The House of Lords' landmark decision in Hedley Byrne & Co Ltd v Heller & Partners Ltd marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2013.The case is one of the main landmarks of English private law in the twentieth century and has been greatly influential in shaping thinking in a number of Commonwealth...

Many modern civil claims are for relatively small sums of money. The same was true in early nineteenth century Australia. The position there was complicated by the way in which the court system was evolving at the time. With the demise of the Court of Civil Jurisdiction in 1814 the jurisdiction...

Private law evolves slowly over decades or even centuries. Without the benefit of hindsight it is not always obvious that any change has taken place at all. Yet this observation does not inevitably hold true. The emergence of unjust enrichment in the final decades of the twentieth century is a...