Equity Property and Obligation

Author(s):  
Sarah Worthington

Equitable property, especially as illustrated in the trust, and equitable obligations, especially fiduciary obligations, are without precise civil law counterparts. This ought to have marked these areas out as prime candidates for innovative and inventive common law and comparative scholarship. Instead, even at the turn of the century, modern equity scholarship is still overwhelmingly devoted to doctrinal analysis that seeks simply to define and understand these equitable concepts. The legal concepts underpinning equitable property and equitable obligation are difficult, and proper definition is important to coherent development of the law's practices. This article discusses the following: ideas of equitable property, fiduciary law scholarship, and the common law-equity divide.

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-290
Author(s):  
Colm Peter McGrath ◽  
◽  
Helmut Koziol ◽  

Author(s):  
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling

This chapter studies intellectual property (IP). A hallmark of the New Private Law (NPL) is attentiveness to and appreciation of legal concepts and categories, including the traditional categories of the common law. These categories can sometimes usefully be deployed outside of the traditional common law, to characterize, conceptualize, and critique other bodies of law. For scholars interested in IP, for example, common law categories can be used to describe patent, copyright, trademark, and other fields of IP as more or less “property-like” or “tort-like.” Thischapter investigates both the property- and tort-like features of IP to understand the circumstances under which one set of features tends to dominate and why. It surveys several doctrines within the law of copyright that demonstrate how courts move along the property/tort continuum depending on the nature of the copyrighted work at issue—including, in particular, how well the work’s protected contours are defined. This conceptual navigation is familiar, echoing how common law courts have moved along the property/tort continuum to address disputes over distinctive types of tangible resources.


2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helge Dedek

Every legal system that ties judicial decision making to a body of preconceived norms has to face the tension between the normative formulation of the ideal and its approximation in social reality. In the parlance of the common law, it is, more concretely, the remedy that bridges the gap between the ideal and the real, or, rather, between norms and facts. In the common law world—particularly in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth—a lively discourse has developed around the question of how rights relate to remedies. To the civilian legal scholar—used to thinking within a framework that strictly categorizes terms like substance and procedure, subjective right, action, and execution—the concept of remedy remains a mystery. The lack of “remedy” in the vocabulary of the civil law is more than just a matter of attaching different labels to functional equivalents, it is the expression of a different way of thinking about law. Only if a legal system is capable of satisfactorily transposing the abstract discourse of the law into social reality does the legal machinery fulfill its purpose: due to the pivotal importance of this translational process, the way it is cast in legal concepts thus allows for an insight into the deep structure of a legal culture, and, convergence notwithstanding, the remaining epistemological differences between the legal traditions of the West. A mixed jurisdiction must reflect upon these differences in order to understand its own condition and to define its future course.


Legal Studies ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Dietrich

The common law has solved questions of liability arising in the context of precontractual negotiations by resort to a range of different doctrines and approaches, adopting in effect ‘piecemeal’ solutions to questions of precontractual liability. Consequently, debate has arisen as to how best to classify or categorise claims for precontractual work and as to which doctrines are best suited to solving problems arising from anticipated contracts. The purpose of this article is to consider this question of how best to classify (cases of) precontractual liability. The initial focus will be on the ongoing debate as to whether principles of contract law or principles of unjust enrichment can better solve problems of precontractual liability. I will be suggesting that unjust enrichment theory offers little by way of explanation of cases of precontractual liability and, indeed, draws on principles of contract law in determining questions of liability for precontractual services rendered, though it does so by formulating those principles under different guises. Irrespective, however, of the doctrines utilised by the common law to impose liability, it is possible to identify a number of common elements unifying all cases of precontractual liability. In identifying such common elements of liability, it is necessary to draw on principles of both contract and tort law. How, then, should cases of precontractual liability best be classified? A consideration of the issue of classification of precontractual liability from a perspective of German civil law will demonstrate that a better understanding of cases of precontractual liability will be gained by classifying such cases as lying between the existing categories of contract and tort.


Author(s):  
Roman Sabodash

The paper shows how the publication of court decisions influenced the formation of a precedent. The author reviewed scientific works devoted to research the precedent in common and continental law. The research explains that the formation of precedent in England was accompanied by development of the judgment’s reviews and their prevalence among lawyers. Of course, publication of court decisions was not a major factor in setting a precedent, but it played a significant role in this. The paper also describes facts of the publication of court decisions in Italy, Germany, France and the Netherlands, as well as the admissibility of their citations at the court of cassation. The general idea of the paper is that convincing precedent exists and is used although the countries of continental law do not have a «classic» precedent. The paper gives a review of the importance of the state register of court decisions for setting a convincing precedent in Ukraine. The author analyzes the pros and cons of citing court decisions. It’s stated that, unfortunately, the quotations of court decisions is not always correct and sometimes amounts to rewriting the «right» legal position without comparing the circumstances of the case. The article concludes that the practice of applying a convincing precedent in Ukraine is only emerging and needs further improvement.          It has been found out that the publication of judgments of supreme courts is one of the factors that helped to establish precedent in common law countries. The publication of court rulings also created the conditions for a convincing precedent in civil law countries (especially in private law). At the same time, the formation of a “convincing precedent» in countries where court decisions are published in publicly available electronic court registers is much faster than in common law countries. Of course, the structure and the significance of the precedent in the common law and civil law countries are different, but one cannot dismiss that publication of court decisions as one of the factors for establishing the precedent.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Margaret Fordham

AbstractThis article examines the issues experienced by civil lawyers when studying the common law. It considers the extent of the differences between common law and civil law legal systems, examines the challenges which students from civil law jurisdictions face when first exposed to the common law, analyses the various ways in which these challenges may be met, and summarises civilians’ overall impressions of the common law.


Author(s):  
Lisa Waddington

This chapter explores the relationship between disability quota schemes and non-discrimination law in Europe. While at first sight they seem to sit uneasily beside each other, the chapter reveals how, in some instances, quota schemes can serve to facilitate compliance with non-discrimination legislation. At the same time, the chapter explores seeming incompatibilities between the two approaches and considers whether there are differences between common and civil law jurisdictions in this respect. Tentative conclusions suggest that there is a greater willingness to establish quota schemes through legislation in civil law jurisdictions compared to common law jurisdictions, and that quota schemes in civil law jurisdictions are more likely to provide for the imposition of a levy in the case that employers fail to meet their quota obligations through employing the required number of people with disabilities. There also seems to be some indication that there is greater awareness of the potential for conflict or tension, in various forms, between non-discrimination law and quota schemes in common law jurisdictions than in civil law jurisdictions. Finally, the two schemes operating in the common law states are only applicable to the public sector—whilst in civil law states quotas are generally applied to both public and private sector employers. This may indicate different perceptions regarding the role of public sector employers and the legitimacy of imposing quota requirements.


Author(s):  
Alex Ruck Keene ◽  
QC Alison Scott Butler

Canada is a federation composed of ten provinces, including Nova Scotia (‘NS’), and three territories. The common law applies in Canada, with the exception of the province of Quebec, which uses a civil law system. There is a federal government; as a province, NS also exercises constitutional powers in its own right. Federal legislation includes provisions relating to adults within the scope of this work. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms also guarantees certain political rights to Canadians and civil rights to everyone in Canada, and contains rights that impact upon capacity law.


Author(s):  
Steve Wilson ◽  
Helen Rutherford ◽  
Tony Storey ◽  
Natalie Wortley

This chapter provides an overview of the English legal system, introducing fundamental legal concepts, such as the nature of law and parliamentary sovereignty, and the differences between criminal law and civil law legal terminology, such as terminology and the outcomes. The sources of law, legislation in the form of Acts of Parliament or statutes and delegated legislation and common law or judge-made law are outlined. An outline of the courts is given, including the judges and the jurisdiction of the courts. The relationship between the English legal system and the European Union (EU) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is explained.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (79) ◽  
pp. 58-72
Author(s):  
Edilene Santana Santos ◽  
Laura Calixto ◽  
Maira Ferreira Bispo

ABSTRACT This article aims to assess the impact of the New Guideline of the Brazilian Accounting Pronouncements Committee (Comitê de Pronunciamentos Contábeis - OCPC 07) on improving formal features (size, readability, and specificity) of Brazilian companies’ Notes. OCPC 07 is one of the world’s first guidelines issued in response to the current demand for the downsizing of companies’ Notes, which according to standard setters and market agents have become too extensive, thus characterizing a disclosure overload. This is a unique study on the subject. The results suggest the effectiveness, although limited, of the new standard in promoting a departure from the habits of secrecy and formalism rooted in centuries of legal-accounting civil law tradition, and indicate that there is still room for complementary improvement initiatives in the form of incentives for firms and increased enforcement. Three complementary methodological approaches are used: (1) an analysis of both the evolution of note size after OCPC 07 and the factors explaining that size and its variation; (2) an examination of indicators of readability, conciseness, and specificity of the note on accounting policies; and (3) a size comparison of the Notes of Brazilian and British companies, a benchmark of the common law tradition. An average reduction of 10% in Note size was found two years after the introduction of Guideline (Orientação) 07 by the (OCPC 07). This downsizing was not generalized, but instead identified only among firms in the Novo Mercado and among those audited by two of the Big Four. Even in firms that reduced their notes by at least 20%, no significant improvements in readability levels could be perceived, nor in habits of copy-pasting the auditors’ templates, which could signal a focus on firms’ real practices in the note on accounting policies. Brazilian Notes remain far from the benchmark and are still 40% longer than British ones, despite an equivalent number of pages being expected.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document