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Although commercial surrogacy businesses have long been banned in the UK, the Court of Appeal recently ruled that a clinical negligence victim would not be breaking the law were she to enter into such an arrangement in California, where a more liberal surrogacy regime prevails. The woman is unable to have children after she developed cervical cancer and had to undergo radical surgery. The NHS trust that was responsible for her treatment was ordered by a judge to pay her almost £600,000 in compensation after it admitted that four opportunities...

The legal dispute between Elon Musk and Vernon Unsworth, the man who helped to rescue boys trapped in a cave in Thailand, may have dropped out of the press over the last few weeks, but a recent case shows the lack of accuracy of Mr Musk's assertion that Twitter was just the forum for a 'schoolyard spat' that would not be taken seriously by users who expect to read 'opinion, not facts'. The case involved a tweet made by the agent of a former chairman of UKIP in the run...

The supposition that residential properties are exempt from Capital Gains Tax (CGT) is a common, but incorrect, one. You would think, for example, that if a person only owns one property, sleeps there quite often, has post sent there and tells the council that it is their home, that would be sufficient evidence to ensure that the onward sale of the property would not give rise to a CGT liability. This view might be strengthened by the fact that it was clearly the owner's original intention to live in the...

When parents changed their wills to exclude their son from inheriting their £1 million farm after a family falling-out in 2016, he took the unusual step of challenging their right to do so. Normally, such challenges are made against the estates of deceased parents. The son took the step after having, he claimed, done 'arduous' work on the family farm for more than 20 years on the basis of a promise by his 78-year-old parents that he would one day inherit it. That such a promise had been made was not...