Normally one person is not obliged to confer a benefit on another unless he has promised to do so. Even if he did promise to confer the benefit, he will not normally be liable for failing to confer it if the promisee gave no consideration for the promise. Moreover even if the promisee did give consideration, a third party, who did not, but for whom the benefit was intended, cannot sue. In principle the same applies where a party provides another with some article or service. The recipient cannot complain that the article or service is not good enough, unless the other party promised, for consideration, to provide the thing or service, and what is provided falls below the quality promised. So actions based on the failure to confer a benefit, or sufficient benefit, normally lie in contract.

The recent decision of the House of Lords in Titchener v. British Railways Board (which will be considered below) is a reminder of the uncertainty that strangely still surrounds the defence of consent or volenti nonfit injuria to an action in negligence. It is clear that the defence at least includes the case where there is an agreement, not necessarly constituting a contract, between the plaintiff and the defendant under which the plaintiff foregoes, in advance, a claim for negligence which might otherwise accrue to him, i.e., the plaintiff agrees that conduct of the defendant which would otherwise be actionable will not be so. The principal uncertainty is whether the plaintiff's mere voluntary exposure of himself to a danger already created, or likely to be created, by the defendant's negligence can give rise to the defence of volenti, either on the basis that such conduct of the plaintiff constitutes the requisite agreement to forgo a claim, or on the basis that no such agreement is necessary. This and other problems in regard to the nature and scope of the defence will be considered in this article.

The English choice of law rules for tort cannot be stated with any certainty. The most likely version, as a result of Chplin v Boys, is a double actionability rule, with provision for a proper law or ‘interests’ approach in exceptional cases, but if that is the law there is little cause for satisfaction. The purpose of this article is to consider what shape any future reform ofthe law in this area should take, confining the discussion, however, for reasons of space, to torts wholly committed within a single country.

The suggestions put forward in this paper may be summarized as follows. The linguistic, cultural and to some extent physical ancestors of the modern Bantu people south of the Zambezi, including the Shona, arrived in Rhodesia in the early part of the first millennium a.d. The B1 culture was not introduced by Shona migrants arriving in the eleventh century, but was a local development of the already existing Shona Iron Age A, attributable perhaps to prosperity gained from the gold trade. The B1 culture should not in fact be regarded as a separate culture from the A, that later fused with it, but as a variant of it, which because of the power and influence of those who developed and practised it eventually spread over a large area and became a common factor in the various local Shona cultures that had diverged, and continued to diverge, in the course of time.