In this article we examine the issue of the standing of individuals and pressure groups in judicial review proceedings, with particular emphasis on standing in planning and environmental law litigation. We begin by developing a particular conception of liberalism to justify a broad, ‘citizen action’ model of standing. The article then proceeds to examine English domestic law on access to the courts against the background of this liberal model.

It is right to say at the outset that the choice of planning and environmental materials is not intended to point up issues in standing which are exclusive to that context. Instead, our purpose is to make some more general arguments about standing in public law and then, through an examination of case law in planning/environmental litigation–which features relatively frequently in the law reports–to test for coherence and contradiction in the judicial reasoning there encountered

In company law usually the difficulties in determining whether a putative contractual obligation is binding on the company are matters of agency. The issue is whether the person who purported to commit the company to the contract had the requisite authority under the common law rules of agency as modified for companies by statute. At one time it was necessary also to consider whether the contract was beyond the capacity of the company under the ultra vires doctrine, which limited the capacity of the company to the range of business activities defined in the objects clause of its memorandum. Now, following the Companies Act 1989, the capacity of the company is no longer limited in this way to a certain range of activities.

The case of Copelund v Greenhalf has puzzled students of land law for over forty years. It is usually taken as authority for the proposition that a claim to an easement will fail if it amounts, in effect, to a claim of exclusive possession of the servient land. The plaintiff, the owner of a strip of land leading to an orchard, had sought to restrain the defendant, a wheelwright with premises across the road from the orchard, from leaving vehicles awaiting repair on the strip of land. The defendant countered that he and his father had used the strip (save for enough space to allow access to the orchard) for storage of vehicles for 50 years; he therefore claimed a prescriptive easement, under s 2 of the Prescription Act 1832, to do so.

The assertion was recently made in the House of Commons that ministers have the right, in certain circumstances, to mislead Parliament, either by telling an outright lie, or by keeping quiet. This astonishing statement concerns a central aspect of the British constitution: namely the essential ability of Parliament to acquire accurate information about government, even (or perhaps especially) when the government does not want to give it. Despite popular cynicism as to the ability of politicians ever to tell the truth, not lying to Parliament has long been regarded as being of the utmost importance. The very survival of politicians in office has often been made dependent on whether it can be shown that they have misled Parliament: ‘John Profumo lost office not because of his sexual misbehaviour but because he lied to Parliament. When Mrs Thatcher narrowly survived the Westland affair the debate was on whether Parliament had been deceived’. The ability to ensure the effective acquisition of relevant information is essential to Parliament's key tasks of engaging in meaningful and effective debate, and of scrutinising the work of the executive:

The judgment of the House of Lords in Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority appeared to usher in an era ofjudicial respect for children's rights and the autonomy of the older child. Just a decade later the decisions of the Court of Appeal in Re R and Re W were perceived as signalling a reversion to judicial paternalism and dealing a near fatal blow to adolescent autonomy. The fundamental philosophy of the Children Act 1989 itself, in which the wishes of children and the ‘rights’ of the more mature minor play such a central part, came under attack in a continuing series of cases at first instance where judges overruled the judgments of older children in favour of the judgment of their doctors.

As Millett LJ recently remarked, there can be no doubt that ‘the most difficult question’ to be solved in the law of restitution is the exact circumstances in which a proprietary restitutionary remedy will be available to a restitutionary claimant. The boundary between restitution and property is still largely unmapped and continues to generate controversy. What is needed is a comprehensive and systematic enquiry into the effects that the various restitutionary factors (mistake, duress, failure of consideration and so on) have on the passing of property between plaintiff and defendant. That, however, would require a whole book, or, at the very least, a series of articles. This article takes a modest step in that direction by concentrating on one specific topic within the area of restitution and property, viz, the inter-relationship between the law of restitution and resulting trusts.