One hundred years have passed since Mr. Parker went to collect his bag from the cloakroom at Charing Cross station, found that the bag was missing and that the cloakroom ticket bore a clause limiting the liability of the railway company to £10. The resultant litigation was neither the first nor the last of what have become known as the ticket cases, but the judgment of Mellish L.J. in the Court of Appeal in Parker v. S.E.Ry. has become the point from which most later judgments begin. Whether this centenary is a cause for celebrations or for shudders is a question that the reader must answer himself. This article seeks to trace and delineate the “embellishment and gloss” that have been added to the principles set out in Parker v. S.E. Ry. over the last century.

Injunctions against pickets and demonstrators are not common. There appear to be no reported cases in England between 1899 (when Llandudno Urban District Council tried to stop a clergyman from preaching on the beach) and the disputes in the London Docks in 1972. In Hubbard v. Pitt, the use of injunctions again came to the fore, when a firm of estate agents obtained interlocutory injunctions restraining members of a tenants' campaign from picketing their premises as a political protest.

The law of agency has been affected indirectly by the European Communities Act 1972. This is largely due to section 9 of the Act which has undermined important principles of English company law. Since many of the propositions of the law of agency depend upon, or are supported by, company law cases it follows that the law of agency has, itself, been affected by the changes in company law. The real question, therefore, is not whether changes have occurred; but to what extent they have occurred. Unfortunately, the infelicitous wording of the Act, already criticised by academics, makes the answer to the above question that much more difficult. Assistance in elucidating the point, however, may be forthcoming from elsewhere. Section 9 of the Act purports to give effect in the United Kingdom to the provisions of the First Directive of the Council of the European Economic Communities on Harmonisation of Company Law and one is, therefore, entitled to seek clarification of the section's verbal ambiguities in the provisions of the said First Directive.

In a series of recent papers Professor Ronald Dworkin has presented a critique of the legal positivist's analysis of law as typified by the work of H. L. A. Hart. Dworkin argues that the “model of rules” provides an incomplete and inadequate characterisation of the nature of legal argument and judicial reasoning and, hence, of law, by virtue of its failure to recognise that judges are bound, in making decisions, not only by rules, but also by principles which have rather different logical properties.