Explore the vast range of titles available.

It is a long-established legal rule that the contents of a will, once it is admitted to probate, are available for inspection by any member of the public. This article is the first examination of this remarkable rule, its possible rationales, and its attendant disadvantages. Particular attention is paid to the problems of the ensuing loss of privacy. Legislative attempts to limit open access are considered together with non-legislative devices used for the same purpose: the secret trust; and applications for the sealing of a will (a device especially prevalent in the case of royal wills).

A person incurs inchoate criminal liability when he incites another person or other persons to commit a crime. The most salient characteristic of incitement, in comparison with the other forms of inchoate crime, is the existence of a communication that is made with a view to persuading the addressee(s) to commit an offence. This article explores the question of why incitement should incur criminal liability, and the nature of such liability. It also identifies its distinctive features. The principal focus here is on ambiguity in the putative words of incitement and on questions of gauging whether the words have had any effect on the actions of the addressee(s). It covers both the standard criminal offences and conduct which, arguably, should not be regulated by the criminal law, thereby raising issues of freedom of speech. Legal issues are set in the context of the common law generally, while drawing (for the most part) on English law in matters of detail.

CONSTITUTIONAL conventions are to be found in political and legal systems of very different types. Not surprisingly, they exist in considerable abundance in those systems—the prime example is the United Kingdom—the affairs of which are ordered by an unwritten constitution. Familiar instances of constitutional conventions in British government include the following: that the Monarch is required to appoint as Prime Minister the person best placed to command a majority in the House of Commons; that governments are to resign when defeated on a vote of no confidence; that the judicial members of the House of Lords refrain from indulging in party political debate in the chamber; and that ministers are to resign from office after displaying an (admittedly indeterminate) degree of mismanagement of their departments. The preconditions of the existence of any particular constitutional convention are set out in a well-known passage by Sir Ivor Jennings.

The purpose of this article is to examine an episode in modern British constitutional history and the lasting mark that it has left on the machinery of financial government. The episode and its sequel, notwithstanding their importance, have received little attention other than the few lines that are routinely assigned to them in textbooks of taxation or constitutional law. When the present day budgetary procedure took shape in the nineteenth century, these books recount, it was the practice that taxes were levied on the basis of resolutions passed by the House of Commons pending the enactment of the annual Finance Act. In 1912, in 'Bowles v. Bank of England', this practice was pronounced illegal on the ground that nothing less than an Act of Parliament could provide the basis upon which taxation could lawfully be imposed on the subject. Before the Finance Act for the particular financial year reached the statute book, therefore, the Bank had no legal authority to deduct income tax at source from payments due to the plaintiff. The government responded by passing the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act (hereinafter \"PCTA\") 1913. Known for some time thereafter as the \"Bowles Act\", it rendered the established practice lawful within strictly demarcated limits. The statutory scheme has been a fundamental feature of the fiscal constitution ever since, the original legislation being re-enacted in revised form in the PCTA 1968.

The term ‘constitutional convention’ tends to be attached indiscriminately to any regularity of conduct that is observed in the process of government. It is here argued, however, that constitutional conventions as properly understood are social rules which govern the relations between political parties or the institutions of government. Furthermore, this term is to be confined only to those social rules that are constitutional in character. Intra‐ party standards of conduct, in particular, have wrongly been accorded the status of constitutional convention. These considerations, together with a detailed examination of the precise status of constitutional conventions as part of the ‘morality’ of the constitution, lead to a re‐assessment of the conditions under which constitutional conventions both come into existence and cease to exist.

Most rights claims are capable of being analysed in terms of both the competing theories of rights, the will theory and the interest theory. Discussion hitherto has concentrated on particular instances of rights claims which are easily accommodated by the one theory but accommodated only with difficulty (if at all) by the other. Such problematic examples have served to illuminate what is at stake between the rival theories. However, in the case of the right to a public trial, I argue that neither theory is capable of accommodating that particular 'right'.