Edited by D. Lasok Published by Pergamon Press Ltd., Oxford (1980, ix, and 269 pp.) Paperback £4.95

This collection of 22 essays by present and former members of the Law Faculty at Exeter University marks the Silver Jubilee of that University, just as the sister volume “Fundamental Rights”, published in 1973, commemorated 50 years of the teaching of law there. Doubtless there is some significance in the fact that the 1970s work was concerned with “rights” whereas that from the 1980s deals with “duties”. There is, however, no definition of what a duty is and no discussion of the issues recently tackled by jurists, for example, the difference between being obliged and being obligated, or the relationship between duties in the Hohfeldian sense as being corollaries of legally enforceable rights and other definitions, such as the sanction idea of duty held by Austin and Kelsen, Hart’s rule-based concept and the Benthamite volitional notion. Indeed, in the preface, duty is rather simplistically equated with service to the public. This sort of approach allows virtually anything to be considered a duty, and that fact, coupled with the failure of most of the essayists to explain why they consider their particular duty to be fundamental, has resulted in just another collection of essays with little to connect them.

The book is divided into five unequal sections, dealing with the Philosophy of Legal Duties, State Duties, Duties to Justice, Duties in Public Relations and Duties in Private Relations. The essays do not fall naturally under these headings, and it seems strange that one essay on tax goes into the fourth section while another appears in the fifth. More seriously, some essays do not really involve duties at all: this may be illustrated by J. E. Alder’s effective treatment of “How Fundamental is Natural Justice?”, which consists of the methods through which the courts have excluded natural justice, rather than natural justice as a duty inherent in the administrative process. Again if one classified A. J. E. Jaffey’s subject “Wrongful Pressure in Making Contracts” as an aspect of duty, then the concept becomes a most amorphous one: cannot most legal relationships be expressed as duties to refrain from particular acts? If that is so, why are relationships other than contractual not at least mentioned? The truth is, of course, that there is no schematic unity, for there can be little to connect ships’ mates, contraceptives and company directors other than that they are treated in consecutive chapters in this book.