John Randall’s scientific contributions

The fields of tort and crime have much in common in practice, particularly in how they both try to respond to wrongs and regulate future behaviour. Despite this commonality in fact, fascinating difficulties have hitherto not been resolved about how legal systems co-ordinate (or leave wild) the border between tort and crime. What is the purpose of tort law and criminal law, and how do you tell the difference between them? Do criminal lawyers and civil lawyers reason and argue in the same way? Are the rules on capacity, consent, fault, causation, secondary liability or defences the same in tort as in crime? How do the rules of procedure operate for each area? Are there points of overlap? When, how and why do tort and crime interact? This volume systematically answers these and other questions for eight legal systems: England, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Scotland, the Netherlands and Australia.

How should a civil court use a relevant conviction? Some have argued that a civil claim contesting the factual basis of a conviction should be struck out as an abuse of process unless new evidence is presented which “entirely changes the aspect of the case”. Such a high evidential requirement is wrong in principle, inconsistent with section 11 of the Civil Evidence Act 1968, and unjust in practice. The law should recognise that there are two distinct types of cases. The first is concerned with truly abusive claims, where the later civil suit is brought for an improper purpose or otherwise similarly abusive; there a high level of new evidence should be required. The second deals with challenges to convictions which are in principle permissible; there, if on the facts they have no real prospect of success, an application for summary judgment by the other party is the solution.

Having set express termination clauses (ETCs) in their legal context, this article's first aim is briefly to explain three significant points concerning their operation which have now been clarified. Other important questions remain unresolved, and the second aim is to explore four of them: the judicial “reading down” of ETCs; whether termination need be immediate; the recoverability of expectation damages; and the avoidance of an unintended repudiation. Respects in which the English law of contract on each of them would benefit from development or change are identified, and it is argued that the Canadian approach to the award of expectation damages following termination pursuant to an ETC is preferable to the established Anglo-Australian position.