One of the few areas of the law in which there is a significant and serious dispute between the United States and its Western Allies concerns the nature and scope of national regulation of international trade. This long-standing and mutually damaging dispute first arose in connection with the extraterritorial enforcement of US antitrust laws through the effects doctrine as elaborated by US courts commencing with the Alcoa case in 1945. Since then the dispute has progressively widened and deepened: it has extended to such matters as international shipping and civil aviation, commodity markets and securities and it has been aggravated by the extraterritorial application of US investigatory and other pretrial procedure.

Throughout the spectrum of inchoate crime spanning the concepts of attempt, conspiracy and solicitation or incitement, the most notorious and intractable problems have arisen in the area of attempts. A court in Zimbabwe, echoing the despondency characteristic of current academic writing, has made the comment: ‘There is, perhaps, a no more unsatisfactory branch of our criminal law than the law relating to attempt, and there is not the slightest prospect that with the passage of time it will become less unsatisfactory.’ Sporadic suggestions by Commonwealth courts that the complexity and incoherence of the common law should be rectified at least in part by legislative intervention, has been acted upon in England and New Zealand.

In English law, as in many of its common law satellites, the tort of privacy is still a curiously problematic one. Unlike Roman or generally civilian law where there is little doubt that an invasion of privacy is actionable, unlike also American law which in the last 80 years or so has fashioned an ample shield around a person's private sphere, English law has been deeply hesitant about admitting privacy as a civil right. Roman law, we may be surprised to learn, accepted from the very start that rules against personal injury include as well as rights to physical security also rights to feelings of human dignity and self-respect.

Common lawyers have long shown a remarkable reluctance to impose criminal liability for omissions. Such liability, it has recently been said, is ‘uncongenial’ — and this seems to be right. Even where the law does, in reality, impose liability for omissions we find courts and writers trying to explain the phenomenon on some other ground. The feeling seems to be that, because the imposition of liability for an omission implies a duty to act it is an interference with the liberty of a person who wishes only to mind his own business and let others get on with minding theirs. Moreover omissions do not cause evil results in the same obvious sense as acts.

It is a fundamental principle that the expectation interest is protected for breach of contract. In protecting this interest, the main choice the law faces is between ordering specific performance and awarding damages. The former orders the defendant to carry out what he promised, whereas the latter gives the plaintiff a monetary substitute for performance. Traditionally, the expectation interest has been primarily protected by awarding damages, and specific performance has been a very secondary remedy.