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‘Magnetic pull of history’ has shaped Irish law

Justice Mary Laffoy told the Law Reform Commission conference yesterday that regardless of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EU, much of Ireland’s law reform work takes place outside of any EU context.

A lot of law, including, commercial, criminal, family, land, succession, trusts and tort, remains a matter for each member state to determine, the LRC president said.

In those areas, she said, there is an “inevitable magnetic pull of history” towards examining what the position in the UK might be, she said.

For perfectly valid, albeit pragmatic reasons, it will often make sense that English legal solutions will also be suitable for Irish legal problems, Justice Laffoy said.

Public acts

“We inherited a lot of British legislation in 1922,” she pointed out, and four years away from marking our centenary as an independent state, 1,100 public acts that remain in force in Ireland date from before 1922.

She said that “an occasionally adventurous legislature” sometimes departed from inherited norms of English law, citing the Succession Act 1965 as an example.

This act adopted many civil principles, such as the legal right share, via the civil law influences in succession law of our Scottish neighbours.

“The Law Reform Commission has made its own distinct contribution to placing an Irish imprint on our law”, she said, including for example our land law and conveyancing law that led to the 2009 act.

Historical reasons

Justice Laffoy said that the 2009 act amounts to a virtual code of law that would be familiar to lawyers from a civil law tradition, and indeed to English lawyers, by abolishing the last remnants of feudal tenure.

“UK law, for these historical reasons, continues to be important to our work,” she said. She said that while the LRC’s work is rooted in a common law tradition, the EU influence is also present.