This article addresses the doctrine of remoteness in tort in light of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Armstead v Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Co. Ltd. Armstead further attenuates an already weak control on tortious liability. In outline, it does so in two ways: first, by establishing that contractual liabilities incurred as a result of tortiously caused property damage comprise non-remote damage provided that those liabilities represent a reasonable pre-estimate of the counterparty’s loss; and, secondly, by allocating the burden of proof in respect of remoteness to defendants. This article explores these rules. It contends, in particular, that the first collides with the fundamental principle that the extent of the claimant’s loss in tort is irrelevant to the issue of remoteness while the second means that, oddly, the onus of proof in relation to remoteness in tort differs from that in contract.

This article argues that public interests fundamentally underpin the decision-making processes of the European supervisory authorities in the banking system and, through their extraordinary regulatory influence, contribute to shaping the discretionary powers, orienting them towards an adequate and effective legal protection of the individual and collective subjective spheres, whose interests are embodied in the legal sources and principles of the European legal order. The case of the European Banking Authority reflects this conceptual framework and could serve as a benchmark for European banking law.

This article is concerned with the question whether a defendant in an unjust enrichment action can reduce or eliminate its liability by establishing that it could have obtained the enrichment (or part of it) from the claimant in a way that would not have given rise to liability. The answer in principle ought to be no. In arguing for that conclusion, I consider the meaning of “enrichment” and “loss”, the nature of the change of position defence and the basis of liability for unjust enrichment in cases involving ultra vires charges by public authorities and the taking of money without consent by private defendants.

This article contributes to debates about the theoretical underpinning for legitimate expectations. Building on existing arguments that what underpins the doctrine is public trust in government, it draws on scholarship on trust from disciplines outside law to reimagine the “trust conception” of legitimate expectations. It argues that the current trust conception lacks conceptual clarity, including several areas of ambiguity which have generated problems for it. The article claims that with the conception so reimagined, trust can offer the necessary theoretical underpinning for legitimate expectations and thus provide much-needed certainty to this confused area of administrative law.

The Damna Usuum was a series of complaints about the operation of uses written during the negotiations with the Commons which culminated in the Statute of Uses (1536). Through detailed analysis of the manuscript, this paper demonstrates that the Damna Usuum has been misunderstood by legal historians. Rather than being a public document intended to persuade the Commons to support reform; the Damna Usuum can be shown to be a series of rough notes prepared by the Crown’s lawyers ahead of their negotiations with the Commons. Furthermore, this has a significant impact on our understanding of how contemporary lawyers conceptualised pre-1536 uses in a period in which they had taken on more proprietary “thing-like” characteristics.

In R. v Jogee; Ruddock v The Queen, the Supreme Court abolished “joint enterprise liability”, thus removing the need for a doctrine that used to temper the harshness of joint enterprise: the “fundamental difference” rule. The Supreme Court nevertheless allowed this rule to linger on in the form of an “overwhelming supervening act” doctrine. That doctrine has led to the creation of yet another: an “escalation” doctrine. We argue that there is no place in the post-Jogee law of complicity for doctrines based on fundamental difference, overwhelming supervening acts or escalation. This is no mere semantic quibble. It has significant implications for the way in which complicity law should be applied, especially in homicide cases.