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If someone upon whom you depend financially dies leaving you nothing in his or her will, judges have the power to ensure that you do not go empty-handed. As a High Court case showed, however, that power will only be exercised in your favour if your need for support is both pressing and genuine. The case concerned a delivery driver whose modest lifestyle had been boosted by a £450,000 lottery win some years before his death from a brain tumour. By his will, he left his entire estate – valued...

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a public emergency which is threatening the life of the nation. A High Court judge wrote those words in reaching the momentous conclusion that, whilst the crisis persists, derogation from certain fundamental human rights is not merely justified, but essential. The judge gave his ruling in the case of a profoundly deaf dementia sufferer in his 80s who was living in a care home which, in common with almost all such facilities, has been closed to visitors during the pandemic. His daughter lodged an emergency application...

To say that parents bear a moral responsibility to ensure that their children behave themselves in public is uncontroversial – but are they also under a legal duty to do so? The High Court addressed that issue in ruling that the sins of an allegedly anti-social teenager could not be visited upon his mother. A local authority claimed that the 15-year-old boy had engaged in various forms of anti-social behaviour, including assaulting another schoolboy and setting fire to a public bench, which resulted in a detrimental effect on the quality...

If a neighbour obtains planning permission for a building project to which you object, that does not always mean you just have to grin and bear it. In a case on point, objectors to a householder's plans to extend his garage succeeded in blocking his proposal despite the fact that it had received local authority approval. Three years after moving into a five-bedroom detached house on a newly built estate, the householder, whose family owned five cars and three motorbikes, obtained planning consent to extend his garage both outwards, to...