In 1964, in Rookes v Barnard, the House of Lords restated the law concerning aggravation of damages. Its effect was to dispel what had been described as its ‘Janus-like attitude’. This attitude was borne out by the historical common law’s tendency to allow two theoretically distinct elements – punishment and compensation – to intermingle in awards of what had hitherto been loosely labelled ‘exemplary’ damages. And yet the House’s restatement has proved controversial. This paper presents the first historical examination of the Janus-like attitude in which the pre-1964 law concerning aggravation of damages persisted in England. By shedding new light on the period from which this area of the law of civil damages immediately broke some six decades ago, it helps modern scholars and law reformers better understand the controversy in which it remains embroiled.

The agency problem describes the information asymmetry where the agent knows more than the principal, who accordingly is vulnerable to the agent taking advantage. It is the central issue in the motor finance litigation, where the basic facts are that a consumer buys a car on credit from a dealer who takes a secret commission from the lender or hides other salient facts from the buyer.

Under English law, adoption permanently severs a child’s legal ties with their birth family, raising concerns about identity that sit uneasily with Islamic legal principles emphasising the preservation of lineage. These tensions are particularly acute for Muslim children, who are overrepresented in the English care system yet underrepresented in adoption. This paper argues that the resulting disparity derives in part from the tolerance of secrecy surrounding a child’s origins within English adoption law. Addressing the source of these tensions, the paper challenges the widespread assumption that adoption is prohibited in Islamic law. It examines recent legislative and judicial developments in Muslim-majority states that facilitate adoption-like arrangements while safeguarding children’s identity rights, highlighting that secrecy is the main source of religious concern. Against the policy context created by the 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and its call for a ‘radical reset’, the paper identifies secrecy within English adoption practice as a continuing barrier to legitimacy and permanence, and proposes a clear policy requiring early disclosure of adoptive status, before age seven and with local authority support, to strengthen children’s identity rights and permanence outcomes across the care system.

Orthodox accounts of negligence liability for ‘pure psychiatric damage’ view it as protecting the claimants’ interest in their psychiatric health and often attack English law’s restrictive duty of care rules for inadequately safeguarding this right. This paper challenges this widespread consensus by presenting and evaluating an alternative explanatory rationale. Drawing an analogy between the ‘paradigm case’ of primary victims and the tort of assault, the crux of the argument is that the interest protected in ‘accident’ cases is in avoiding anticipated immediate physical violence but the law sometimes extends the protection of this right to secondary victims in order to preserve the law’s legitimacy. From this perspective, several intractable doctrinal problems that have long troubled adherents to the orthodox view become explicable.

On 14 November 2025, the High Court of England and Wales handed down judgment in the largest environmental mass tort in UK history: the group claim by more than 600,000 Brazilian victims of the 2015 collapse of the Fundão tailings dam against the mining giant BHP Group. In Município de Mariana v BHP Group, the Court found BHP (through its UK and Australian-listed parent companies) liable on both strict liability and negligence grounds under Brazilian law.1

Despite the exponential rise in the number of couples cohabiting, across Europe, cohabitants are unable to access comprehensive legal protections. To strengthen calls for reform, this paper advocates for the adoption of a human rights framing and traces its potential development. It begins with an analysis of the current discourse and offers an explanation as to why there is limited engagement with human rights argumentation. The focus will then shift to the need for a human rights framing. Through an analysis of the merits of such, it will be demonstrated that the common criticisms of a human rights framing are not applicable in the cohabitation context. Moreover, it will be argued that, owing to a previous judicial recognition of human rights infringements, the debate is primed for the adoption of a novel framing. This paper will conclude by considering how a human rights framing could be applied in practice.

The unique statutory provision that is section 423 of the Insolvency Act 1986,1 offering redress to creditors that have been, or potentially will be, prejudiced by fraudulent transactions entered into by the debtor, has recently been the subject of interpretation by the Supreme Court in El-Husseiny v Invest Bank.2 This asset recovery provision is not strictly confined to insolvency situations.3 The core issue before the Supreme Court was whether the term ‘transaction’ in section 423 applied to a situation where a debtor procures a company which he owns to transfer a valuable asset for no consideration or at an undervalue which diminishes or eliminates the value of his shares in the company, or whether the provision required the debtor to personally own and transfer the asset in question.4 This was a preliminary matter that was found against the debtor in the Court of Appeal which enabled the substantive trial to proceed. While the substantive trial decided that other elements in section 423 were not met, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the parties did not seek to stop it from rendering its judgment, and that in any case the issue was of sufficient importance for it to proceed.5

This paper examines the effect of post-Brexit UK trade agreements on devolved regulatory autonomy. It does so by: (i) carrying out a comprehensive mapping exercise of the overlaps between such agreements and devolved matters; (ii) analysing the domestic legal framework for the implementation of international trade commitments in devolved law; and (iii) identifying the extent to which trade agreements have affected devolved competences and/or caused substantive changes to devolved legislation. The paper demonstrates that UK trade agreements have rarely resulted in significant changes to devolved legislation. This outcome is attributable not only to the limited regulatory ambition of the agreements concluded so far, but also to the distinctive role played by UK domestic implementing legislation in shaping the scope of devolved autonomy. In particular, it shows how the interaction between international trade commitments and the UK’s implementation framework operates as a ‘double bind’ on devolved autonomy.

Why do states under-expend? Conventional explanations point to institutional failures. By contrast, drawing on the case of cesses in Indian tax history and practice, I take underspending not only as symptomatic of flaws in state administration, but also as constitutive of state forms. In this specific case, I argue that the underspending of earmarked funds, and their consequent pooling and remobilisation, produce a bifurcated state through its revenue arrangements. This argument is of substantive value, but it is also in the service of a broader conceptual move: reinterpreting something that might conventionally be understood as a marker of state failure or dysfunction, as in fact constitutive of the state. Finally, the argument also has a methodological dimension. In order to execute this redescription, I draw on a mix of archival material and analysis of case law. This extends an insight from tax law scholarship on the importance of a multi-disciplinary methodological apparatus to bring tax and constitutional scholarship together.

Personal property has had an enduring bipartite categorisation of things in action and things in possession. But digital assets, supposedly situated outside both categories, have disrupted this categorisation. Recent statutory reform, through the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, seeks to permit a third category of personal property. This contribution outlines the effect of the Act and of a third category of personal property. The third category is negatively defined, dependent on the boundaries of the other categories for its scope. The breadth of the thing in action category is not settled, which means that the scope of the third category is undefined. The Act suggests that digital assets can be a ‘thing’ that is ‘the object of personal property rights’. But the Act does not define what this thing is, nor does it tell us what rights an owner of a third category thing might have. Cases that have considered these questions have highlighted the transactional abilities these assets enable. If this is the focus, then these assets are best viewed as things in action.

The public local inquiry in the planning system is expected to facilitate public participation in environmental decision-making. Public participation in environmental decision-making has the aim of enhancing environmental democracy, making better decisions and improving environmental protection. This paper argues that, despite the long history of participation in the planning system, public local inquiries in their present state are limited in their capacity to facilitate public participation. It contends that the public participation responsibilities of the public local inquiry are hampered by its adversarial procedures. Planning scholars have argued that the formal, adversarial nature of the public local inquiry makes it difficult for people with little legal experience to participate, thus acting as an obstacle to public participation and good decision-making. Drawing on inquiry case law and scholarship, this paper investigates the multiple purposes of the inquiry and how tensions between these purposes have been interpreted by the courts. In exploring the reasons for these conflicts, the paper provides an opportunity to refine the system to facilitate public participation and to ensure that the public local inquiry is fair to its participants and serves the democratic purpose it is expected to meet.

This case note examines the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Slagelse Almennyttige Boligselskab, Afdeling Schackenborgvænge, where the Court found that a distinction between westerners and non-Westerners constituted discrimination under the Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000 implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin. The case note shows that while the finding in this case does help address xenophobia under the Directive 2000/43, the interpretive moves made by the Court in reaching this finding are normatively weak in five respects: (i) the meaning of ethnic origin, (ii) the distinction between direct and indirect discrimination, (iii) the meaning of xenophobic discrimination, (iv) the recognition of structural harm, and (v) the use of the narrative of integration in European policy.

According to the Mental Capacity Act 2005, P’s family are to be afforded a consultee role in a best interests decision. That is, they are to be involved in decisions but are not empowered to act as a substitute decision maker. However, in practice, healthcare professionals can struggle to set clear boundaries where families are insistent on more active treatment. The Best Interests in Renal Dialysis Study explored the making of best interests decisions in the context of adult kidney care in England. Interviewing healthcare professionals – both doctors and nurses – we found that it is not uncommon for the ‘path of least resistance’ to be pursued in best interests decisions where the family takes a strong position. Out of a fear of legal action and a desire to maintain a working relationship, healthcare professionals will sometimes compromise in providing care that they do not consider to be in P’s best interests to appease the family. This is seemingly at odds with the requirements of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, particularly where it goes as far as to prove harmful to P. Drawing on Margalit’s conception of rotten compromise, we argue that this form of rotten medical compromise undermines the law’s recognised P-centricity.

The puzzle underlying the law of public interest immunity (PII) is well known. In ordinary proceedings all relevant evidence should be placed before the court and the parties, including when the government is one of those parties.1 But what if some of the relevant evidence – due to reasons in the public interest – cannot be disclosed to the other parties involved?2 The traditional way in which English law tackles this puzzle is by invoking the law of PII. Ever since the landmark decision in Conway, it has been settled that ‘the courts should balance the public interest in the proper administration of justice against the public interest in withholding any evidence which a Minister considers ought to be withheld’.3 If the public interest favours disclosure of the evidence, the evidence is admitted and made ‘available to both parties and to the court’; but if the contrary is true the evidence will be excluded altogether from the proceedings and made ‘available neither to the other parties nor to the court’.4

Seema Elizabeth Isoy wrote in a condominium owner Whatsapp group that developer David Chiu had been arrested for fraud several years earlier. She knew but left out that he had later been acquitted. In holding her liable for defamation, the Malaysian Federal Court in Seema Elizabeth Isoy v Tan Sri David Chiu Tat-Cheong relied on the concept of a half-truth – a statement that is literally true but omits key information that would change the statement’s meaning – raised by Lord Shaw in Sutherland v Stopes. This note suggests that, while the Federal Court’s conclusion ultimately may have been justified, it should have more carefully considered whether a report of a preliminary act such as an arrest or charge necessarily implies guilt and whether an acquittal actually lessens the sting of an arrest and charge. Judgments cited by the Federal Court – from India, the US, Malaysia, Canada and South Africa – did not adequately address these issues, making this note of potential interest to readers across the common law world.

In what was his last decision as a Justice of the Supreme Court, Lord Walker delivered the judgment of Pitt v Holt.1 Amongst other issues, the judgment re-examined the ‘rule in Hastings-Bass’.2 Twelve years on, the Privy Council in Ashley Dawson-Damer v Grampian Company Trust Ltd3 was called upon to further clarify Lord Walker’s analysis of the reformed rule. While the Privy Council offered welcome guidance, it left certain aspects of the rule uncertain. This comment critically analyses the decision, and offers further points of reflection.