Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), the freedom enjoyed by the police to detain suspects in custody and to question them in order to obtain incriminating admissions, is made subject to the mandatory duty of the court to exclude any confession that was or may have been obtained by oppression or as a result of conduct likely to render the confession unreliable. The courts are assisted in this duty by the requirement for custodial interviews to be contemporaneously recorded either by verbatim notes or by audio tape.

The requirement to make contemporaneous records appears to have been designed ‘to prevent the police from fabricating confessions or damaging statements [and] to prevent those who have in fact made admissions subsequently retracting them’. Backed by the statute, this requirement is more stringent than that provided for under the old Judges’ Rules.

Is there a general right to a minimum wage in English law? That we even ask this question might prompt a suspicion that we have taken leave of our senses. After all, no general right to a minimum wage exists in statutes or in the common law, and the situation is not altered by the incorporation of European Community (EC) law into domestic law by the European Communities Act 1972 -for, while it is true that the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty may be interpreted as granting a general right to a minimum wage, the UK has opted out of this chapter?

Certainly, the UK is party to international treaties and conventions - most notably the European Social Charter (ESC) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) - that expressly grant a general right to a minimum wage.

Does the law of estoppel remedy reliance loss, or protect and grant expectations? In 1983 it was said that:

‘This is a question that the courts must decide once and for all, and … they must not shirk from providing an answer by pretending that that answer will vary according to the facts of each particular case.’

This article examines a view about this question which I shall call the ‘reliance loss theory’, which states that the normal response to a successful plea of estoppel is to compensate the claimant's reliance loss rather than to fulfil his expectations; in other words, that the court will, if possible, remedy the detriment he has already suffered in reliance upon what the other has said, without going to the lengths of obliging that other to abide by, or fulfil, what he has led the claimant to believe by his conduct or silence. The reliance loss theory has been presented as a description of what actually happens, but it also appears as an argument for what the law should be.

This paper explores the implications for English law of the decision of the European Court of Justice in joined cases C-46/93 Brasserie du Pêcheur v Germany and C-48/93 R v Secretary of State for Transport, ex p Factortame (No 4) and subsequent decisions developing the principles enunciated therein. More specifically, it examines how the English law of torts is to accommodate the European law obligation to compensate, in appropriate circumstances, individuals suffering a loss as a result of a breach by the state of Community law. In confronting this question English law is engaged in the unfamiliar exercise of attempting to match a remedy to an already recognised right: the history of the common law, and the law of torts in particular, is of defining rights in the light of the existing remedies under which they could be asserted.

The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct (ACLEC) has recently called upon academic law teachers of the undergraduate degree in law to take more of an interest in professional ethics. This means that academic law teachers can no longer set the subject aside as something to be dealt with during vocational legal education. Professional ethics must be taught pervasively, ie at each stage of legal education. This paper argues, however, that professional ethics must be taught pervasively in a further sense: even within the undergraduate curriculum, the task of educating tomorrow's lawyers in professional ethics cannot be left to one or more specialists in the subject.

The law's overseeing of administrations of pain-relieving treatment with inevitable life-shortening consequences is of crucial significance in view of the dogmatic approach of English criminal law to active euthanasia. As Lanham states in respect of society's treatment of terminal physical pain:

‘If the euthanasia option is not available, some other method will have to be found. In Britain and Australia that method involves palliative care and the hospice movement. By contrast, in the Netherlands active euthanasia is available and palliative care is poorly developed.’

The recent prosecution in R v Cox made it abundantly clear that causing death in order to relieve a patient of further pain and suffering amounts to murder under current law. By contrast, knowingly shortening life through the administration of pain-killing drugs was recently declared to be lawful by Lord Goff in the House of Lords in Airedale NHS Hospital Trust v Bland.