 Gweithio gweithio. Gweithio gweithio, yn gyflawn gyda'r gweithio. Rwy'n gobeithio'r gwahau amser gyda'r gymhreith. Rwy'n gobeithio'n gwahau, deser i gyrfa'r gweithio, yw eu gwirioneddau ddiwedd yn y gyflawn gyda'r gwahau amser. Mae'n Sara Werthington, ac mae'n ddweud i'r gwirionedd ar gyfer'r Gwylfa'r Ffacol efo'r 2016 Erufyrd, yw'r lech chi'n gweithio. Mae'n yma, yn y ddiwyllion lech chi'n ddweud sydd wedi ymddir yw'r ffresfieldod, ac mae'r ffresfieldod yn cyfrifloedd yng Nghymru Llywodraeth Cymru felly mae'n cyd-dwynghwyl o'r cyfrifloedd rydyn ni'n wneud unrhywun o'r cyfrifloedd o'r cyfrifloedd yn cyfrifloedd o'r cyfrifloedd o'r cyfrifloedd, ac mae'n gyrhaf ei wneud o'r cyfrifloedd o'r cyfrifloedd o'r cyfrifloedd, fel y byddwch eich cyfnod o'r gwybod a'r busgu'r cyfnod yn ymwneud â bobligatio 8. Felly, maen i'r wych i'r cyfrifedd a'r gweithi'n gweithio â'r cyfrifedd a'r gyfrifedd yma yn gweithio'r gweithio ar y cyfrifedd a'r gweithio'n gyfrifydd a'r gweithio'n gweithio. Yng nghymru yn y ffrifydd ac rwy'n gweithio'n meddwl am yr oedd sydd yn ei wneud ar y gwaith ar y dyma, ond yn ddiweddol, mae'n gweithio'n meddwl am y byddwch i'r gweithio. Mae'r cwpwys i'r ddigon iawn i gyda'r anodd ysgol iawn o'r hyn yn ysgol ysgol ysgol iawn. Felly, mae'n fwyaf ychwaneg â wlad tu i'w ddweud. Mae'n fwyaf ychwaneg gan yng Nghymru. Gweithio'r ydw i ddiogelodau i Andrew Robertson, sydd wedi bod wedi i'r ddaf i'r ddechrau. Fylinech. Mae'r ddweud iawn i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i Michael Kirby. Y ddofyn ni'n gwneud ei amlwg hefyd. Mae'n ddwylo'n ddweud yn cyflwyno'ch gwneud yma yw i'ch cyflwyno ddod gyfer y dyma ac yn y dduniadau yn y ddweud, mwyn amdano gallu hynny. Felly, maen nhw'n meddwl a fyddwch gennym ni'n cynnig iawn i gyflwyno ddwylo'r dingyfyd ac yn y ddwylo'r ddwylo'r rhaid. Maen nhw'n meddwl yn y dda i'r Sesameig,驢r hiol sydd amlwg,驢r i'r teimlo i'r werthfaeth, a'r selystr yn ysgolwyr i chi'n iawn i gael efo'r ystyried, a rwy'n fieisio'r ystafell yn ystafell ar y Ffadol Ffadol Ysgolwyr yn Ysgolwyr yn ystafell ar y yma yma y 35. Mae'r record rwy'n iawn i'r sgolwyr a'r awdraeth, dwi'n byw'n ei wneud i'r awdraeth na'r ffordd. Dyna'r yma'r ymddangos a'r ystafell ar y Ffadol Ffadol Ysgolwyr yw'r dyma'r Ysgolwyr ym 11 yma. yng Nghymru Cynlluniaeth Cyfnodol, ac, wrth gwrs, y dynon cyfnod y Hysbryd Ysgriliad, ar 1996-2009. Michael Kirby wedi bod yn cyfnodol i'r cyfrydiad effeithio cyfanol a'r cyfrifiool i ddysgu'r iawn. Hefyd, y cysylltu'r cyfrifio Cyfrifio i'r Cyfrifio Cyfrifio, ac y cysylltu'r cyfrifio Cyfrifio. Onwr yn rhoi ychydig, fyrd i'r cyfrifio, ac mae'r cyfrifio sefydliad ac yn dweud the biggest signs of injustice in the world. He has been awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal and the Gruber Prize for Justice. He was named Laureate of the UNESCO Prize for Human Rights Education. The sitting morning herald named him as one of Australia's top ten public intellectuals, but before we start making jokes, there is competition in that category. One Australian magazine named him as one of the hundred most influential Australians ever and included him amongst Australia's 10 most creative minds. He's been elected as honorary member of the American Law Institute and honorary bencher of the Inner Temple in London and has been declared an Australian living treasure by the National Trust. Michael Kirby's interests in recent years have been some distance from the law of obligations for much of his adult life. He's been heavily involved in international organisations, playing various roles with the OECD, UNESCO, the International Labour Organization and the International Commission of Jurists, including a term as its president. Since retirement from the bench, he's immersed himself in work with international organisations having recently, just to give two examples, led a committee of inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea. And co-chaired the UN Secretary General's high level panel on access to essential medicines. But while his current interests lie elsewhere, Michael Kirby's judgments continue to have a powerful influence in our field and I can attest to this as a teacher. At Melbourne Law School, Michael Kirby's judgments play an influential role right across the obligations curriculum with significant and influential interventions in the law of contract, the law of torts, the law of unjust enrichment in various equitable doctrines and in relation to Australia's important statutory obligations. Michael Kirby's judgments are beacons of justice, reason and good sense for law students. Every year I find large numbers of students who are so convinced by his reasoning that they want to resolve problems in accordance with the principles laid down by Justice Kirby even when he's dissenting on the law. In fact, especially when he's dissenting on the law. So we're delighted that he's agreed to take time away from his demanding work on international causes and turn his attention once again to the law of obligations. So it's with great pleasure that I invite the Honourable Michael Kirby to present the Cambridge Freshfields Lecture for 2016. Thank you very much Andrew for that introduction and I'm extremely proud to be asked to deliver this Freshfields Cambridge Lecture for 2016. And I acknowledge the presence here of Mr Phillip Richards who is from Freshfields and who has the distinction of having interrupted a fishing holiday in Iceland to be here for this lecture. So thank you very much and thank you for supporting the Law School and this lecture series. I've been told that many of the people in this audience who've had my lecture for several weeks have had the opportunity to read it. The opportunity to read it doesn't necessarily mean that it is percolated into the grey matter. When judges told me when I was an advocate and even later when I was a judge, yes, yes, we've read the written submissions. I never believed them because I always thought it was important to get the essence of it orally so that it has a chance of percolating into the brain from one human being to another by way of diction. And so I'm going to take you quickly through my paper with a sort of tasting experience of the ten revolutions that I have experienced in my judicial life of 34 years, in my life of even longer as a practitioner. The earliest purchases I made of a published legal series were typical of a young, ambitious Australian lawyer of 1958. The Red Buckrum of the Australian Law Journal contained a lot of news on developments in Australia, England, and also detailed reports of the High Court of Australia and of the Privy Council. The Black Buckrum were the three volume weekly law reports that brought me a constant stream of the authentic voices of the English law from the Privy Council, the House of Lords, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and other English courts. This is how it was in those days in Australia 50 years after the establishment of our nationhood by the federal constitution and 60 years ago. I still have those volumes on my shelves brought up to date in the intervening years, later the Commonwealth Law reports and the New South Wales Law reports were added, and I even condescended to statute as time went on. Nowadays, when I think of the law of obligations, my mind tends towards international law, as Andrew Robertson has pointed out. I think of the obligations of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to conform in respect of its population to the international covenant on civil and political rights and other international treaties, which, strangely enough, most of which they have adhered, and I think of the TRIPS Agreement of the World Trade Organization and of the obligations under that agreement and under the Doha Declaration and under the United Nations Human Rights on the Right to Health as it conflicts with international intellectual property law. These are what now occupies me rather than the red and the black buckram of my earlier times. I've called my survey a survey of revolutions and I'm very pleased that we're honouring tomorrow morning the 50th anniversary of Gough and Jones. I came to know Robert Gough very well in the 1980s and 1990s. He was a wonderful human being and a great judge and scholar. He is shown in a photograph on the walls of my chambers in Sydney at a conference which we both attended in Canada in which we were honoured by the native people of the region and each of us was given a huge headdress of native people's feathers. Robert, in a typical English way, looks extremely uncomfortable and embarrassed by the headdress. I, on the other hand, having had a lifetime getting used to the clothing in which we were bedecked in the tradition of the British Empire, was completely at home and felt that it was only fitting that we should both be there in that gear. Although lawyers trained in the English law played a great part in many legal revolutions, the United States, Ireland and India spring to mind, for most of us in the old dominions the word revolution conjures up most unpleasant ideas. And yet the broad features of the developments that I've seen in my lifetime deserve, I think, the title of revolutions. So what are the ten revolutions? The first is the declining role of the judicial committee of the Privy Council and the growing disunity of the common law. The representatives of the Australian settlers didn't provide for the continuance of the Privy Council from their colonial days into the federal constitution. However, the British cabinet keen to protect British investments in Australia thought otherwise. And section 74 of the constitution controlled any process of abolition. This had the advantage of promoting and overseeing the consistent development and the application of the common law in the colonies and in particular the private law. The role of the House of Lords wasn't mentioned in our constitution, still less preserved by it. But for two reasons, up to the middle 1970s it was treated as effectively part of the Australian judicial hierarchy. The first reason was the realistic appreciation that the same judges were serving on the House of Lords as on the Privy Council. And secondly, it was thought useful and prudent to follow their directions so as not to fall foul of the decisions of the Privy Council. These developments began to change by the 1970s and looking back it's surprising that it took such a long time and so few questioned the situation as it existed in the 1970s and even up to the 1980s. The first force for change was political, the growing realisation after the First World War and following that of Australia's separate nationhood. This took time to set in. Secondly, Australian judges who were foremost in respect and deference to the law boards began to find decisions that they regarded as unconvincing or frankly wrong. And thirdly, justices were appointed to the High Court of Australia who'd served as Federal Attorney General and were inclined to read the constitution and view the private law with entirely fresh eyes. Right up to 1985 the Court of Appeal for England and Wales was uniformly described in Australia as the Court of Appeal. Yet by 1966 there were separate courts of appeal in Australia and I was serving on the New South Wales Court of Appeal by 1984. English authorities were repeatedly quoted and still are to shine light on local legal problems. This is particularly so in the fields of contract and tort law that remain largely governed by the common law. Professor Andrew Burroughs was astonished to discover in his empirical survey produced for obligations 7, the extent to which reports from Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere cite and utilise English judicial reasoning. But we who grew up with the Judicial Committee of the Privet Council know that drawing on analogous areas and the writings of highly intelligent and experienced judges in England is often extremely useful. Back in my student days it was comparatively rare for the Privet Council or the House of Lords for its part their part to refer to overseas common law decisions on the law of obligation or anything else for that matter. However on the cusp of the creation of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom two revolutionary developments occurred. First leading judges appeared who were open to the utility of overseas reasoning and secondly open mindedness was encouraged by a number of considerations chief amongst which was the advent of electronic legal information. So in this sense new technology the revolutionary new technology had an impact in a revolutionary legal development. As chance would have it I presided in Sydney in the last Australian appeal that went to the Privet Council. The appeal was dismissed and a graceful ceremony followed. Now the glue that holds together the principles of the common law is that appropriate to free peoples dealing with their own problems, societies and institutions. Reasoning, persuasiveness and utility not power in law now control comparative developments. The second revolution was European and human rights law and the impact or non impact of that movement. Despite the outcome of the Brexit referendum it seems inevitable to me that the laws of England including in the field of obligations will continue to be affected by the law of the European Union and the human rights emanating from Strasbourg. Years ago as we remember Lord Denning perceived European law as an incoming tide and to some extent this prediction has been vindicated. The alternative as Lord Bingham pointed out would have been that tort law would be left essentially static making only such changes were forced upon it leaving difficult and in human terms very important problems to be swept up by the convention. Well-known decisions of the European law have influenced the English expression of the common law of torts including Reynolds and the Times Newspapers Limited and Campbell against MGM. Although the Reynolds defence was later abolished by the Deformation Act 2013 the relevant provision didn't change the law very much because the statute creates a seemingly similar defence. In the recent decision of the Supreme Court in Michael against Chief Constable of South Wales an important decision was reached concerning the approach to be taken to the legal duty of care on the part of a police authority. In part the decision involved reconsideration of the earlier decision of the House of Lords in Hill against the Chief Constable of West Walkshire but in part it also concerned a claim in negligence brought under the Human Rights Act 1988 for breach of the duties of police as public authorities to safeguard the rights of a deceased person under Article 2 of the European Convention. Most countries of the common law are not parties to the European Convention save for Ireland, Malta only the United Kingdom has signed up but most civilised countries have their own human rights charters including commonwealth countries that are probably closest to the authority and reasoning of the English courts. I'd single out Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Australia alone holds out against this trend. For the law of obligations in Australia there is but one common law and the likelihood of increased divergence from other common law jurisdictions is considerable if not certain. My attempts to construe the Australian constitution and statute law taking into account the international law of human rights were declared by some of my colleagues in Australia to be legal heresy. So far it has made little headway but the engagement of the United Kingdom with European law in the form of the Council of Europe, the EEC and then the EU were viewed by many Australian lawyers like the border interrogations at Heathrow to be a clear signal that the United Kingdom had embarked on a new and different post imperial journey. In the post bricks at world it will be important to monitor whether the United Kingdom joins Australia in viewing the distinctive English ways of thinking about law as something deserving preservation and even revival not elimination. Many Australian lawyers have regarded human rights law as a product of non-English European natural law thinking. It's not the doctrine of the traditional English Protestant legal thinking. More than a few judges in Australia regard their country as a distant citadel protecting the fragile flame of English law and preserving the true common law down there in the antipodes and they're waiting until English lawyers come to their senses and abandon this foreign contagion as post Brexit. They may unexpectedly now begin to do. So what's this space? Thirdly, non equality discrimination and the treatment of people as equals. The common law of England was not always a great vehicle for the protection of the rights of women to legal equality or the protection of minorities. So Stephen Cretney pointed out as latest 1923 Lord Chancellor Birkenhead refused to grant a wife's appeal against an order declining her the divorce she had sought for reasons that would today appear to be misogynistic and even cruel. There are many decisions of many courts throughout the common law that rejected notions of gender equality. The appointment of Brenda Hale in 2004 as a Lord of appeal in ordinary was a sharp break with a very old tradition. But why I presume to ask has there been no follow up to that over more than a decade. Only in India and some parts of Africa to nation states rival England in the low numbers of women appointed to final courts. Reflecting the life experience of half of humanity is hardly a surprising feature of an acceptable legal and judicial profession. This is not a fault. It's an ought to be seen as a benefit and a strength. In Australia justice Gordon's values and approaches were often similar to those expressed later by Baroness Hale in Glideon against Gordon Mendoza. Lady Justice Hale or Baroness Hale wrote of homosexual relations in a way that few if any male law lords would have done and which I certainly can affirm. Judges of the current age who are more cosmopolitan in their legal knowledge and interests, more willing to look to the international human rights sources influenced in part by the context of the law and more likely to confront the ignorant and unjust laws inherited from solely male judges and male legislators in past times on matters related to women, to gays, to people of different races and to other minorities. This was a real legal revolution that had to come and in many places it's still unfolding. A changing composition of the courts and of the legal profession will quite properly influence the changing content of the law they administer. Fourthly the move from formalism to greater realism. Law other than the law of the Meads and the Persians is in a constant state of flux. Nevertheless there are comparative certainties more I suggest in contract than in tort law. A contract as Sir Bernard Ricks reminded us in a recent case, one of his last, the first rule is that the contracts are made to be performed not broken. This is in fact what Michelle Obama said was a guiding principle for her, keep your promises and what Mrs Trump in amazingly similar language. But I'm here tonight to tell you that they're all copying Sir Bernard Ricks who said it first and clearest. In the field of tort the common law is generally struggling to advance from one solution to another in terms of a category or classification to a broader genus. That after all was what happened in Donahue and Stevenson. It is that case that led in due course to the suggested elemental requirement of proximity in an endeavour to confine somewhat the classes to which an enforceable legal duty was owed. But that single word proved no better than Lord Atkins multiple word description. In Australia, as in Canada, New Zealand and other countries of the common door, many judicial decisions have been delivered in the hope of providing greater precision to civil obligations. The House of Lords led the way in Kaparo Industries PLC against Dickman, propounding the so-called three way test. In Australia, I felt the attraction of the Kaparo approach and I said so in many decisions. My approach attracted ractuous academic support and I persisted that my judicial colleagues were never quite convinced. I think that many of them were unwilling to admit so candidly a role for policy and judicial line drawing that a candid examination of the cases would have demanded. The recent decision of the United Kingdom Supreme Court in Michael against Constable of South Wales suggests that judicial divisions in that court are similar to those that earlier emerged in Australia in that respect. As an alternative to judicial law reform, one of the most notable revolutions that's occurred in the law in the United Kingdom and Australia and other common door countries over the last 50 years has been the result of the work of full time law reform bodies. I, as you have heard, took part in the creation of the Australian Law Reform Commission model on the Law Commission of England and Wales. Both sides of the world, the worker professional law reform bodies, have proved highly influential, including in the field of private law. To some extent, the borrowing of legal ideas through decisions of the courts has now been replaced or certainly supplemented by exchanges between law reform agencies. If funding and implementation of law reform reports has not always been as wholehearted and substantial as was expected by Lord Scarman in his day, the work of international law reform goes ahead. A conference celebrating the achievements of the law commission commissions in the United Kingdom over 50 years has concluded recently and I understand the papers will be available to participants in this conference. Fifthly, there's comparative law and the struggle against isolation. Although comparative law borrowing has always been, to some extent, a feature of the common law enforced throughout the British Empire by the decisions of the Privy Council in the House of Lords, it remains the fact that most of the comparisons were borrowed from England. Nevertheless, even in the 19th century English scholars and writers were willing to praise comparative jurisprudence of the mature systems. Today there are many scholars and some judges who espouse the value of comparative law scholarship and that is evidenced in the books that are on display every time we end a session of this conference. Lord Bingham was a great supporter of comparativism. Jurists from the Antipodes are mostly cautious and mostly, I think, hostile. Against, amongst other problems of doctrine, they often cite the perils of unprincipled cherry picking and the dangers of embracing legal approaches that are imperfectly understood by common lawyers. Nevertheless, intellectual isolationism is scarcely a viable stance for lawyers to take into the age of the internet skype, international trade and torts, global media, intercontinental travel and even conference series such as the obligations conferences. The field of comparative law borrowing is large and ever growing from within and beyond common law jurisdictions, including in such notions as proportionality borrowed from the German legal system. The barriers of resistance and hostility towards legal categories and reasoning of lawyers in non-English speaking jurisdictions are breaking down. Somewhat belatedly, globalism has met the common law and the common law has met globalism. Again it remains to be seen how the counter revolution of Brexit may affect this trend. Sixly, the revolution in legal realism. In the olden days, judges indulged in the fairytale of the declaratory theory of the judicial function. Over the past 50 years, however, there's been a growing candour in the exposition about the judicial role, including the acknowledgement of the creative functions of judges, especially in the highest courts. As the duty of care cases demonstrate, many judges feel anxious about asserting to directly their function in creating new principles, but on the whole the greater judicial transparency about what is actually going on in the courts has been fairly well accepted. Certainly this is so amongst the knowing members of the legal profession and of the academy. In the field of tort law, the growing influence of leading academic scholars has promoted a greater willingness on the part of judges to tackle problems realistically and from a practical standpoint. Professor John Fleming was a foremost leader of this 50 years ago, and his books were taught to me at law school and influenced generations of Australian judges who followed. Fleming paid particular attention to aspects of the operation of tort law that had long been neglected, including the assessment of damages, the shift towards statutory no fall compensation schemes and the impact of insurance on the ambit of tort liability. His aim was to bridge the gulf that frequently existed between the exposition of tort law in the books and the law as it was in actual operation. Certainly Fleming had a large impact on Australian practicing lawyers and their submissions before judges in my country. That impact has I think been beneficial. In one field however, the call for realism has not been rewarded by as much attention as it probably deserves. I refer to the significance of insurance, its existence, its prevalence, its availability and its significance for the outcome of litigation. Everyone knows that motor vehicle negligence claims are paid out of a fund created pursuant to compulsory statutory third party insurance. Yet solemnly the litigation and much else is carried on as if insurance was completely irrelevant. Similar considerations affect the attempt to introduce more empirical economic analysis on reasoning about our obligations. In the Court of Appeal of New South Wales in 1990 in a case called SICAN against Aims, I expressed regret of the failure of the common law to develop more than a general notion of the economic consequences of asserting the requirements for reasonable care. I describe this as one of the chief defects in the law of negligence as affecting public authorities as it then existed. In his comments on SICAN, Fleming drew attention to the early judicial attempts in the United States to formulate in almost algebraic terms a ratio between the probability of injury and the cost of prevention. Fleming was repeatedly teaching the Australian legal profession and the judges that the individual case in tort is important for the compensation to the claimant and the liability of the respondent. But it also assumed an additional importance equally significant, that of setting the standards for a civilised society to be observed by neighbours living together in the same community. Seventhly, the decline and fall of jury trial. Fifty years ago, in most parts of Australia and elsewhere, claims in tort and contract were generally decided by civil juries. In New South Wales such juries were composed of four citizens chosen from a panel, similar panel to that called for criminal trials. The judge instructed the jury on the law, the jury returned their verdict, judgement was entered, appeal was very difficult, save for material legal misdirections. Cases had to be simplified down to their bare bones in order to address the jury. The system began to be demolished in 1970 in most parts of Australia, although it lingered on for a time in the state of Victoria. Now the civil jury is almost extinct in Australia. For a time civil jurors could still be summoned in defamation cases and in claims where fraud had been pleaded. However, even there the exceptions have been whittled away now almost to vanishing point. Recently the New South Wales Bar Association suggested that the reintroduction of civil jury trial should be considered as a cost saving measure in that state. However the suggestion went nowhere because courtrooms for the past 40 years have been built throughout the state without a jury box, without facilities for jurors. The result of the abolition of jury trial has undoubtedly been a great lengthening of trials. The introduction of extremely intensive case management, the proliferation of appeals including interlocutory appeals, the explosion of written submissions, a profound increase in legal costs and a great expansion of judicial reasons in an attempt to make them appeal proof. Similar developments have occurred in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. It's unlikely that jury trial for cases of legal obligations will be restored at least in Australia. It's ironic that the system was abolished because it was thought that jury trial was too slow and cumbersome and that juries were unduly sympathetic to claimants. The outcome has been a costly trial system so costly that most claims now have to be sent off to mediation before trial. There the resolution is normally achieved by reference to market forces and the prospective costs of litigation rather than legal principles or entitlement on the merits. The pressure to channel claims arising out of legal obligations into alternative dispute resolution may be another instance where an elite procedure developed by specialists ultimately grew so cumbersome and expensive that it sapped life out of the very creature and caused it to look elsewhere to survive. Those who ponder on the serious uncertainty of the body of the law of obligation such as the law of negligence need to reflect on Darwin's rule of variation. According to Charles Darwin, all living things require an internal capacity to regenerate and alter if they are to survive in a constantly changing environment. The consequences of the death of jury trial for the future elaboration of tort and contract law is a subject worthy of close study. Eighthly, there's the growing predominance of statute law and the decline of the common law. Those who were taught the law of obligations as I was more than 50 years ago spent most of their time reading very closely and discussing judicial reasoning. Statutory law did not generally make much of an appearance except where some provision of the Crimes Act was relevant or perhaps a law reform statute dealing with contributory negligence such as James Goodcamp dealt with in his session today. Now in the United Kingdom too and elsewhere in the countries of the common law, the role of the judges has generally become that of expounding the meaning of the written law, statutes, regulations, bylaws, ordinances, rules of court, etc. and the role of judge made law is in rapid decline. This is less so in tort and contracts than elsewhere but even there statute is playing an ever increasing role where it applies the statute so long as it's constitutionally valid and where that is an issue will still narrow the scope for the operation of the common law. This development has had many side effects. Some of them concern the rules for statute interpretation compared to earlier times. In 1993 in Peper and Hart the House of Lords adopted a principle with the rule excluding reference to parliamentary material is an aid to statutory construction should be relaxed providing that the legislation was ambiguous or obscure. In addition to the use of statutory materials academic writing is now increasingly receiving received both to assist in interpretation and to promote the achievement of sound policy understood by reference to permissible considerations. The evaluative role of the decision maker is now increasingly acknowledged but increasingly law is sourced to a legislative mandate. This phenomenon of expanded statutory law is likely in the years ahead to revive once again the hopes of expressing the contract law of England and of those who live under the same or similar rules in statutory form. In the United Kingdom pressure to that end is likely to come from European and other predominantly civil law trading partners and this notwithstanding Brexit. In Australia the very same pressure is likely to be felt by us from the nations principle trading outlets China, Japan and the Republic of Korea. Merchants and business people in such countries who asked to see the trading partners contract code are astonished to be told that none exists. The golden age of judicial exposition of the law obligations is therefore fading. Availability, predictability and relative certainty have brought us to the age of statute. This revolution too will not be reversed. It seems likely to be enhanced by increasing pressures for codification. Ninthly there are statutory restrictions on liability. Once the law begins its journey towards exposition in applicable rules of statutory form, the safety valve of judicial discretion and the safety valve of merit evaluation is removed or certainly reduced. What remains is simply what the lawmaker or investor has provided in advance of the happening of the cause of action. Over the past 40 years legislatures in many jurisdictions have enacted provisions to abolish common law remedies, to substitute statutory entitlements and then to limit those entitlements sometimes in very unjust ways. An example of the most radical statutory reform was the New Zealand Action and Compensation Act. This followed the report of an inquiry chaired by Sir Owen Woodhouse, a distinguished New Zealand judge. Similar scheme was recommended in Australia by the same author. However, it was abandoned in 1975 when the Whitlam Government in Australia, which had promoted it, was dismissed by the Governor-General and replaced by a government that did not favour such a change. Views differ about the implementation of the accident compensation scheme in New Zealand. The aggregate fund for benefits for accidental injuries has been whittled away by successive governments strapped for funds. In Australia, having avoided by a whisker the New Zealand type reform, the available damages in tort cases soon had to face severe restrictions on recovery of another kind introduced by states and territories throughout the country. The restrictive legislation is complex, but its purpose is plain and basically uniform. It's to cut back, very substantially, on entitlements of people harmed by others as declared in the recent decisions of the courts. The haste, uniformity and radical nature of the imitations that were introduced in Australia probably represented a substantial demonstration of the disapproval by the politicians of what judges and lawyers had been doing in the law of obligations over the previous decades. This was the more surprising because in the years immediately prior to the beginning of this wave of statutory reform in 2002-3, the judicial decisions themselves had favoured claimants, favouring claimants had come to an abrupt end in the Australian courts themselves. As I would walk into the High Court of Australia for the delivery of yet another judgement, I would say to my colleague Justice Callanan another plaintiff hits the dust and he would say, yes, but they had a dream run for too long. The most disappointing feature of the restrictive legislation enacted in Australia was the blatant emphasis of its political advocates on simply reducing the costs of compulsory insurance at a price that many injured persons would be denied most or any damages for wrongs undoubtedly done to them by others. Such people are now thrown back in Australia on their families, on the community or on social services where available. There is little that judges can do about this in the affected area of the law of obligations but give effect to the statutory law. The perceived justice or injustice is regarded as immaterial affordability and political opprobrium is the governing criterion for the legislatures. Finally, the revolution in the law has involved the view of the law of itself. The chapter of the law of torts in the analysis of the history of the House of Lords by Robert Stevens proclaimed that the modern law of torts is dominated by decisions of the House of Lords. Although both the praise and blame of this opinion laid too much at the door of the senior English judges, it must be remembered that the focus of Robert Stevens context was the House of Lords 1876-2009. In the 20th and 21st centuries, some of the credit and doubt was a disproportionate part of the suggested blame has to be shared by judges of the common law beyond the seas. Stevens made a good point in arguing for the advantage of having judges who decide real cases on legal grounds entrusted with constitutional as well as private law responsibilities. This is certainly the case in Australia, in Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, India and most common law jurisdictions other than the United States. Stevens' view was that resolving banal issues, doubtless many in the field of the law of obligations, was a healthy antidote to judicial grandeur delusions, although he was far too polite to describe it quite so bluntly. He argued that dealing with boring cases was important for modest judging more generally. Now, constitutional questions, for good or for bad, are sometimes in their nature incapable of being boring, but so, as I've tried to show, are many cases in the private law of obligations, including the puzzling progeny that followed the ginger beer bottle purchase in Paisley of poor, shockable Mrs Donahue. In addition to the many legal revolutions that I've collected, it must be acknowledged that a sea change has come over the institutions and practitioners of law after our tradition throughout the world. In many countries, we're now attempting to ensure a greater diversity into the intake into the law. We're seeking to support vulnerable lawyers as they study, practice and even as they become judges. We're looking afresh at subjects of poverty law. We're encouraging greater engagement of the law with civil society. We're promoting various forms of legal aid so that equality before the law is not just an empty ideal. We're increasingly realising the huge practical importance of the law of costs, which can often be far from boring. We're more deeply concerned about miscarriages of justice than were sometimes the case in the past. These concerns give rise to new institutions, new appeal rights and even to innocence clinics. We encourage more reliable empirical research about the actual question and the law. Learned professors find the outcomes astonishing. They nowadays say so even more directly than John Fleming did in earlier times. We're not only more interested in other legal systems. We're even willing to look beyond the law of England to foreigners whom we concede may occasionally have useful things to say to us, including in the field of obligation, including after Brexit, so long as they translated into English. None of the foregoing revolutions in the law and the legal profession was important or even much mentioned or even mentioned at all 50 years ago. Yet these are features that struggle to make our judiciary, our practitioners and our scholars today fit for purpose. There's no reason to think that the legal revolutions are going to suddenly abate in 2016. The prospect is exciting, I think, not boring. To maintain the rule of law, dressed in the raiment of justice, we must keep it moving. On the basis of past experience, the true challenge is to foresee the legal revolutions that are just around the corner for judge, practitioner and scholars alike. In obligations nine and obligations 10, which will follow this conference, I think to some extent they already write their own agenda. First, the unexpected and to many of us shocking and deeply depressing advent of Brexit, which seems to demand that English lawyers shrink their minds just as they were suddenly and unexpectedly beginning to enjoy the expansion which they had been exposed to. Secondly, the unaddressed revolutions of gender and social changes and of racial changes in the worldwide family of the common law, including in the institutions of the common law, including, dare I say, in the obligations conference, through the prism of which we presume to judge the present and to forecast the future of the law of obligations. On several fronts, Africa, the Caribbean and much of Asia remain embracing the common law. They remain important and they remain a place of opportunity for influence and for sharing of experience, especially after Brexit. I hope that when in due course I'm invited back to come back to an obligations conference in the future, I will see reflected the gender, racial and other variations that I predict will come in our law and in the obligations conference accordingly.