The tangled, intertwined concepts of the law of negligence are a constant source of fascination for lawyers, and also a source of despair. The one produces an almost endless stream of comment on the intricacies of ‘duty’, ‘remoteness’, ‘causation’ and ‘foreseeability’, while the other forces many to conclude their remarks with an exasperated, ‘but it's all policy anyway’. Yet ‘policy’ is the beginning not the end of wisdom in the law. The crucial question is exactly what these policies consist of. The legal method, as opposed to the economic or the sociological, approaches the task by tearing up and reconstructing legal ‘concepts’.

Sociology of law often seems to be marked by a form of intellectual apartheid. Whilst social theorists refine their conceptual frameworks, those with more practical concerns robustly set out to investigate the ‘law in action’. Mixing of the two approaches is thought likely to impede their necessary separate development. One recent survey of the field concluded that:

‘The trend is likely to be a continuing divergence between its theoretical and practical branches: the theoretical consisting mainly of re-analyses of old sociological approaches to law, and the practical continuing with its problem-solving approach without confronting the theoretical problems implicit in what it accepts as problems and solutions’.

Down the centuries, it has been considered that in general a doctor is only under a duty to exercise reasonable care in treating a patient. While the latter is entitled to a high standard of treatment, results are not guaranteed. In the United States, courts have imposed more onerous obligations, but in England there has been no real challenge to this position until now. The doctor's liability in contract has always had the potential of going beyond mere negligence, but the general concentration on tort actions and understandable uncertainties as to the scope of contractual liability meant that this potential was never explored.

The tendency of lawyers these days is to deny much of a place to Roman Law and this is reflected not only in a widely held view that since the eighteenth century legal innovation has been so great as to have left the Corpus Juris Civilis a ‘mere antiquarianism’: it is also reflected in the fact that fewer and fewer law schools in the West insist on Roman law as a compulsory subject. Indeed, the number of law faculties or departments in England offering the subject as even an optional course can probably now be counted on the fingers of, if not one hand, then two.

It is a familiar principle of the law of extradition that a fugitive should not be surrendered to a requesting State if his alleged offence is of a political character. Yet in recent years this exception to extradition has been the subject of criticism. With the increase in political violence in Europe in the 1970's it was feared that fugitive terrorists might be able to shelter behind the political offence exception. In the United Kingdom some politicians have been particularly disturbed by the application of the political offence exception by the courts of the Republic of Ireland to prevent cxtradition of alleged terrorists.