Revelations in UK Law

Mr Spearman has argued that these matters, if they are to be criticised at all, should be regarded as relatively trivial. There is, for example, a dispute as to the extent to which BP personnel were involved in the project.

On the other side of the line, or so it seems to me, would fall private conversations in a domestic environment (including at any rate some discussion about business matters). For example, one would expect most people from time to time to come home from work and to feel free to unburden themselves about the horrors of the day – whether to a wife, husband, lover, mistress or partner (homosexual or otherwise).

It is not the subject-matter which determines the issue in those cases, but the circumstances in which the opinions or information may be imparted. The entitlement to protection springs from the nature of the confidential relationship itself: cf Argyll v Argyll (cited above) at 329–30. It is necessary to have regard to any such pre-existing relationship, and the duties of confidence to which it correspondingly gives rise.

As to what degree of likelihood makes the prospects of success 'sufficiently favourable', the general approach should be that courts will be exceedingly slow to make interim restraint orders where the applicant has not satisfied the court he will probably ('more likely than not') succeed at the trial.

For these reasons, the test to be applied when considering whether it is necessary to restrict freedom of expression in order to prevent disclosure of information received in confidence is not simply whether the information is a matter of public interest but whether, in all the circumstances, it is in the public interest that the duty of confidence should be breached.

When an ex parte application is made for a Mareva injunction, it is of the first importance that the plaintiff should make full and frank disclosure of all material facts. He ought to state the nature of the case and his cause of action. Equally, in fairness to the defendant, the plaintiff ought to disclose, so far as he is able, any defence which the defendant has indicated in correspondence or elsewhere.

The Norwich Pharmacal jurisdiction is an exceptional one and one which is only exercised by the courts when they are satisfied that it is necessary that it should be exercised. New situations are inevitably going to arise where it will be appropriate for the jurisdiction to be exercised where it has not been exercised previously. The limits which applied to its use in its infancy should not be allowed to stultify its use now that it has become a valuable and mature remedy.