Precedent in the Southern Hemisphere

1970 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Garfield Barwick

I am most honoured to have been asked to deliver this lecture in the series of the Lionel Cohen Lectures in this University. During the years I practised as an advocate I had the privilege and advantage of appearing in London on more than one occasion before a board of the Judicial Committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council of which Lord Cohen was a member. May I respectfully say that in the argument of cases before him I came to appreciate his knowledge of the law and the perceptiveness of his mind in the resolution of complex legal problems. I always appreciated his unfailing courtesy and patience with counsel even when perforce counsel in the course of duty had to put what his Lordship thought was a bad and even an untenable argument. Also, I came to know him personally and joined the wide circle of his friends. I am very delighted to be now participating in a public acknowledgement of Lord Cohen as a jurist and as a man.

Author(s):  
James Gordley

‘Classical’ contract law was built on a substantive premise about contract law and two premises about legal method. The substantive premise was voluntaristic: the business of contract law is to enforce the will or choice of the parties. The first methodological premise was positivistic: the law is found, implicitly or explicitly, in the decisions of common law judges. The second methodological premise was conceptualistic: the law should be stated in general formulas which can be tested by their coherence. Finally, ‘classical’ contract law reflected an attitude about how best to steer a course — as every legal system must — between strict rules and equitable considerations. Since the early twentieth century, classical contract law has been breaking down. Allegiance to its premises has weakened as has the preference for rigor. At the same time, scholars have found classical law to be inconsistent even in its own terms. Nevertheless, much of it has remained in place faute de mieux while contemporary jurists have tried to see what is really at stake in particular legal problems. This article describes their work.


Author(s):  
Aleksandra Kluczewska ◽  

For a genealogist, each birth, baptism, marriage and death certificate is a valuable source of research. It turns out, however, that genealogists in their work encounter obstacles related to the restriction of access to these sources. This “brake” is legal regulations that can effectively discourage a genealogist from continuing their research. The aim of this article is to present the legal issues of genealogical research, especially in terms of the practice of applying the law and emerging problems in jurisprudence. In her article, the author presented the currently existing legal regulations, which in some cases may hinder genealogists from accessing searches, including legal problems related to the EU Regulation on the Protection of Personal Data (GDPR) in force since May 2018. The article also presents the problem of access to genealogical research from its practical side, recalling the decisions of Provincial Administrative Courts and the Supreme Administrative Court.


competency in a narrow field of practical legal method and practical reason. Then, a philosophical argument will be appreciated, considered, evaluated and either accepted or rejected. This is not a theoretical text designed to discuss in detail the importance of a range of legal doctrines such as precedent and the crucial importance of case authority. Other texts deal with these pivotal matters and students must also carefully study these. Further, this is not a book that critiques itself or engages in a post-modern reminder that what we know and see is only a chosen, constructed fragment of what may be the truth. Although self-critique is a valid enterprise, a fragmentary understanding of ‘the whole’ is all that can ever be grasped. This is a ‘how to do’ text; a practical manual. As such, it concerns itself primarily with the issues set out below: How to … (a) develop an awareness of the importance of understanding the influence and power of language; (b) read and understand texts talking about the law; (c) read and understand texts of law (law cases; legislation (in the form of primary legislation or secondary, statutory instruments, bye-laws, etc), European Community legislation (in the form of regulations, directives)); (d) identify, construct and evaluate legal arguments; (e) use texts about the law and texts of the law to construct arguments to produce plausible solutions to problems (real or hypothetical, in the form of essays, case studies, questions, practical problems); (f) make comprehensible the interrelationships between cases and statutes, disputes and legal rules, primary and secondary texts; (g) search for intertextual pathways to lay bare the first steps in argument identification; (h) identify the relationship of the text being read to those texts produced before or after it; (i) write legal essays and answer problem questions; (j) deal with European influence on English law. The chapters are intended to be read, initially, in order as material in earlier chapters will be used to reinforce points made later. Indeed, all the chapters are leading to the final two chapters which concentrate on piecing together a range of skills and offering solutions to legal problems. See Figure 1.1, below, which details the structure of the book. There is often more than one solution to a legal problem. Judges make choices when attempting to apply the law. The study of law is about critiquing the choices made, as well as critiquing the rules themselves. However, individual chapters can also be looked at in isolation by readers seeking to understand specific issues such as how to read a law report (Chapter 4) or how to begin to construct an argument (Chapter 7). The material in this book has been used by access to law students, LLB students and at Masters level to explain and reinforce connections between texts in the construction of argument to non-law students beginning study of law subjects.

2012 ◽  
pp. 16-16

Author(s):  
Gerald R. Ottenheimer

The uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the imminent Law of the Sea Conference is inevitable in the light of the lack of consensus on many of the most pressing problems of ocean law. Nowhere is this lack of agreement more evident than in the law regulating the world’s fishery resources.During the past few years the attention of international lawyers and experts in related disciplines has been focused on the crucial considerations of continental shelf and ocean bed resources. Yet the legal problems related to international fisheries persist and increase.


1980 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-495
Author(s):  
Julius Stone

Judges whose daily tasks are to interpret the law of their own State frequently find difficulties in expressing the exact nature and hierarchical value of the rules of international law, which from time to time they are required in some sense to apply.Perhaps the classical example of this in countries applying the English common law is that of prize courts and the law which they should apply. Under international law belligerent States, by whom maritime captures (prizes) may be made, have a duty to create some forum before which issues can be tried as to the lawfulness of such captures and its consequences. As Lord Parker observed inThe Zamoraas to the title in the property seized, “from the moment of seizure the rights of all parties are governed by international law”. In the final ruling in that case, the Privy Council held that the neutral property at issue had been unlawfully requisitioned, even though such requisition was authorised by a British Executive Order-in-Council, because that Order-in-Council itself was inconsistent with the rules of international law governing requisition of neutral property.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 162-166
Author(s):  
Keith Stanton

Who is beneficially entitled to the money deposited in a joint bank account? In the great majority of cases, it is clear that the money is jointly owned and will pass on the death of one of the account holders to the survivor. However, things are not always simple and the law then has to decide as to the ownership of the money in a dispute between the surviving account holder and the estate of the deceased. The decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Whitlock v Moree, a case on appeal from the Court of Appeal of the Bahamas is the latest decision on this topic.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-137
Author(s):  
Thomas M.J. Möllers

Abstract Resolving legal problems at the national and European level, legal principles are of outstanding significance. However, it often remains unclear how to utilise these legal principles – which are partly not codified – in the specific legal solution. This article addresses two questions: How can we derive legal principles from the law if they have not been codified in the law? Moreover, how can we concretise legal principles? These two main issues will be illustrated on the basis of contractual freedom and particular legal institutes such as obligation to contract, price control, and frustration of contract. A last issue will be to tackle methodical difficulties posed by legal principles at the European level.


1986 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Vaughan

AbstractBy way of a critical assessment of the leading authorities on the critics of the Judicial Committee, this article argues that the proper appreciation of what the law lords did to the terms of the BNA Act can be found in an understanding of their perception of their unique function. Supporters of the Judicial Committee's decentralization of the terms of the British North America Act have tended to rely on either G. P. Browne's book on the subject or Alan Cairns's article in this Journal (4 [1971], 301–45). The purpose of this article is to challenge those authorities and offer an alternative explanation.


2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 607-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCaughran

This article is about the implication of terms into contracts based upon the presumed intention of the parties. It is particularly concerned with the decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Attorney General of Belize v. Belize Telecom Limited,1 a number of recent Court of Appeal decisions thereafter, and whether there has been any change in the law. Before getting to Belize, it is necessary to consider, as briefly as possible, what went before.


2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 55-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciarán Ward

New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa, in the windy city of Wellington in the Southern Hemisphere spring of early September was the venue for 2002's conference “Visible Justice - evolving access to the law”. This was my first overseas conference as a BIALL delegate and one I approached with trepidation, not really knowing what to expect, but my overall impression was without doubt a positive one. I was able to obtain a network of valuable contacts and gain an important insight into legal librarianship in the Country.


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