ABSTRACT
Indeed, Lord Shawcross (then Sir Hartley Shawcross, the post-war Labour Attorney General) commented that this was a ‘very simple branch of the law’ which required ‘no study or thought at all’. Its precise scope has, therefore, over the years been by no means as settled as the province of other mainstream core or optional subjects of the qualifying law degree, either in terms of the perceived extent of the subject area for academic or vocational purposes, or within the undergraduate curriculum, where it is now usually a popular second or third year optional subject, although specific coverage varies enormously from law school to law school.
