UK public law is often viewed as a sophisticated power struggle between rival institutions, an approach encouraged by the assumption that the law is ultimately dependent on such contingencies as the existence of an official consensus about its sources. From that perspective, legal judgments should be read as strategic moves within the political power-game. We can make better sense of public law if, instead, we interpret it as the articulation and enforcement of standards of legitimate governance, inspired by universal ideals of individual freedom and human dignity. The rule of Law denies the legal validity of arbitrary, unjustified assertions of power inimical to those ideals. Positive law is, at root, an instantiation of natural law, as the interplay of legal rule and underlying principle, characteristic of common law reasoning, confirms. There are important implications for our understanding of the constitutional foundations of judicial review, the limits of parliamentary sovereignty, the nature of the principle of legality, and the scope and content of fundamental rights.

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.

This article considers the rule that a claimant who has been wronged will be denied recovery where the damage flowed from a sanction imposed as a result of their own illegal acts such that compensating the claimant would divert a sanction intended to be imposed on the claimant to the defendant. The article has two purposes. The first aim is to provide a counterweight to the overwhelming body of academic literature critical of Gray v Thames Trains Ltd. in which the House of Lords, in applying the illegality bar found it unnecessary to examine the purpose of the criminal sanction against the claimant, preferring to treat its existence as sufficient to lead to a denial of recovery. The article argues that academic support for adoption of an alternative test of “significant personal responsibility” rests on precarious grounds, depending, as it does, on the “unsatisfactory state of law” and “different policies” arguments. This article reconceptualises the rule in Gray and systematically examines the role played by the theme of consistency between the civil law and criminal law in judicial decision-making. The second aim is to evaluate Gray in light of Patel v Mirza. The article critiques the Supreme Court's inconsistent treatment of deterrence in Henderson v Dorset University NHS Foundation Trust and Stoffel v Grondona, and argues that the way the court in Henderson conceptualised the relationship between Gray and Patel discloses an approach which is more closely aligned with that adopted by the minority in Patel.

The companion 1763 tort cases of Huckle v Money and Wilkes v Wood hold a mythical status in the Anglo-American common law imagination. Few modern accounts of the doctrinal origins of exemplary (or punitive) damages omit reference to them. This article contends that the assumption that these two cases combined to provide damages above and beyond compensation a positive basis at English common law is misconceived. Set back into their historical context, it shows that their true significance is at odds with the decidedly lawmaking significance often ascribed to them by modern judges and scholars alike.

A growing body of literature has emphasised the role of equity as a body of second order principles. These scholars argue that what makes equity distinct is that it assumes a particular outcome at common law, but then controls or disables one party's insistence on her legal entitlements. Where do equitable bars to relief fit within such accounts? This article argues that equitable bars to relief fit comfortably with the view that equity is second order law. This is for a simple reason: equity prevents the unjust exercise of legal entitlements. However, equitable rules are also amenable to being exercised unjustly. To prevent equitable rules being abused, equitable doctrines require some limited discretion to be built in. If this were not the case, then the general law would require a third set of rules to control equity and then a fourth set of rules to control those rules (ad infinitum).