In the preface to his memoirs, Casanova outlined his reasons for writing them in French. Having noted that the clarity, precision and grace of the French language are such that a cultivated person cannot help but fall beneath its spell, he went on to mention one further feature:

It is worth observing that among all the living languages in the republic of letters, French is the only one which its presiding judges have sentenced not to enrich itself at the expense of the other languages.

Arguably this is a proud posture for a language to strike, hermetically cocooned within a self-imposed cultural bridewell. Nevertheless, Casanova's observation was, to a degree, an accurate representation of the cultured French of his day and, curiously, is probably truer today that it has ever been.

By equitable concession a shareholder may bring a representative action, ostensibly on behalf of himself and fellow shareholders, but in reality for the company, to permit corporate recovery against persons in a position of control who have perpetrated a fraud on the company. Such “derivative” actions form an exception to the axiom, expressed as one aspect of the rule in Foss v. Harbottle, that in matters of corporate recovery the proper plaintiff is the company itself.

Contemporary convention has it that the essential validity of marriage in the conflict of laws is governed by the law of each partner's pre-nuptial domicile. But this is contestable. The present argument is that the cases which are said to authorise the traditional conceptual pattern are in reality examples of the proper law of status at work in English law.

For a considerable period of time, statutes have existed which require the registration of deeds, third party incumbrances affecting land, or title to the land itself. In general, the sanction for non-compliance with these registration requirements is that a purchaser for valuable consideration takes free from any interest which should have, but has not, been registered. Throughout the period when registration statutes have been in force, however, a tension has existed between literal compliance with them on the one hand, and seeking to read into them general equitable principles on the other. The effect of introducing these principles is to bind a purchaser by notice of an unregistered interest that is not protected in the appropriate manner by registration.