Markets and the common law

Legal Studies ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-330
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hill

The law relating to markets illustrates the extent to which the English legal system bears the indelible stamp of its historical origins. Despite a mass of legislation during the last one hundred and fifty years, the common law of markets has retained much of its significance. Although aspects of the common law dating from the Middle Ages are singularly ill-adapted to contemporary social and economic conditions pressure on parliamentary time and the rigid application of the doctrine ofstare decisis combine to preserve this distinctly anachronistic area of the law.

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
JE Penner

Titles in the Core Text series take the reader straight to the heart of the subject, providing focused, concise, and reliable guides for students at all levels. This chapter traces the historical roots of the trust. The law of trusts is the offspring of a certain English legal creature known as ‘equity’. Equity arose out of the administrative power of the medieval Chancellor, who was at the time the King’s most powerful minister. The nature of equity’s jurisdiction and its ability to provide remedies unavailable at common law, the relationship between equity and the common law and the ‘fusion’ of law and equity, and equity’s creation of the use, and then the trust, are discussed.


Author(s):  
Smith Marcus ◽  
Leslie Nico

This chapter focuses on leases. Leases are most commonly associated with transactions involving land, and have been a feature of the law of real property since the Middle Ages. However, other forms of lease have become increasingly prominent in modern times. There are now major industries concerned with the leasing of chattels, such as vehicles or aircraft, and leases of intangible rights have become commonplace in the world of intellectual property. The key feature of such leases is that the lessee obtains the right to exclude others from using the relevant chattel or intellectual property. This is in contrast to a mere licence, by which the licensee obtains only the right to use the chattel or property himself. The chapter looks specifically at leases over land—its nature, historical origins, and whether they can be properly classified as choses in action.


2019 ◽  
pp. 227-358
Author(s):  
Uwe Kischel

This chapter focuses on common law. The common law is distinguished as a legal system developed by cases—that is, by judicial decisions. Put simply, the common law judge derives the law from previous decision of other judges. Even more importantly, common law courts typically do not create abstract legal rules to decide future cases. The method of the common law is not focused on deductively deriving results from general legal principles, but rather on inductively working out principles from individual decisions. This means that only judges themselves remain as creators of law. According to this view, common law would actually be judge-made law, a view also common among comparative lawyers.


1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Palmer

The English common law of real property, as S.F.C. Milsom has argued, took shape between 1153 and 1215. The common law gave royal protection to free tenements, replacing feudal relationships as the primary bond structuring society. The law thus constituted the institutional core of the English state. But no Machiavellian monarch constructed the English state. Henry II was, rather, a king who presumed the morality and necessity of feudal relationships. His innovations, though intentional and carefully planned, were directed at narrower and less far-sighted ends. Other changes were the result of bureaucratic action. The complex interplay between present-oriented political or juridical decisions and bureaucratic rigor generated a legal system.


1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Wilfred Jenks

During critical phases in the development of a legal system the quality of the craftsmanship which practitioners of the law bring to its service can have a decisive influence on the process of development and on the whole texture of the legal system resulting from that process of development. So it was when the great civilians transformed the law of an overgrown city state into the law of an imperial commonwealth; so it was when the glossators laid the foundations of the modern civil law; so it was when the Bench and Bar of England created the common law; so it is today in the case of international law.


Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy

This chapter underlines the deep continuities in urban political thought between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It emphasizes the status of English towns as relatively autonomous, self-governing entities, and places them within a continental urban landscape. While debate about citizenship was persistent, it was at its most intense between the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The reasons lay primarily in the changed economic conditions of English towns. Civic elites tried to redefine citizenship. However, citizens spoke back, and they did so aggressively. Town officials helped to provoke the very antagonism that they feared. Urban citizenship remained the battleground of town politics at the end of the Middle Ages, and beyond.


Author(s):  
Eva Steiner

This chapter examines the law of contract in France and discusses the milestone reform of French contract law. While this new legislation introduces a fresh equilibrium between the contracting parties and enhances accessibility and legal certainty in contract, it does not radically change the state of the law in this area. In addition, it does not strongly impact the traditional philosophical foundations of the law of contract. The reform, in short, looks more like a tidying up operation rather than a far-reaching transformation of the law. Therefore, the chapter argues that it is questionable whether the new law, which was also intended to increase France's attractiveness against the background of a world market dominated by the Common Law, will keep its promise.


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.


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