The Law behind the Law: Rookes v. Barnard [1964], the Common Law and the Right to Strike

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 37-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Smith
Keyword(s):  
The Law ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-395
Author(s):  
Paul F. Scott

AbstractThis article, on the basis of a consideration of the development of the law relating to the use of passports as a tool of national security in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, challenges the common law conception of passports, arguing that passports effectively confer rights and so, consequentially, that the refusal or withdrawal of a passport represents a denial of rights. From this conclusion a number of points flow. Though these consequences are most acute for the United Kingdom and Canada, in which passports remain regulated by, and are issued under, prerogative powers, there are also a number of points of significance for Australia and New Zealand, where passports have a statutory basis.


1945 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lord Wright

In preparing the few and elementary observations which I am about to make to you tonight I have wondered if the title I chose was apt or suitable. The Common Law is generally described as the law of liberty, of freedom and of free peoples. It was a home-made product. In the eighteenth century, foreign lawyers called it an insular and barbarous system; they compared it to their own system of law, developed on the basis of Roman and Civil Law. Many centuries before, and long after Bracton's day, when other civilised European nations ‘received’ the Roman Law, England held back and stood aloof from the Reception. It must have been a near thing. It seems there could have been a Reception here if the Judges had been ecclesiastics, steeped in the Civil Law. But as it turned out they were laymen, and were content as they travelled the country, and in London as well, to adopt what we now know as the Case System, instead of the rules and categories of the Civil Law. Hence the method of threshing out problems by debate in Court, and later on the basis of written pleadings which we find in the Year Books. For present purposes, all I need observe is that the Civil Lawyer had a different idea of the relation of the state or the monarch to the individual from that of the Common Lawyer. To the Civil or Roman Lawyer, the dominant maxim was ‘quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem’; law was the will of the princeps. With this may be compared the rule expressed in Magna Carta in 1215: No freeman, it was there said, was to be taken or imprisoned or exiled or in any way destroyed save by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Whatever the exact application of that phrase in 1215, it became a text for fixing the relations between the subject and the State. Holdsworth quotes from the Year Book of 1441; the law is the highest English inheritance the King hath, for by the law he and all his subjects are ruled. That was the old medieval doctrine that all things are governed by law, either human or divine. That is the old doctrine of the supremacy of the law, which runs through the whole of English history, and which in the seventeenth century won the day against the un-English doctrine of the divine right of Kings and of their autocratic power over the persons and property of their subjects. The more detailed definition of what all that involved took time to work out. I need scarcely refer to the great cases in the eighteenth century in which the Judges asserted the right of subjects to freedom from arbitrary arrest as against the ministers of state and against the validity of a warrant to seize the papers of a person accused of publishing a seditious libel; in particular Leach v. Money (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1001; Entick v. Carrington (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1029; Wilkes v. Halifax (1769) 19 St. Tr. 1406. In this connexion may be noted Fox's Libel Act, 1792, which dealt with procedure, but fixed a substantive right to a trial by jury of the main issue in the cases it referred to.


1956 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Jolowicz

The proposition that a master, who has become liable for an injury caused by a servant acting in the course of his employment, can recover an indemnity from the servant is one which has been stated on a number of occasions, but until the recent case of Romford Ice & Cold Storage Co. v. Lister no clear authority could be cited in support. It is true that the master's rights against his servant have been canvassed in at least three modern cases, but in all of them the common law position has been obscured by the application of the Law Reform (Married Women and Tortfeasors) Act, 1935. In Romford Ice & Cold Storage Co. v. Lister, however, by what those interested in legal principle can only regard as a happy chance, it was necessary for the Court of Appeal to deal with the matter independently of the Act.


1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Devakumar

The Law Lords in June 1998 overturned the judgement in the matter of L. v. Bournewood. The Law Lords, on a majority decision, were of the opinion that a compliant incapacitated patient such as L. does not need the formal powers of the Mental Health Act and admission to hospital and subsequent assessment and treatment for mental disorder can be based on the common law principles of necessity. However, this position is quite contrary to the Appeal Court judges' view, “The right of a hospital to detain a patient for treatment for mental disorder is to be found in, and only in, the 1983 Act, whose provisions apply to the exclusion of the common law principle of necessity” (L. v. Bournewood Community Mental Health Trust, 1997).


1969 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 221 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Stevens ◽  
Jason W. Neyers

The law of restitution has developed out of the law of quasi-contract and the law of constructive trust. Inadequate attention to the logic and coherence of doctrines in the law of restitution, however, renders this new law as opaque and confused as its predecessor. This is largely due to the remedial mentality of the common law. The remedy to the remedial mentality is to concentrate future efforts in stating doctrine on defining rights, not remedies. The precedent for this type of change in method is the transformation that occurred in contract and tort over the past 100 years, inspired, in part, by civilian theories of private law. The right that generates the remedy restitution is the cause of action in unjust enrichment. It arises where there has been a non-consensual receipt and retention of value, that is, a receipt and retention of value that occurs without "juristic reason." "Nonconsensual" means by mistake, by theft or by finding. There are a number of problems in the method of the common law tradition which stand in the way of recognizing this simple formulation: (a) The inherent expansiveness of "restitution " and "unjust enrichment" if these terms are not rigorously defined; (b) The lack of serious competition for the expansive versions of the subject, on a number of fronts; (c) The lack of a clear direction in the efforts to reform the law of quasi-contract and constructive trust; (d) The deeply embedded nature of the quasi-contract thinking; (e) Poor analysis in some areas of the law of contract and (f) Tort; and (g) The lack of an explicit agency of reform in the tradition.


Author(s):  
Eva Steiner

This chapter examines the law of contract in France and discusses the milestone reform of French contract law. While this new legislation introduces a fresh equilibrium between the contracting parties and enhances accessibility and legal certainty in contract, it does not radically change the state of the law in this area. In addition, it does not strongly impact the traditional philosophical foundations of the law of contract. The reform, in short, looks more like a tidying up operation rather than a far-reaching transformation of the law. Therefore, the chapter argues that it is questionable whether the new law, which was also intended to increase France's attractiveness against the background of a world market dominated by the Common Law, will keep its promise.


Author(s):  
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling

This chapter studies intellectual property (IP). A hallmark of the New Private Law (NPL) is attentiveness to and appreciation of legal concepts and categories, including the traditional categories of the common law. These categories can sometimes usefully be deployed outside of the traditional common law, to characterize, conceptualize, and critique other bodies of law. For scholars interested in IP, for example, common law categories can be used to describe patent, copyright, trademark, and other fields of IP as more or less “property-like” or “tort-like.” Thischapter investigates both the property- and tort-like features of IP to understand the circumstances under which one set of features tends to dominate and why. It surveys several doctrines within the law of copyright that demonstrate how courts move along the property/tort continuum depending on the nature of the copyrighted work at issue—including, in particular, how well the work’s protected contours are defined. This conceptual navigation is familiar, echoing how common law courts have moved along the property/tort continuum to address disputes over distinctive types of tangible resources.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136571272110022
Author(s):  
Jennifer Porter

The common law test of voluntariness has come to be associated with important policy rationales including the privilege against self-incrimination. However, when the test originated more than a century ago, it was a test concerned specifically with the truthfulness of confession evidence; which evidence was at that time adduced in the form of indirect oral testimony, that is, as hearsay. Given that, a century later, confession evidence is now mostly adduced in the form of an audiovisual recording that can be observed directly by the trial judge, rather than as indirect oral testimony, there may be capacity for a different emphasis regarding the question of admissibility. This article considers the law currently operating in Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia to see whether or not, in the form of an audiovisual recording, the exercise of judicial discretion as to the question of the admissibility of confession evidence might be supported if the common law test of voluntariness was not a strict test of exclusion.


2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danwood Mzikenge Chirwa

AbstractThe 1994 Malawian Constitution is unique in that it, among other things, recognizes administrative justice as a fundamental right and articulates the notion of constitutional supremacy. This right and the idea of constitutional supremacy have important implications for Malawi's administrative law, which was hitherto based on the common law inherited from Britain. This article highlights the difficulties that Malawian courts have faced in reconciling the right to administrative justice as protected under the new constitution with the common law. In doing so, it offers some insights into what the constitutionalization of administrative justice means for Malawian administrative law. It is argued that the constitution has altered the basis and grounds for judicial review so fundamentally that the Malawian legal system's marriage to the English common law can be regarded as having irretrievably broken down as far as administrative law is concerned.


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