Regulation as a legal form of social engineering has been subjected to much analysis in the last decade or so. The importance of the topic to contemporary law cannot be overstated: on the one hand, it has been the avowed aim of government to ‘deregulate’ industry; on the other hand, and paradoxically, both the concomitant policy of privatisation and the evolution towards a Single European Market have increased the need for regulation in appropriate areas. The efforts to explore the strengths and weaknesses of different regulatory forms have brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Administrative lawyers have been concerned with how the power of decision-making is allocated between institutions and the general problems of accountability and control of discretion to which this gives rise. Socio-legal researchers have critically examined the practices of regulatory agencies as regards rule formulation and enforcement.

No statute defines indecency, yet this is the element that makes the difference between common assault (a summary offence, maximum six months) and indecent assault (maximum now ten years). In gross cases no question arises; the trouble is with the marginals. The courts solve them, as they solve so many problems on jury trial, by leaving the question of indecency pretty well at large to the jury. This long-established rule was reaffirmed by the lords in Court. Lord Ackner, with the concurrence on this point of all the other lords, said ‘The prosecution must prove & that the assault, or the assault and the circumstances accompanying it, are capable of being considered by right-minded persons as indecent’.

The Court of Session decision in Pringle, Petitioner again raises the issue of what constitutional effect, if any, is to be attributed to the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England. Specifically, is it competent for the Court of Session to find that an Act or a provision in an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament is invalid because of an inconsistency with an Article of the Treaty of Union as enacted in Scots law by the former Scottish Parliament in the Union With England Act 1707 (c 7)? This is the first case since MacCormick v Lord Advocate in which the Inner House of the Court of Session has commented on this favourite question of Scottish constitutional lawyers and, although hardly answering the question any more revealingly than it did in that case, the court's latest reservation of opinion on the answer is worthy of some further discussion.

In October 1985, the Nugee Committee produced a well-received Report. It drew attention to a number of diverse problems relating to the management of leasehold flats, most especially those faced by lessees. These were said to include excessive delays in carrying out repairs, complaints as to the level of service charges and difficulties in the enforcement of lessors' obligations. It goes without saying that the slow and inevitable structural deterioration which inevitably takes place as a building ‘ages’ will risk being accelerated by any dilapidations caused by the neglect ofthe lessor regularly to comply with his repairing obligations. In this and similar circumstances of mismanagement (such as a failure regularly to collect service charges) the value, credit-worthiness and saleability of the lessees' interests are all put at risk.

Advocates of the legal equality of women and men must, sooner or later, address the issues raised by the biological differences between the sexes. Even those who would argue for a completely sexually egalitarian society which does not recognise differences based on sex cannot avoid this issue. Women are child-bearers: this a a biological fact. They are also perceived as child-rearers: a view with origins that are clearly more complex than mere biology. These particular functions have an impact on all aspects of a woman's life within and outside the home. In the workplace pregnancy is treated as a deviation from the male norm or as the price to be paid by the employer for employing women. It is women who are expected to make concessions and it is unsurprising that the claim has been made that ‘the heart of woman's oppression is her child-bearing and child-rearing role’.

It is clear that several members of the judiciary are unhappy about some of the moral implications of Caldwell recklessness. In particular, there is concern about the accused whose capacities, mental or physical, are appreciably more restricted than those of the ordinary person. Such person may not just fail to foresee risks obvious to rcasonable people, they may plausibly be seen as being incapable of so doing. Judicial anxiety about this first surfaced in Elliott v C. There, the Queen's Bench Divisional Court allowed a prosecution appeal against the acquittal of a 14 year old girl (who was in a remedial class at school) for the criminal destruction of a garden shed and its contents.

There is an increasing awareness of the need to save man's environment for current and future generations, both on the part of governments and of the populace generally. This has resulted in a number of enactments, both national and international, which purport to protect the environment in a number of ways - by controlling, for instance, the release of pollutants into the atmosphere, the dumping of waste products in the sea, the killing of marine life, the export of endangered species and so on.