The tort of passing off developed as an offspring of deceit, with the twist that it allows trade rivals, rather than deceived customers, to sue. The classic case is a trader ‘passing off his goods as the goods of somebody else: the defendant is liable for misrepresenting, innocently or otherwise, that his goods are the goods of somebody else. The plaintiff is the trader whose trade is thereby diverted or whose reputation is thereby harmed.

The classic case thus involves a misrepresentation as to the source of the goods. However, case law has shown that this is not the only relevant misrepresentation on which the tort can be founded

The objectives of the Criminal Law Revision Committee when drafting the radical reforms proposed by the 1966 Theft Bill were described by a contemporary commentator2 as being: ‘. . . to do away with the more embarrassing and restrictive technicalities of the existing law . . .’

In the same place it was observed that the Committee faced a choice between creating a specific definition of the various theft offences and their elements, or one whose generality would allow it to evolve to meet the challenges presented by ever more complex and sophisticated dishonest dealing.

In 1979, Allen Smith suggested that there was to be a ‘coming renaissance’ in Law and Literature as a teaching discipline. In fact, Law and Literature had already arrived. In 1973, James Boyd White had publishedhis The Legal Imagination, and had geared it primarily to the teaching and study of law. Of the many intriguing characteristics of the Law and Literature movement, one of the most exciting and most valuable, is the fact that, unlike many other theoretical approaches to the problems of law, the ambition of Law and Literature is firstly educative, and only then, secondly, social and political. Moreover this secondary ambition, has tended, in two senses, to be appended to the educational ambition. In one sense, it is additional in that the political manifesto is supposed to emerge from the educational force of literature. In a second sense, it is additional because politics was certainly not such a ranking ambition in the earliest days of the Law and Literature movement, and it is no concidence that the politicization of Law and Literature has come about as its star has risen, whilst that of Critical Legal Studies has declined

The Society first issued its Statement of Minimum Holdings for Law Libraries in England and Wales in 1958. Revised versions appeared in 1970 and 1975. A supplementary list covering the law of the European Communities and of the then seven continental Member States appeared in 1974. The most recent revision, including the law of the Community but no longer of continental countries, appeared in 1986.

The present revision was authorised by the Council of the Society in 1992, in order to have a list which is up-to-date and also, being stored on disk, can be continuously revised. The list (whose purposes remain those stated in the introduction to the 1970 version by Professor Sir John Smith) must be regarded as provisional.

In 1983, a report by the organisation JUSTICE into the state of prisons considered that the ability of convicted prisoners to communicate with those outside prison, by letters or visits was, as prison regulations then stood, ‘severely restricted’. Recent years have, however, witnessed a relaxation in the controls imposed on prisoners’ legal and non-legal correspondence, including the abolition of the prior and simultaneous ventilation rules and many restrictions affecting those convicted of less serious offences. Despite this fact, a number of restrictions remain, and the practices of prison authorities in opening, examining, reading and stopping legal mail continue to occupy domestic and international courts.

A trustee or fiduciary may mix trust money with his own, purchase property, and make a profit upon its sale when the property subsequently increases in value. Frequently, however, the trustee will use the misapplied money in order to raise further funds by way of a loan with which he then purchases the property. In the first case, equity’s conventional approach is to apportion the increase in value rateably between the funds from the trust and the trustee’s own contribution so that the trust obtains that proportion of the profit derived which the misapplied funds bear to the purchase price. This result flows from the decision of Hudson J in the Supreme Court of victoria in Scott v Scott from which no cross-appeal was taken to the High Court of Australia.

This essay addresses a perennial theme within the doctrine of common law. It is that of the Englishness of English law or alternatively, as Nietzsche once remarked, the lawfulness of being English. It is, ofcourse, a well-known and ironic historical fact that English law is a rather confused form oflocal French Law. The most obvious feature ofcommon law has been that for most of its history, it was recorded in Latin and argued and reported in a species of French. When William Camden sought to identify the most distinctive characteristic of the inhabitants of the Island Britannia, the only thing he could find about the origin of the word Britain was the ancient Gallic practice of painting the body with woad: ‘Brith… signifies anything that is painted and coloured over.’