Why should a Law Commissioner be interested in family courts? Family courts were an item in the Commission’s first programme but the Commission has made no proposals on the subject. A working party was set up in 1971 and seemed on the point of producing a working paper when it was learnt that the Finer Committee intended, not merely to make some general observations, but to lay down broad principles and work them out in some detail. The Commission therefore suspended operations indefinitely. Since then, it has taken the view that the issue must be left to the responsible government departments, who have recently begun their own consideration of the subject.

It is the purpose of this article to consider the recent case law on the Majewski rule and to show the problems which can be created by an undisciplined use of language. The first section is concerned with the inaptness of the language used in one of those cases to confine the Mujewski rule to its proper sphere of operation. The second part deals with the somewhat reckless use of the term ‘recklessness’ and its potential impact upon that rule.

Some years ago, a state-of-play review of the study of Law and Society in Britain by Colin Campbell and Paul Wiles contained the almost rueful comment that ‘analytical jurisprudence and legal positivism… have proved of intimidating endurance as archetypes. As another commentator, Peter Goodrich, has noted recently, Neil MacCormick, one leading authority in the field, rejoined that ‘to confirm or confute these accounts it is necessary to take up some position in analytical philosophy and the philosophy of language. Goodrich's review of linguistics and contemporary legal philosophy indicated that this gauntlet has not been systematically taken up either by legal philosophers or even by those sociologists of law who have been most critical of the general features of legal positivism and the substantive theories legal positivists have themselves proposed.

Part I of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 has established a Crown Prosecution Service for the whole of England and Wales. The Service is, inter alia, responsible for the conduct of all police prosecutions (except minor motoring matters) following the institution of proceedings by the police. Police officers no longer present their own cases in court, but the new Service is not intended merely to replace them with professional advocates. The White Paper on which the Act is based declared that an independent prosecution service should be established. This was in order to give crown prosecutors complete freedom to veto, or to modify, the initial decison of the police to prosecute.

The relationship between trade unions and the courts has always been a sensitive one, and no less so when the issue is how to deal with a union’s refusal to obey court orders. During most of this century enforcement has not been a serious problem because the nature of trade dispute law has meant that the courts have rarely had to establish their authority over trade unions; but during the era of the Industrial Relations Act 1971 and also since 1980 the situation has been rather different. This is because statute has drastically curtailed the ambit of lawful industrial action, and has also rendered unions directly liable, thus making conflict between unions and the courts inevitable.

In William & Glyn's Bank v Boland Mr Boland, the sole resgistered proprietor of a house, mortgaged it to a bank. On his inability to meet the repayments, the bank sought possession as a prelude to the exercise of its power of sale. The action of possession failed because Mrs Boland successfully claimed an overriding interest in the property. This claim was founded on her having substantially contributed to the purchase of the house, thereby obtaining an interest in it. This interest was enforceable against the bank because she was in actual occupation of the land at the time it acquired its interest with the result that, because of section 70(1)(g) of the Land Registration Act 1925, she had an overriding interest in the land.

The ‘rights’, if any, which belong to trade union members who refuse to participate in industrial action have been the subject of debate and controversy recently. A number of factors account for this. The first is the legal action maintained by members of the National Union of Mineworkers who refused to participate in the recent industrial action in the coalfields. Secondly, recent debates over the wisdom of introducing a ‘positive’ right to strike in place of the existing system of ‘immunities’ have, as Lord Wedderburn has remarked, ‘opened up… the prospect of a prohibition on unions disciplining members who refuse to strike, on the basis of the fallacy that a positive ‘‘right to strike’’ implies the negative ‘‘right not to strike’’’.

UK immigration law is changing rapidly. There have been four major revisions of the immigration rules since 1979, interspersed with numerous minor, but none the less significant, amendments. Moreover, in an increasingly complex field, litigation has flourished. Applications for judicial review have been lodged at a rate which has recently prompted the Court of Appeal to severely restrict access to the court - in all but the most exceptional cases - until the statutory appeal process has been thoroughly exhausted. One consequence of this level of activity has been that the provisions under which family members may join their relatives in the United Kingdom have changed radically during the short life of the Immigration Act 1971.

To understand the rights in land of a person in the GDR the first task of an English lawyer is to consider the rules being applied in terms of concepts and institutions in operation in England. The GDR have opted for a ‘mixed’ property system, retaining ‘pure’ personal ownership (similar to the rights given to landowners under English law) alongside the socialist creatures: contractual rights (use-contracts) and the hybrid use-rights in public land. Property law has long provided for the creation of rights which provide at the outset for the conditions under which the right will end; this is one of the principal attributes of leasehold tenure in England. It is indeed striking how many of the characteristics of use rights can be discovered among the provisions and decisions upon the security of tenure of tenancies in England.

There are grounds for being optimistic about the future of legal education. Not least of these is that there is emerging a broad alliance, embracing a range of intellectual positions, which is increasingly outspoken in its criticism of the dominant vocationalism which characterises so much legal education. Neil McCormick has recently added his forceful voice to the criticism of the narrow and intellectually barren fetish of ‘learning the rules’ which constitutes the great bulk of the practice of law teaching. The context of MacCormick's advocacy of the virtues of a broad philosophical orientation in legal education was the publication of Barnett and Yach's survey of jurisprudence teaching in the United Kingdom.

The legal tradition is a written tradition and is consequently centred upon the study of textual meanings. From the earliest times law, both religious and secular, has been inscribed and codified, be it chiselled in stone, carved in wood, scratched on vellum or written in books. While the law codes and law books are certainly not the only forms of law they are in historical terms the dominant ones. The law is ideally promulgated in books and is found in books, it being of the historical essence of sacred and secular legal power to take a written form.

Through the ages many common legal values have developed in western Europe. Notwithstanding the differences in legal systems there is a remarkable uniformity in the basic concepts of legal thinking. All western European states are democracies with constitutional restrictions to the power of the government. They all have similar defences against absolutism and one of these defences is the protection of fundamental human rights against government interference. The existence of such legal restrictions is a distinguishing feature of western European politico-legal development.

It is an established principle that an individual who is adversely affected by a public nuisance may not sue in tort unless he can show that he has suffered ‘particular damage’ over and above that suffered by the general public. Traditionally the principle has been justified on the ground of prevention of multiplicity of suits. It is argued that unless the complainant's injury is in some way distinguishable from that suffered by the general public, the proper plaintiff is the Attorney General as the public's representative; otherwise the wrongdoer could be punished ‘a hundred times for the same cause’.

A legislative package which transformed the landscape of Australian administrative law during the last decade by invigorating prosaic models of judicial review, has attracted attention throughout the Commonwealth as ‘an awesome leap’. A burgeoning bureaucracy, whose commitment to legal norms is all too often diluted by excessive zeal in the pursuit of administrative goals, and the perceived inadequacy of conventional restraints including legislative scrutiny, the supervisory jurisdiction of regular courts and internal checks operating at different levels of the executive hierarchy, have heralded bold, innovative approaches.

Trade marks, business names and get-up, like products, can be important commercial assets, carefully chosen for the appropriate image and impact, projected by advertising and capitalised through goodwill. As such, they represent a significant investment for which businesses expect adequate legal protection. In these days of worldwide travel, communications and media exposure the reputation acquired by a name or mark may transcend national boundaries and even precede commercial activities in a particular country. The temptation to cash-in on the reputation of another business through imitation of a name, mark or get-up has never been greater and piracy has reached epidemic proportions.

In an earlier paper, we had occasion to examine the French and English law of forenames. Possibly to his surprise, the English lawyer will have discovered that, certain minor reforms apart, legislation of the Revolutionary era still governs this aspect of French life, purportedly restricting the forenames a person may bear, and, after registration of birth, all but forbidding their subsequent modification or substitution. Such a position contrasts dramatically with the received wisdom of English law, where forenames can be freely acquired and abandoned by use and reputation, the French rigidity of outlook being utterly alien to an English lawyer’s relativist attitude in the matter.

Most of the cases laying down the act of state doctrine, S.A. de Smith observed, were decided ‘in the heyday of imperial expansion, when judges often seemed to be as executive-minded as the Executive.’ Morris and Read, after analysing African cases adjudicating upon preexisting rights in ceded territories, conclude: ‘Those brought up in the traditional view of the judiciary as being the bulwark against any danger of autocratic behaviour on the part of the exeuctive may find all this somewhat susprising.’ Yet Lord Diplock, who could not fairly be described as executive-minded or reluctant to oppose executive autocracy, recently described as an ‘elementary fallacy’ the suggestion that a treaty transferring territory to the Crown can guarantee inhabitants' property rights before the municipal courts.