is always his rule: to do justice in the instant case. The House of Lords doesn't agree with that. Lord Denning said that he was a Portia man himself. It was Portia who found a way of interpreting the Venetian law of contract which did justice, defeated Shylock and saved
Antonio's flesh.
Rights or Duties? Here is what Jennings said about them. He told us a good many years ago that we must be very careful in using the word "rights". If it is meant that they are natural rights, or if they are accepted as part of the logic of the western democracies, the word is used in a sense different from its meaning in the phrases "contractual right" or "right to damage". It is different from the general constitutional principles that rights are actually conferred by statute law or common law. Today we can see that both the Bill of Rights and the Basic Law use the word "rights" in the same way only as correlative to a duty imposed upon some persons by positive law. In this sense, liberty is only a freedom without legal restriction. It arises from the tautologous principle that anything is lawful which is not unlawful. There is no more a "right to free speech" than there is a "right to tie up my shoe-
lace"; or, if there is a right of free speech, there is also a right to tie up my shoe-lace because
there is no law which prevents them from doing so. The question to be discussed in each case
is the nature of the legal restriction. This is exactly what both the Bill of Rights and the Basic
Law happened to mean of the word "rights" which is correlative to restrictions "established
by laws"; (9(1)) as well as to the "obligation to abide by the laws in force" in Hong Kong
(Article 42, Basic Law), both as a crown colony of the United Kingdom at present and as a
Special Administrative Region of the PRC after 1997.
The position is different where the "rights" are set out in a written constitution, for they
govern the restrictions, and restrictions which infringe the rights are not laws in accordance
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