In the opening fragment of Digest 18.1, Paul tells us that Sabinus and Cassius had not required a money price in sale. So long as you could distinguish buyer and seller, they had contended, the mere fact that the buyer paid with goods made no difference, but such a permutatio was sale. Sabinus had appealed to the authority of Homer, who says: ‘From there (i.e., from the ships sent by Euneus from Lemnos) the long-haired Achaeans procured wine, some for bronze, some for gleaming iron, some for hides, some for whole cattle and some for slaves’.

As these verses do not contain the term ‘sale’ at all, they are generally regarded as pointless; and it is held that all Sabinus can have meant to prove by them was that other things than money might be used for trading—a platitude for which he need not have-searched the ancient books. This, however, is doing him an injustice. As a matter of fact, he knew very well why he adduced just this passage. The word χαλκῷ here rendered as ‘for bronze’ was rendered as ‘aere’ by the Romans. Paul, in the very fragment under discussion, says that the Greeks obtained wine ‘aere ferrohominibusque’ One of the meanings of ‘aes’, as indeed of χαλκóς, was ‘money’. (One may think, for example, of ‘aes alienum’.) It was, therefore, possible to ascribe to χαλκῷ in the passage quoted the sense of ‘for money’, instead of ‘for bronze’. Sabinus translated: ‘They procured wine, some for money, some for gleaming iron,’ etc.

It is often said that the French system of judicial control of the Administration is one of the best existing today. The French have no difficulty in believing this, and although Common Law jurists have long been influenced by Dicey, who wrote at a time when Administrative Law was different from that which we know today, they, also, are becoming aware of the merits of the work of the French Conseil d'Etat: Professor Hamson is in no small way responsible for this change of attitude. Moreover, the adoption of the French Administrative Law techniques by the European Communities and their introduction, albeit hesitantly, into the Law of International Organisations have also contributed towards increasing its reputation. Yet, at the very moment when it seems to have become an excellent product for export, the merits and the efficacy of French Administrative Law are causing considerable doubts among the French themselves. It has become fashionable to criticise what was unreservedly praised, and one wonders if adulation will give way to systematic denigration. The answer, not surprisingly, is to be found between the two extremes. The French system comprises elements both of strength and of weakness. This lecture is an attempt to evaluate these elements.

Clauses that provided fixed monetary penalties first appeared in English contracts and conveyances in the first decade of the thirteenth century. Rather quickly thereafter penalty clauses came to be used in a wide variety of contracts and conveyances. They were used in (1) agreements over tithes, (2) settlement of disputes, (3) arbitration agreements, (4) agreements to transfer or not to transfer land, (5) marriage property agreements, (6) warranties of title to land, (7) leases, (8) agreements to pay rents and annuities, loans, and in a variety of other transactions. The penalty clause was just another clause in the agreement. At about the middle of the thirteenth century other methods of inserting a penalty clause into an agreement began to be used. A penalty clause could be made part of a recognizance on the plea rolls, the Exchequer rolls, or the Chancery rolls. The recognizance itself could be a penalty to enforce a side agreement. A money bond could serve as a penalty rendered void if the terms of a separate, conditional acquittance were met. A bond or a statute merchant could be given to a third party under an agreement to give the bond or statute merchant to the promisee if the promisor failed to carry out his agreement. By 1348 the penal bond with conditional defeasance endorsed on the back of the bond had been invented.

The jubilee of the Journal happens to coincide with the centenary of Head v. Tattersall, the well-known but troublesome case in which the buyer of a horse was allowed to exercise a contractual right to return it (for failure to answer a warranty that it “had been hunted with the Bicester hounds”), despite the fact that it had been accidentally injured in the meantime and could be restored to the seller only in a damaged state. Most contract textbooks cite this as the classic instance of the condition subsequent, by virtue of which a contract or obligation, although initially effective, ceases to operate on the occurence of a specified event. It is apparent, however, on closer analysis that it was not the contract or any aspect of it which was terminated because the horse failed to meet the warranty, but the buyer's title: in other words, the property in the horse passed to the buyer immediately, but defeasibly, so that when he rejected the horse he divested himself of the title and revested it in the seller. Even this explanation leaves on one side the question of the damage sustained by the horse. In the language of the law of sale, it would be most natural to regard this issue as one of risk, and to say that the court held in effect, and indeed perhaps expressly, that the horse was at the seller's risk during the period allowed for its return.

This article explores certain key features of the tort of deceit which, if looked at only superficially, are apt to mislead as to the gist, nature, and province of this tort. In particular, the article addresses three main issues. The first is the way in which the reliance test used in this tort comes apart from a simple (more familiar) test of causation, and why this has important theoretical ramifications. Secondly, the article seeks to reveal the true gist and province of this tort. In this regard, it is argued that it is a mistake – made by many – to suppose that the infliction of economic loss forms the gist of deceit. Instead, it is suggested that the tort is better seen as being rights-based and that, consequently, it ought not to be seen as a specifically economic tort, but rather as one which protects the victim's decision-making autonomy. Lastly, the article unearths the juristic explanation for the curious fact that, in the tort of deceit, the operation of the contributory negligence defence is excluded while the mitigation principle is applied openly. (The incoherence here inheres in the fact that both these principles are animated by the self-same concern: a desire to exclude the recovery of losses that are attributable to an unreasonable lack of self-regard on the part of the claimant.) The juristic explanation I unearth is then subjected to critical analysis in the course of which I suggest that we ought not to confuse explanation with justification. I conclude that there is no sound reason of principle to exclude the operation of the contributory negligence defence in this tort.

Much has changed since 1925, even in land law. The emergence of principles of proprietary estoppel has been one of the most striking developments. For some litigants, these principles have been a source of new opportunities; for many judges and academics, they have been a source of new problems. It is therefore no surprise that, by means of what is now section 116 of the Land Registration Act 2002, the Law Commission attempted to deal with one of these problems, albeit only in disputes relating to registered land.

The legislature gives effect to the values of democracy and compromise in a pluralist society, but the legislation it produces is mediated in its application by the values inherent in the legal culture into which it is received. The judges complete the law promulgated by Parliament by applying it. In articulating the common law also, the judges act within the bounds of objective standards supplied by legal and political traditions, with a limited legislative role. The legislative role of the judges in applying statutes has been enhanced by the interpretive obligations applicable in areas where EU and ECHR law operates.

The best interests rule – the central fiduciary duty of company directors in a number of common law jurisdictions – encapsulates loyalty between director and company. Its multifaceted nature means that it is employed to impose a number of requirements, as demonstrated in the multi-jurisdictional analysis in this article. Contemporary commentary and cases (such as Moulin Global Eyecare Holdings Ltd. v Mei (2014) 17 HKCFAR 466, recently analysed in this Journal) have, however, doubted the fiduciary classification of the rule. This article defends the rule's fiduciary classification. After examining key facets of the rule, it demonstrates that, although flexible, the rule cannot be stretched to protect stakeholder interests independently of corporate benefit.

An Introduction to the Law of Restitution was a landmark in private law. More clearly than any preceding work, it unpacked the ambiguity inherent in the notion of “the claimant's expense by delineating two forms of “unjust enrichment. (1) The autonomous action in unjust enrichment involves a subtractive expense. The defendant acquires a benefit from the claimant in circumstances that the law regards as reversible. The response is always restitution. The defendant must give the enrichment, or its value, back to the claimant. (2) Unjust enrichment by wrongdoing, in contrast, is concerned with a normative or wrongful expense. The defendant acquires a benefit, usually from a third party, as a result of breaching an obligation owed to the claimant (e.g. trespass to land). Although the standard response to a civil wrong is compensation for the claimant's loss, a court exceptionally may compel the defendant to give up, or disgorge, his ill-gotten gain.

Successful drugs policy must be driven by thoughtful principle and intergovernmental consensus, not by departmental or legal inertia, nor by public (mis)conceptions about drug use. Perhaps the most pressing choice for drugs policymakers at present is between harm reduction and abstinence approaches to drugs policy. To choose between these two approaches, we need to know addiction's normative status: is having an addiction a misfortune or a harm in its own right, even setting aside knock-on health and wellbeing consequences? We argue that the harm of addiction is driven by poor policies, but that harm is not inevitable.

In Sutradhar v. Natural Environment Research Council [2004] EWCA Civ 175 the claimant, who lived in Bangladesh, suffered arsenic poisoning from drinking contaminated water. 699 other villagers suffered the same harm. The defendant, a research organization paid for by the British overseas development budget, had written a report for the Bangladeshi authorities which those authorities reasonably and foreseeably took to indicate that the water supply in the claimant's area was safe to drink. In fact, the researchers had omitted to test for arsenic and to tell the Bangladeshis that their tests did not include arsenic. The claimant sued in negligence. The defendant applied to strike out the action. The defendant failed at first instance, but, by a majority, the Court of Appeal (Kennedy and Wall L.JJ.; Clarke L.J. dissenting) dismissed the claimant's action.

If a pebble is dropped into a pool of water, ripples will spread on the surface of the water; how far the ripples will spread and with what strength depends on a variety of factors, but there will always be a ripple of some kind. The same is true of a decision of a court of law. Notwithstanding what Professor Chayes has accurately described as the “bipolar” character of traditional civil litigation, it is almost inconceivable that the outcome of a civil action will affect no one but the parties to it: unless an exception can be found to John Donne's famous axiom that "No man is an Island, entire of itself”—and such a man, if he exists, is unlikely to bring an action in the first place—the ripple effect even of, say, a simple decision that an individual defendant must pay a sum of money by way of damages to an individual plaintiff will extend to their respective families and beyond. It is not wholly absurd to say of such a case that, for example, the retail traders, the banks, and so on with whom the parties have dealt or may deal in the future have an “interest” which an action by an injured individual may “protect” and, if they do, that interest is certainly "diffuse" and "fragmented" even if it is not “collective.”