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Causation ↓
You know the tests, but you’re blurring factual and legal causation once the facts get messy — and novus actus is where it shows. The White, Blaue and Kennedy line would sharpen that distinction before Thursday.
Trusts Law Group Project
Due 14 NovWeighting 50%Back to the surgeon and the typist — it’s what made opportunity cost click for you last month. The surgeon types faster than her assistant, but a minute spent typing is a minute of surgery lost — so she trades the task away, and countries do the same.
Don’t ask who’s better at it — ask what it costs each of them to do it.
Your analogy · saved 14 Sep
Apply it to the cloth-and-wine example from seminar 3: work out each country’s opportunity cost before you look at who produces faster.
Certainty of objects
The two tests
A fixed trust needs a complete list of beneficiaries — the court cannot divide a fund among a class it cannot count. A discretionary trust only needs the is-or-is-not test from McPhail v Doulton: can the trustees say of any given person whether he is in the class.
Where it goes wrong
Conceptual uncertainty kills the trust. Evidential uncertainty does not — that is a question of proof. Width alone is not fatal either, unless the class is administratively unworkable (R v District Auditor: the inhabitants of West Yorkshire).
CRISPR-Cas9: Precision and Its Limits
“The genome is less a text to be edited than an ecosystem to be negotiated.”
Review article — Molecular Genetics, Michaelmas term
How Cas9 finds its target
Cas9 is steered by a 20-nucleotide guide RNA that pairs with a matching stretch of DNAAsk desk about this, and only cuts where that pairing sits beside a short recognition motif. The enzyme itself never reads meaning: specificity lives entirely in the guide, which is why designing one is the real work of an editing experiment.
Repair pathways
Once both strands are cut, the cell repairs the break by one of two routes. Non-homologous end joining is fast but error-prone, leaving the small insertions and deletions that knock a gene out; homology-directed repair copies from a template and can write in a precise change.
The choice between them is not free. Homology-directed repair runs mainly in dividing cells, so the tissues most worth editing — neurons, muscle, the mature liver — are often the ones where the precise route is least available.
Off-target effects
A guide will tolerate a few mismatches, so near-identical sites elsewhere in the genome can also be cut. Sequencing of edited lines finds these changes at rates that vary enormously from guide to guide, which is why guide design has become a computational discipline of its own.
What counts as precise
Precision folds together three separate questions — whether the cut lands where intended, whether the repair writes what was intended, and whether the edit reaches every cell that matters. Only the first is routinely measured, and the practice that follows is to sequence widely before claiming a clean edit.
What remains open is how far base and prime editors escape these limits. The early evidence suggests they trade the double-strand break for a narrower repertoire of possible edits — fewer scars, but fewer things they can write.
Four more and it’s a new record.
- Criminal Law — Causation09:00
- Read: R v Kennedy (No 2)11:30
- Tort seminar prep16:00
Novus actus interveniens — 3 days ago
