This article addresses the doctrine of remoteness in tort in light of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Armstead v Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Co. Ltd. Armstead further attenuates an already weak control on tortious liability. In outline, it does so in two ways: first, by establishing that contractual liabilities incurred as a result of tortiously caused property damage comprise non-remote damage provided that those liabilities represent a reasonable pre-estimate of the counterparty’s loss; and, secondly, by allocating the burden of proof in respect of remoteness to defendants. This article explores these rules. It contends, in particular, that the first collides with the fundamental principle that the extent of the claimant’s loss in tort is irrelevant to the issue of remoteness while the second means that, oddly, the onus of proof in relation to remoteness in tort differs from that in contract.

The Damna Usuum was a series of complaints about the operation of uses written during the negotiations with the Commons which culminated in the Statute of Uses (1536). Through detailed analysis of the manuscript, this paper demonstrates that the Damna Usuum has been misunderstood by legal historians. Rather than being a public document intended to persuade the Commons to support reform; the Damna Usuum can be shown to be a series of rough notes prepared by the Crown’s lawyers ahead of their negotiations with the Commons. Furthermore, this has a significant impact on our understanding of how contemporary lawyers conceptualised pre-1536 uses in a period in which they had taken on more proprietary “thing-like” characteristics.

It is well known that, under a contract of sale, title to goods passes when the parties intend, but it is considered unclear whether the same is true of non-sale contracts. This article argues that there is a long line of cases dealing with “vesting clauses” that establishes that title passes when the parties intend under any contract, not just contracts of sale. This has significant implications for how judges should reason through cases dealing with transfers under contracts and how lawyers generally explain various areas of commercial law.

This article argues that the concept of dualism has ceased to operate as a reliable indicator of, or guide to, the relationships between domestic and international laws in the UK’s constitutional order. Dualism, it is argued, provides only a partial account of the complex interactions between domestic and international laws, cannot accommodate the hybrid products of interactions with European legal orders and ignores the post-“incorporation” processes of domestication through which international and domestic norms are reconciled. The connections between domestic and international laws are – in contrast to dualism’s binary simplicity – multi-dimensional and interconnected with the UK’s (recently turbulent) constitutional politics.

This article examines the participation of women as authors in five leading law journals of a generalist nature in the UK. For its data points, it takes each author of an article in the Cambridge Law Journal, the Journal of Law and Society, Legal Studies, the Modern Law Review and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. From 2016 to 2020, around 900 authors have published over 700 articles in these five journals. The analysis of these results reveals discrepancies in women’s participation in legal publishing. It shows that those journals which publish fewer articles, publish fewer women authors. The article situates its data in a description of gender patterns within the academy generally and specifically within the UK law school. It draws on the experiences of gender publishing disparity in other disciplines where the debate is more established. It concludes with suggestions for changes in the publication process and further research to develop the picture of women’s publishing in law.

In R. v Jogee; Ruddock v The Queen, the Supreme Court abolished “joint enterprise liability”, thus removing the need for a doctrine that used to temper the harshness of joint enterprise: the “fundamental difference” rule. The Supreme Court nevertheless allowed this rule to linger on in the form of an “overwhelming supervening act” doctrine. That doctrine has led to the creation of yet another: an “escalation” doctrine. We argue that there is no place in the post-Jogee law of complicity for doctrines based on fundamental difference, overwhelming supervening acts or escalation. This is no mere semantic quibble. It has significant implications for the way in which complicity law should be applied, especially in homicide cases.

Effective justice seeks for the truth and consequently must be founded on an analysis of all relevant evidence. Only where a manifestly greater societal interest intrudes, can there be a privilege against the production of testimony. For the Court of Justice of the EU, however, an activist interpretation of Article 8 of the EU Charter, promoting security of data, has become an elevated privacy right which justifies nullifying crucial information, thus shielding criminals, undermining civil trials and obstructing searches for missing persons. No convincingly apodictic conclusion emerges from the several judgments of the court, while the exceptions identified undermine, rather than support, any articulated core principle.

This article argues that public interests fundamentally underpin the decision-making processes of the European supervisory authorities in the banking system and, through their extraordinary regulatory influence, contribute to shaping the discretionary powers, orienting them towards an adequate and effective legal protection of the individual and collective subjective spheres, whose interests are embodied in the legal sources and principles of the European legal order. The case of the European Banking Authority reflects this conceptual framework and could serve as a benchmark for European banking law.

This article contributes to debates about the theoretical underpinning for legitimate expectations. Building on existing arguments that what underpins the doctrine is public trust in government, it draws on scholarship on trust from disciplines outside law to reimagine the “trust conception” of legitimate expectations. It argues that the current trust conception lacks conceptual clarity, including several areas of ambiguity which have generated problems for it. The article claims that with the conception so reimagined, trust can offer the necessary theoretical underpinning for legitimate expectations and thus provide much-needed certainty to this confused area of administrative law.

Escalating ground rents in long residential leases (rents that double or are adjusted by reference to an index at regular intervals) have been described as onerous and can prevent property sales. This article considers whether they are legally enforceable under consumer protection legislation. Although litigation would be needed both to clarify the application of key provisions in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 to ground rent terms, and to take account of the individual lease terms, the article concludes that escalating ground rent provisions may not be binding where the leaseholder is a consumer. Further, if the rent provisions are held to be unfair it would mean that the leaseholder does not have to pay and can recover sums already paid. This conclusion would therefore also weaken the human rights arguments made against the government’s plans to tackle problematic ground rents.

The extent to which the English common law protected civil liberties in the past is widely debated. Were the judges protectors of core freedoms such as liberty and the right to protest or were they allies of the executive in their hostility towards them? Since at least Dicey, the common law has had a vision of itself as the former, but what does practice reveal? This article explores the many ways in which the advocates of female suffrage in the 10 years or so before the First World War interacted with executive and judicial authority in their effort to use what they saw as their ancient freedoms to protect their campaigning for the vote for women. The suffragette campaign generated a series of conflicts between the judicial and executive branches of the state while also testing the depth of the common law’s commitment to civil liberties.

Possession of a chattel is sufficient to create a title to it. This article considers the nature and justification of these titles. It argues that popular justifications of possessory title fall short and offers a more appealing justification. The article then seeks to resolve, in light of that justification, three ongoing doctrinal controversies about a possessory title’s nature: whether it continues to exist after possession of the chattel is lost; whether it is transferable; and whether it includes a right that others not interfere with a possessor’s use of the chattel.