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Restrictions on the use to which properties can be put often lurk in old title deeds. As one case showed, however, some of them only endure as long as a human lifetime whilst others have no such shelf life and continue to have effect indefinitely. The case concerned a covenant in a 1961 conveyance that placed restrictions on the purchasers of a building plot on which a bungalow was later erected. It forbade them from constructing any other building on the plot, and from making alterations to the bungalow's external...

The value of many assets has been devastated by COVID-19 – but is that a good enough reason for setting aside divorce settlements agreed before the pandemic struck? A family judge considered that issue in a guideline case. The case concerned a middle-aged couple whose 24-year marriage yielded three children before it ended in divorce. By far their biggest asset was a family business which, prior to the onset of the pandemic, was valued at about £3.5 million gross. The husband owned 51 per cent of the shares in the...

Will drafting is an exact science, requiring years of professional training, and a single mischosen or out-of-place word can have very serious consequences. Exactly that happened in a High Court case concerning the mistaken use of the word 'both' – rather than 'each' – in a millionaire businessman's will. The businessman, whose estate was worth £6.4 million, was the main shareholder in a company in which his wife and a close friend and colleague – the beneficiaries – held minority stakes. By his will, he conferred power on his executors...

Whether or not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 is a matter of personal choice. A family judge robustly made that point in declining to authorise vaccination of a care home resident suffering from acute dementia who had fiercely objected to the procedure. The 86-year-old woman believed that she was living in the late 1940s or early 1950s, that her long-deceased parents were still alive and that she worked at a cake factory where she had been employed in her youth. Every day at 4pm, when the factory siren once signalled...