The classical account of administrative law, which holds that unlawful administrative acts are void ab initio and that judicial review remedies such as quashing orders are merely declaratory of such acts’ legal status, appears to be placed in doubt by a range of recent legislative developments, judicial pronouncements and academic commentary. However, the classical account is not only capable of withstanding those apparent challenges: it is constitutionally imperative if collateral challenge is to be maintained and the rule of law thereby upheld.

In the pharmaceutical sector an increasing number of new medicines are large-molecule products, namely biologics derived from living organisms, rather than small-molecule drugs synthesised from chemicals. Unlike small-molecule medicines, which are relatively easy to manufacture, large-molecule products are less stable and harder to produce. We investigate whether the current UK legal system provides an appropriate balance between the protection provided to technology owners and the public interest in accessing medical technologies, especially in times of emergencies. At present, UK law facilitates compulsory licensing of patents but has no equivalent scheme for trade secrets. Our analysis of the legal constraints on potential reforms suggests that a mechanism for compulsory licensing of trade secrets would be compatible with UK domestic law, the European Convention on Human Rights, the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and other international agreements, provided appropriate safeguards are put in place to balance the rights of intellectual property holders with the public interest. The article contributes a detailed framework for the compulsory licensing of trade secrets, drawing parallels with voluntary technology transfer agreements, including provisions for defining the scope of transfer, maintaining confidentiality, restricting future use, providing fair compensation and ensuring enforceability.

The extent to which the English common law protected civil liberties in the past is widely debated. Were the judges protectors of core freedoms such as liberty and the right to protest or were they allies of the executive in their hostility towards them? Since at least Dicey, the common law has had a vision of itself as the former, but what does practice reveal? This article explores the many ways in which the advocates of female suffrage in the 10 years or so before the First World War interacted with executive and judicial authority in their effort to use what they saw as their ancient freedoms to protect their campaigning for the vote for women. The suffragette campaign generated a series of conflicts between the judicial and executive branches of the state while also testing the depth of the common law’s commitment to civil liberties.

In the recent history of private law theory, the task of restoring interpersonal justice to a position of chief importance has been undertaken by those who draw from the wellsprings of Kantian philosophy. But in defining the domain of interpersonal justice, Kantians have also narrowly confined it. In this article I offer a post-Kantian approach, taking reference from a method well established in political and moral philosophy, but yet to make a comprehensive impact on private law: contractualism. Contractualism anchors what we owe each other in the notion of interpersonal justification, offering a fresh understanding of persons, nexuses and relational reasoning. I show how this approach tackles key questions in private law – its institutions of empowerment, primary entitlements, remedial norms and practices, and the division of labour between public and private spheres – in a manner preferable to Kantian theory.

Autonomy theories of contract are influential and have many attractions, not least their compatibility with liberal ideals. However, such theories cannot account for basic features of the common law of contract, in particular: the role of established transaction types, the doctrine of consideration and the phenomenon of contractual obligation. An exchange theory of contract can account for those features of the law. This theory’s liberal credentials can be established by connecting it to an alternative intellectual strand in the liberal tradition, sometimes known as commercial liberalism.

It is widely assumed that English law adopts a restrictive approach towards tort actions for “wrongful life”. This article reveals the true legal position to be much more complex. A broad distinction exists between cases where the wrong occurred before or at conception and those where it occurred during pregnancy, with claims usually being permitted in the former scenario but not in the latter. In this article, I expose this bifurcation as arbitrary before examining potential solutions for remedying it.

This article contributes to a growing body of literature on special jurisprudence through a case study of energy law as an emergent area of law that is perceived to lack a clear understanding of its definition, foundations and doctrine. The article has two functions that both seek to integrate the literature on special (as opposed to general) jurisprudence with that on energy law as a legal discipline and an independent area of law. The first is to explain why the lack of a doctrine is a problem for a field like energy law, thus motivating the creation of a special jurisprudence. The second is to outline how the foundations of the discipline could be deliberatively developed in a meaningful and methodologically justified way.

It is well known that, under a contract of sale, title to goods passes when the parties intend, but it is considered unclear whether the same is true of non-sale contracts. This article argues that there is a long line of cases dealing with “vesting clauses” that establishes that title passes when the parties intend under any contract, not just contracts of sale. This has significant implications for how judges should reason through cases dealing with transfers under contracts and how lawyers generally explain various areas of commercial law.

Effective justice seeks for the truth and consequently must be founded on an analysis of all relevant evidence. Only where a manifestly greater societal interest intrudes, can there be a privilege against the production of testimony. For the Court of Justice of the EU, however, an activist interpretation of Article 8 of the EU Charter, promoting security of data, has become an elevated privacy right which justifies nullifying crucial information, thus shielding criminals, undermining civil trials and obstructing searches for missing persons. No convincingly apodictic conclusion emerges from the several judgments of the court, while the exceptions identified undermine, rather than support, any articulated core principle.