‘Were it not against our laws’: oppression and resistance in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors

Legal Studies ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Heinze
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Legal Norm ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Parent Child

The Comedy of Errors, always loved on the stage, has long been deemed less substantial than Shakespeare's ‘mature’ works. Its references to private and public law have certainly been noted: a trial, a breached contract, a stand-off between monarchical and parliamentary powers. Yet the play's legal elements are more than historical curios within an otherwise light-hearted venture. The play is pervasively structured by an array of socio-legal dualisms: master–servant, husband–wife, native–alien, parent–child, monarch–parliament, buyer–seller. All confront fraught transitions from pre-modern to early modern forms. Those fundamentally legal relationships fuel character and action, even where no conventionally legal norm or procedure is at issue. ‘Errors’ in the play serve constantly to highlight unstable and shifting relationships of dominance and submission. Law undergoes its own transition from feudal–aristocratic to commercial forms. Through a theatrical framing device, it thereby re-emerges to remind us that those dualisms, even in their new incarnations, will remain squarely within law's ambit.

Private and Public Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 574-592
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Merrill
Keyword(s):  
Law And Economics ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
General Criterion ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Ordering ◽  
Public Rights ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Derivatives Of

This chapter explores the relationship between private and public law. In civil law countries, the public-private distinction serves as an organizing principle of the entire legal system. In common law jurisdictions, the distinction is at best an implicit design principle and is used primarily as an informal device for categorizing different fields of law. Even if not explicitly recognized as an organizing principle, however, it is plausible that private and public law perform distinct functions. Private law supplies the tools that make private ordering possible—the discretionary decisions that individuals make in structuring their lives. Public law is concerned with providing public goods—broadly defined—that cannot be adequately supplied by private ordering. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, various schools of thought derived from utilitarianism have assimilated both private and public rights to the same general criterion of aggregate welfare analysis. This has left judges with no clear conception of the distinction between private and public law. Another problematic feature of modern legal thought is a curious inversion in which scholars who focus on fields of private law have turned increasingly to law and economics, one of the derivatives of utilitarianism, whereas scholars who concern themselves with public law are increasingly drawn to new versions of natural rights thinking, in the form of universal human rights.

scholarly journals In the service of secrecy: An enveloped history of priority, proof and patents

2021 ◽  
pp. 135918352110288
Author(s):  
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Property System ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Propriété Industrielle ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Double Envelope ◽  
Double Compartment

This article is about an everyday paper object: an envelope. However, as opposed to most other flat paper containers, the enveloppe Soleau can only be bought from L’Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) in Paris. At the cost of €15 you get a perforated, double-compartment envelope allowing you to constitute proof of creation and assign a precise date to your idea or project. But the enveloppe Soleau is something much more than just a simple and cheap way by which you can prove priority in any creative domain. It is a material footprint anchored to centuries of practices associated with disclosure and secrecy, a gateway into the infrastructure of the intellectual property system and its complicated relationship to the forms of knowledge it purports to hold. The purpose of this article is to consider the making of the enveloppe Soleau as a bureaucratic document, a material device performing a particular kind of legal paperwork. In four different vignettes, the article tracks the material becoming of the enveloppe Soleau as an evidentiary receptacle, beginning by going back to early modern practices of secrecy and priority, continuing with its consolidation in two patents (from 1910 and 1911) to the inventor Eugène Soleau (1852–1929), and ending up, in 2016, dematerialized in the e-Soleau. As a bureaucratic document, the enveloppe Soleau shows just how much work a mundane paper object can perform, navigating a particular materiality (a patented double envelope); formalized processes of proof (where perforations have legal significance); the practices of double archiving (in an institution and with the individual) and strict temporal limitations (a decade). Ultimately, the enveloppe Soleau travels between the material and immaterial, between private and public, between secrecy and disclosure, but also between what we perceive of as the outside and inside of the intellectual property system.

scholarly journals Ensuring Guarantees of the Rights of the Individual and the Inalienability of his Legal Status in the System of Legal Regulation

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Alexander Vladimirovich Konovalov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Synergistic Action ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The Core ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Levels

The article is devoted to the analysis of the general principle of law — ensuring guarantees of individual rights and the inalienability of his legal status. According to the author, they are provided by the synergistic action of private and public law regulation. The article convincingly shows that private and public law is a single system of values with different levels of generalization of terms and different methodology. At the same time, it is the private legal mechanisms that are the basis, the core of the rule of law.

Options for Applying Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions (FOCJs) for Municipal Cooperation in Russia

2017 ◽  
pp. 73-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Friedrich ◽  
Mariia Chebotareva
Keyword(s):  
Public Service ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Public Enterprises ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Environments ◽  
Public Service Provision ◽  
Service Activities ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Legal Forms

Municipal cooperation is important for transformation countries, like Russia, which have to develop legal, institutional and political environments for public service activities. The authors recommend FOCJs as an instrument for coordinated municipal public service provision. To determine the suitability of FOCJs the analyst has to investigate the relation between FOCJ theory, their financing possibilities, the fiscal effects, and the legal forms in which FOCJs can operate in Russia. The authors define several forms of FOCJs and sort out appropriate public enterprises of private and public law for Russian FOCJ. To analyse the establishment, the operations, and the competition between FOCJs the authors present three types of models. One relates to the establishment of an FOCJ, the second concentrates on financing service activities, and the third model deals with competition among FOCJs and demonstrates the effects of different ways of finance. The article concludes with elaborating recommendations for financing FOCJ under conditions in Russia.

Enforcement

2021 ◽  
pp. 237-258
Author(s):  
Eva Micheler
Keyword(s):  
Public Law ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Normal Process ◽  
Minority Shareholders ◽  
Public Enforcement ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Law

This chapter studies the rules governing the enforcement of the duties imposed on directors, distinguishing between private and public enforcement. Directors owe their duties to the company and so the company is responsible for enforcing these duties. The law prefers such litigation decisions to be taken by the company through its normal process. The courts only interfere if that process cannot be made to work independently of the wrong-doers. It is unlikely for a derivative claim to succeed against the wishes of an independent majority and so it is right to observe that the shareholders are the main focus of the law. But here too the law is more nuanced and integrates the interests of minority shareholders and creditors. The duties of the directors are also enforced through the means of public law. The chapter then shows that public law sanctions particularly attach in relation to duties that enhance the interest of third parties interacting with the company. This leads to the conclusion that these interests are at least formally better protected than those of the shareholders.

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