually ignored as an academic discipline for law students. This article argues that corporate governance is a subject which should be included in the law curriculum and describes how a course dealing with the topic might be structured.

Successive studies have documented the institutionally marginalised status of many women academics. What remains unclear is whether such findings apply equally to women legal academics. This article begins the process of investigating the role, status and experiences of women legal academics, reporting the findings of the first survey into the representation of academic women in UK university law schools. The study presents a snapshot of the gender composition of law schools in October 1997, at all levels of seniority, together with data on the representation of women in each responding law school. It finds considerable differences between law schools, as well as an under-representation of women compared with men at senior levels. It is suggested that these patterns of the representation of women legal academics have important ramifications for legal education, the legal profession and the discipline of law itself.

The paper explores two fiscal devices which, while falling short of the ideal which economists have advocated, may induce behavioural change and thus operate effectively as regulatory instruments: the ‘nudging’ tax, which is calculated according to what level of payment is likely to reduce undesired activity; and the ‘rectificatory’ tax, which relates the sum payable to part of the harm caused by the activity. The former has been widely used, and with some success, but there is tension between its regulatory and revenue-raising functions. The latter seems better designed to meet goals of corrective justice than to modify conduct in an economically appropriated way.

Stilk v Myrick (1809) 2 Camp 317, 6 ESP 129 has long been perceived as a ‘problem case’ in the law of contract. It provides a famous example of conflicting reports: one reporter appears to base the judgment on the doctrine of consideration, the other on public policy. The view that the case turned on the application of the doctrine of consideration had been generally accepted, but was challenged in Williams v Roffey Bros. & Nicholls [1991] I QB1. This article looks again at the texts of the two reports of Stilk v Myrick, and discusses these against the background of law reporting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also looks at the case in its historical context, as one of many cases in the law reports concerning aspects of the employment and remuneration of merchant seamen. The writer suggests that judges and commentators have tended - whether looking at the reports of the case as texts, or considering the facts of the case in their historical context - to take an over-simplified view of the case.

After the Aberfan disaster on 21 October 1966, which killed 144 people, 116 of them children, the Charity Commission, duty-bound to uphold an outdated and inflexible law, intervened and obstructed payments by the charitable disaster fund to individual victims and for the cemetery memorial. It did not intervene to protect the fund from a government raid on its money to pay for the removal of dangerous coal tips above Aberfan – a raid that seems dubiously justifiable in charity law. The failures of regulation after Aberfan are discussed; some of them have since been remedied, some not.