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I was away Wednesday to Saturday, and on my return was pleased to see that such a vigorous theoretical debate has been occurring on the RDG. In the shameless plug category, Butterworths Canada will, any day now if it has not already, publish a special issue of the Supreme Court Law Review entitled "Ruled by Law: Essays in Memory of Mr. Justice John Sopinka." (vol 12, SCLR (2d); ISBN 0-433-42418-4). One article in there is called "The Mystery of Juristic Reason" and it looks at whether common law Canada has really embraced a civilian orientation in looking for a 'juristic reason' for enrichments. The argument in the paper is that it has not done so, but remains undecided. The paper then goes on to argue that there are good theoretical reasons for retaining the traditional common law orientation, of looking for reasons for reversing enrichments. I will not bore the group with any more detail, except to pass on the observation that the only occurrence of the phrase "juristic reason" which I could find before its appearance in Pettkus v Becker in 1980 was in the speech of Lord Simon in DPP v Majewski [1977] AC 443, 478. In the same volume is an article by Stephen Waddams called "Breach of Contract and the Concept of Wrongdoing" which examines the status of a breach of contract. Professor Waddams concludes that while breach of contract is a wrong, it does not therefore follow that it generates the same remedial consequences as other wrongs. The other articles are also on private law issues.

In the administration category, the recent flurry of discussion generated a couple of messages which bounced to me as non-member submissions, even though they are from subscribers, because the address subscribed was in some way different to the address which the posting was designated as "from". Majordomo is very literal about these things and it does not know about all of your email aliases (which even you may not know about). If ever your email address changes (which includes changing the "return" address in your mailer settings), no matter how slightly, this problem will arise. My general policy will be to approve the message, unsubscribe your current address, and subscribe the one your bounced message came from. The consequences for members are (a) there will be a delay in the appearance of your posting, the length of which depends entirely on how quickly I get the bounced message, and therefore is longer if I am away; (b) you will get a "welcome to the RDG" message which might seem rather mysterious. The only general way to avoid all of this is if ever your "from" address changes, to effect the subscribe/unsubscribe procedure before the problem appears at the time of your next posting. If you need help just let me know. In fact you will need my help to subscribe or unsubscribe any address other than the one you are writing from. Note also the implications if you sometimes use a different mail server and address altogether, eg some people use a web-based mail program when on the road. Any postings from that are likely to be bounced. The only solution I suppose is to subscribe both addresses to the RDG, but then you will get double helpings of postings. All of this is also by way of explaining that I will now try to approve some messages which were bounced during my absence, which may appear more or less out of place as they were replying to postings which are now a few days old.

And finally: some RDG members will know that my family and I are moving to Montreal and that I will be taking up a post at McGill. We are only ten days away from moving. My plan is to allow the RDG to run here in Oxford during August, when I will have only intermittent email access (so NB the earlier comments about delays in approving bounced messages). Toward the end of August or early September I will be seeking to effect the RDG's second migration, to a server at McGill. I am hopeful that the move will be quite seamless and I will keep you up to date. The main difference will be, of course, that the address for making a posting will be different. There will be one twist, which is that at McGill they do not use Majordomo software but rather LISTSERV, a different package for the same function. If you ever use any of the majordomo commands, then you will have to learn a different command set. I will point everybody to online documentation about this nearer the time.

Lionel