This thesis explores the structure of the criminal law and, in particular, the structural device of element analysis. Building upon the classical actus reus/mens rea distinction, element analysis further sub-divides both parts of an offence into acts, circumstances and results. In doing so, element analysis offers advantages within the criminal law, both as a structure for legal discussion and analysis, and as a structure for law reform. In relation to the latter, recent reform of inchoate assisting and encouraging (as well as a range of Law Commission recommendations) has made use of element analysis to structure the reform of the general inchoate offences, requiring different levels of fault in relation to different offence elements. However, despite the increasingly important role played by element analysis, it remains a controversial device. Critics have exposed a lack of objectivity within the separation of elements, and an unacceptable level of complexity, particularly in relation to assisting and encouraging. Accepting much of their criticism, but rejecting the viability of the alternatives offered, this thesis therefore seeks to reinterpret and remodel element analysis in order to realise its potential

Licensing regimes which regulate the use of animals generally implement a process whereby an individual must be deemed to comply with a particular set of regulations in order to be granted, and retain, a licence to keep or use animals in a particular manner. The set of regulations will differ dependent on the specific use that the licensee intends to put the animals to. This research will consider the efficacy of the common regulatory model of the licensing regime as a means of regulating animal use in England, with a particular focus on their ability to ensure animal welfare. The research aims to address the gap in available information on the practical application of two pieces of legislation, whose provisions create licensing regimes; The Zoo Licensing Act 1981 (ZLA 1981) and The Welfare of Wild Animals in Travelling Circuses (England) Regulations 2012 (WWATC 2012), introduced under the Animal Welfare Act 2006 (AWA 2006).

Until recently sentencing was not considered to be a separate subject within the discipline of law. It was thought to be a matter essentially for judges. Sentencing was not taught as such. Rather, on ascending to the bench lawyers took with them their experience of the law in practice and their knowledge of their powers as limited by statute. Thereafter there was little in the way of guidance. In the last quarter century sentencing has developed in a number of ways. Parliament has passed an increasing number of laws creating and limiting new powers. Academic commentators have analysed judgements and they have sought to establish a scheme of things to do with sentencing. Judges themselves have tended increasingly to explain their decisions and to develop an order of priorities. This work is a study of the sentencing policy laid down in judicial decisions in cases of contraventions of The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. By studying the sentencing decisions in reported cases of drugs offences, a legal model of the drugs trade is established. Such a model in broad terms follows the nature and terms of the offences contained in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. But it is clear that there are certain aspects that cut across the conventional order of offences. In particular, the sentencing of drug addicts has posed difficult questions for the courts to consider. It is uncertain as to whether lawyers have grasped fully the implications of drug abuse on the scale practised by most addicts. This particular study has been completed in the context of the present literature relating to sentencing offenders. The law is predominantly that of England and Wales because that is the jurisdiction with the greatest number of reported cases. Consideration is given to both Northern Ireland and Scotland. The Law is stated as at 31st December 1986.

Evidence from eyewitnesses is often the starting point for police investigations and it is estimated that it plays an important role in one quarter of all contested Crown Court cases. However, the memory is a fragile and malleable instrument which can produce unreliable yet convincing evidence. Because mistaken witnesses can be both honest and compelling, the risk of wrongful conviction in eyewitness identification cases is high, as is illustrated in a number of famous miscarriages of justice. This thesis assesses the sufficiency of the protections offered to defendants in cases involving eyewitness identification by examining psychological research on memory, police procedures for the collection of evidence from eyewitnesses, and judicial discretion to exclude unreliable evidence found in \(R\) \(v\) \(Turnbull\) and section 78 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. In interview, startling levels of guessing were reported by witnesses attending identification procedures; and suspects were largely unaware of their rights. Current identification procedures are time-consuming and inefficient; and psychological research offers some guidance but few answers, precluding the usefulness of expert evidence. The thesis concludes that an increase in specialised identification officers, reform of procedures to allow for greater use of video identification, guidelines on the exercise of discretion under s.78, and judicial education regarding the importance of using a comprehensive \(Turnbull\) direction are required before an adequate level of procedural and evidential protection against erroneous identification can be offered to suspects.

This research considers the interface between the restraint of trade doctrine (hereinafter ROTD) and competition law in England and Wales (comprising the UK Competition Act 1998 and Articles 101-102 TFEU). The ROTD and competition law overlap in cases where both laws appear to be applicable to certain restrictions on professionals (e.g. non-competition clauses). It will be argued that the ROTD and competition are different legal regimes whose prima facie concurrent applicability creates an interface problem for some professionals who are precluded from relying on the ROTD to resist a particular restriction. The most acute problem, in cases of overlap, arises where a restriction does not infringe competition law but falls foul of the ROTD. By examining developments in UK law and in EU law this study analyses how the interface problem evolved incrementally. UK competition legislation may be interpreted so that the ROTD applies only in a residual fashion. Moreover, Art 3 of EU Reg. 1/2003 delineates the interface between EU competition law and national competition law. The High Court has interpreted Art. 3 so that once EU competition law is applied to a restriction the court cannot reach a different conclusion under the ROTD. For reasons of consistency, this conclusion may also hold true for the interface between the ROTD and UK competition law. The scale of persons affected by this problem becomes greater if some professionals in employment are classified as “undertakings” because such classification would increase the overlap and interface between competition law and ROTD. This thesis proposes fresh solutions for courts when applying the ROTD. The solutions aim to ensure the availability of the ROTD’s unique protection to professionals who are subject to restrictions to which competition law also applies.

The law of contractual receivership has evolved quietly over a period of one hundred and fifty years or so. The institution of receivership started out as a mortgagee's remedy, but has proved remarkably adaptable to the commercial needs of large financial organisations, so much so that it has enjoyed ascendancy as a method of debt enforcement for the latter half of the twentieth century. This thesis attempts to chart the developmental process of receivership law, and to evaluate both judicial and legislative responses to the particular issues of policy it raises. In particular, it investigates the impact of receivership, both in legal and practical terms, on the various parties interested, in their various capacities, in the corporate entity. The main body of the thesis addresses this question from a number of perspectives. Corporate insolvency affects a wide variety of constituents. Receivership, as an insolvency regime, is frequently criticised as overly biased in favour of powerful financial institutions at the expense of both the corporation itself and its other stakeholders. By affording a contractually appointed receiver dominion over the entirety of the company's property, and by sanctioning the proposition that his decisions be informed exclusively by his appointor's interests, this censure of the law might appear justified. Alternatively, proponents of receivership have promoted the institution as a 'rescue' mechanism, a means by which viable companies, or viable sectors of their businesses, may be nurtured back to productivity and profitability. These two conflicting views will be examined in the final Chapter, in the light of recent reform initiatives which appear to envisage at least some minor modification to the existing 'balance of power'.

This study, which seeks to conceptualise client behaviours within the professional service relationship is located within the academic literature associated with relationship marketing. However, this study differs from the main characteristics of that literature in two ways. First, that literature focuses on the organisational benefits of retaining customers and empirical work to explore the benefits customer's receive is limited. This study, among clients of a professional service, provides a better understanding of why clients maintain relationships with solicitors and how their motives influence their behaviours within that relationship. Secondly, empirical studies are primarily focused within the business-to-business context and attempts to extend theory generated from that context into consumer markets have been criticised. The focus of this study is the private client perspective. Consequently, this thesis draws heavily on construct and theory development within the social exchange literature to explain the empirical findings and highlight limitations with the conceptual development and measurement of constructs with the relationship marketing literature. This thesis provides empirical support for the propositions that the presence of particular interaction variables will generate trust in the solicitor among private clients and that the presence of trust in the solicitor will result in private-client commitment to that relationship. Specific behaviours, exhibited by clients committed to the private client-solicitor relationship, are identified and suggestions made regarding client behaviours that emerge when private clients are not committed to the relationship. The thesis also critiques the way in which the trust and commitment constructs have been conceptualised and measured within the marketing discipline. An agenda is identified for future research to extend knowledge in four broad areas: the appropriateness of relationship marketing theory for the professional service context; conceptual and measurement scale development of constructs that underpin relationship marketing theory; differentiation of antecedents generating trust in, or reliance upon, professional services providers; and further understanding of private client behaviours within the professional services relationship.

This thesis has four main objectives; a) to provide an understanding of Legal Aid Appeals Tribunals, from a description of individual cases and the activities that occur therein, focusing in the main on those at which an appellant and/or their representative is present; b) to explore the use of documentation in the tribunal practices of tribunal panel members, legal aid clerks, appellants and their representatives; c) to explore the possibilities that post-analytic ethnomethodology as the adopted research methodology allows, and to clarify what this radical research 'programme' entails; and d) taking legal positivism as an epistopic to explore its possible ethnomethodological respecification in light of the descriptions of practice in legal aid tribunals. Although this thesis explores the possibility of post-analytic descriptions it is not a theoretical investigation into post-analytic ethnomethodology, but an empirical investigation of phenomena of legal aid tribunals which allows an exploration of the practical application of post-analytic ethnomethodology. Nevertheless, some clarification is attempted of just what a post-analytic ethnomethodology may entail. Used in conjunction with the description of the use of texts in legal tribunals, the investigation of epistopics, though not a common research practice does here help develop our understanding of the situated nature of legal practical, legal decision making, and legal objectivity. In a wider sense this approach highlights an argument made throughout this research, that texts are both significant and researchable as they are utilised in everyday practices, and do not have to be research solely with reference to an isolated reader and an isolated content.

The main focus of this thesis is the three copyright collecting societies operating in the music field - PRS, which looks after the public performance and broadcasting rights in music, MCPS which is responsible for the mechanical (recording) right in music and PPL which looks after the public performance and broadcasting rights in sound recordings. Between them, these three societies had gross revenue (before costs) of over £83 million in 1983, of which PRS was responsible for 72%, MCPS for 17% and PPL for 11%. The thesis attempts to investigate their operations and performance. In many ways they are similar but there are also important differences especially between PRS and PPL on the one hand and MCPS on the other. They all depend for their operations on the concept of collective licensing – that copyright owners can more effectively exploit their copyrights by banding together in societies such as PRS, MCPS and PPL. In many cases, collective licensing represents the only possibility for the copyright owner to receive income from his copyright. All three societies also use blanket licences in their operations to various extents this means that licensees can use the entire repertoire of the society on payment of royalties and provided they supply the society with returns of their music use (on which the society bases distributions to members). Since PRS and PPL are effective monopolies, representing virtually all copyright owners in their respective fields, such licensing can be effective. MCPS is an effective monopoly only in the broadcasting field and it is only in this field that it employs blanket licensing. The other fundamental differences between MCPS and the other two societies are its agency relationship with its members and its charging of a commission to cover costs. All of this is looked at in detail.

This thesis is concerned with social inquiry and/or pre-sentence reports in criminal cases. These reports are compiled by probation officers, at the request of the court, to assist the court in reaching an appropriate sentencing decision in some criminal cases. This study takes place against and draws upon a wealth of material that has contributed to what is now a considerable body of knowledge but which has also left gaps in our understanding of the ways in which probation reports are constituted and constructed and the implications of this to the wider administration of justice. Empirical accounts of probation reports have largely consisted of documentary analyses or quantitative data. The inherent partiality of these approaches has meant that reports have been artifically decontextualised from their operational moorings. Probation practice has been theoretically located along a care-control continuum that has reflected the historical evolution of sentencing strategies and state intervention into welfare practice. The aim of this thesis is to present a contextualised account of probation reports. In order to unravel and reveal the processes, philosophies and strategies related to report writing and to address the impact of these in the judicial arena, the study was conducted from a grounded observational perspective that acknowledges the complexities of report compilation at the interactive, organisational and systems levels. In adopting this approach it is clear that the care-control model that has been applied to other areas of probation practice is not necessarily conducive to the practice of report compilation because whilst it applies to the role of the probation officer in relation to supervising offenders, it is not readily transferable to the relationship that exists between report writers and sentencers. This relationship is extremely important to both the impact and the content of reports, to the extent that the offender becomes incidental. as opposed to central, to the final document if not to the process. I suggest therefore that, whilst different areas of probation practice are not mutually exclusive, probation reports might be understood in terms of a role-function model. The role of the report writer and the function of the report emanate from an historical context that continues to have an impact on contemporary probation practice but which has rarely been the object of study at an operational level. This thesis attempts to redress the theoretical and empirical balance by adopting a qualitative approach that incorporates an historical perspective into the analysis.