Legal Dilemmas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Herzog
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Law ◽  
Star Chamber ◽  
Tort Claims

The chapter launches with Star Chamber proceedings against Lewis Pickering: in the sixteenth century, defaming the dead could be a crime. And that remains true even in today’s United States. But as the common law sharpened the distinction between tort and crime, it rejected the view that such defamation could be a tort. Tort claims extinguished when either plaintiff or defendant died. And when aggrieved survivors sued, the law held they hadn’t been wronged, even if they had been harmed, so they couldn’t recover, either.

The Law of Personal Status: Wives, Paupers, and Slaves

2019 ◽  
pp. 173-212
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Common Law ◽  
White Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
Marriage And Divorce ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

This chapter discusses the law on marriage and divorce, family property, adoption, poor laws and social welfare, and slavery and African Americans in the United States. In the colonial period, the United States had no courts to handle matters of marriage and divorce. Marriage was a contract—an agreement between a man and a woman. Under the rules of the common law, the country belonged to the whites; and more specifically, it belonged to white men. Women had civil rights but no political rights. There were no formal provisions for adoption. A Massachusetts law, passed in 1851, was one of the earliest, and most significant, general adoption law. The so-called poor laws were the basic welfare laws.

Defaming the Dead

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
Dead Person ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Way

If you defame the dead, even someone who recently died, tort law does not think that’s an injury: not to the grieving survivors and not to the dead person. This book argues that defamation is an injury to the recently dead. It explores history, including the shaping of the common law, and offers an account of posthumous harm and wrong. Along the way, it offers a sustained exploration of how we and the law think about corpse desecration.

scholarly journals Assignments and Transfers of Contractual Duties: Integrating Theory and Practice

2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Kirby
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Contractual Obligations ◽  
Contractual Rights

While contractual rights are usually assignable, the extent to which contractual obligations may be "assigned" or otherwise "transferred" is unclear. In this article, Justine Kirby examines the common law, section 11 of the Contractual Remedies Act 1979, and accepted methods of "transferring" obligations, and then compares the effects of a purported assignment of obligations under New Zealand, English and United States law.  She argues that the law should be clarified, and offers drafting suggestions to lawyers to give effect to parties' intentions while the law remains uncertain.  

Choice of Law Methods in the Private International Law of Contract

1981 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 161-200
Author(s):  
Joost Blom
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Choice Of Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Contractual Obligations

This article examines the choice of law methods developed in four legal systems for problems relating to the substantial or essential validity of contracts. The complicated questions of formation and capacity have had to be left aside. The first two parts of this article discussed the choice of law methods used by courts in France, Germany, and the United States. This concluding part deals with the law in England and the common law jurisdictions in Canada, and also, by way of epilogue, with the recently completed European Communities Convention on the law applicable to contractual obligations. Finally, some general conclusions will be offered about the patterns of law that have emerged in the course of this survey.

The Conciliar Courts

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-134
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Due Process ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The North ◽  
Magna Carta ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Star Chamber

This chapter examines the courts associated with the king’s council and the residuary prerogative jurisdiction of the Crown. Such courts were not supposed to meddle with the law of property, or with matters of life and death, since they did not follow the ‘due process’ required by Magna Carta and its progeny, but they nevertheless developed extensive jurisdictions alongside the courts of law. Their procedure was close to that of the Chancery. The principal conciliar courts were the Star Chamber and the Court of Requests, at Westminster, but there were provincial counterparts in the Marches of Wales and in the North. The extraterritorial jurisdictions of the admiralty and the constable and marshal were similarly derived from the royal prerogative and operated outside the common law. The King’s Bench watched all these jurisdictions carefully and checked excesses by means of prohibition and habeas corpus.

Torts and Other Wrongs

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
John Gardner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

This chapter focuses on the law of torts, not in the United States, but in other major common law jurisdictions (England and Wales, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) in which tort cases are normally adjudicated by judges sitting without juries. It considers the so-called classical interpretation of the common law of torts by John Goldberg and Ben Zipursky, and how they tend to equivocate on an important point of law in a way that puts them at odds with some writers with whom they would do better to make common cause. It suggests that this equivocation is where the law of the United States parts company with the law in the rest of the common law world. The problem, an English lawyer might then teasingly say, is with American tort law rather than with the Goldberg and Zipursky rendition of it.

scholarly journals The Law of Forcible Entry

1969 ◽  
pp. 271
Author(s):  
W. F. Foster ◽  
Joseph E. Magnet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Civil Process ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Criminal Matters

The author considers the two contradictory interests which the law on forcible entry must try to harmonize, namely the inviolability of the citizen's dwelling place as against the effective enforcement of the criminal law and civil process. He discusses the common law attitude towards forcible entry in civil and criminal matters and its view of the need for announcement prior to such entry. He also deals with developments in the United States in this area and considers the present state of the law of forcible entry in Canada in the light of the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Eccles v. Bourque [197S\ S.C.R. 739.

scholarly journals The Sh(e)aring Economy. Debates on the Law on Takings

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Nofar Sheffi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship

Rethinking ‘sharing’ and the relationship between ‘sharing’ and ‘jurisdiction’, this meander proceeds in three parts. It begins with a journey to and through the forests of the nineteenth-century Rhineland, rereading Marx’s journalistic reports on debates in the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly about proposed amendments to forest regulation (including an extension of the definition of ‘wood theft’ to include the gathering of fallen wood) as a reflection on the making of law by legal bodies. From the forests of the Rhineland, the paper journeys to the forests of England, retracing the common story about the development, by legal bodies, of the body of common law principles applicable to ‘innkeeping’. Traveling to and through the ‘concrete jungles’ of the United States of America, the paper concludes with a reflection on Airbnb’s common story of creation as well as debates about the legality of Airbnb, Airbnb-ing, and ‘sharing’.

Rediscovering Blackstone: wpływ Williama Blackstone’a na rozwój amerykańskiej nauki prawa w recepcji Alberta W. Alschulera

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Edyta Sokalska
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Common

The reception of common law in the United States was stimulated by a very popular and influential treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone, published in the late 18th century. The work of Blackstone strengthened the continued reception of the common law from the American colonies into the constituent states. Because of the large measure of sovereignty of the states, common law had not exactly developed in the same way in every state. Despite the fact that a single common law was originally exported from England to America, a great variety of factors had led to the development of different common law rules in different states. Albert W. Alschuler from University of Chicago Law School is one of the contemporary American professors of law. The part of his works can be assumed as academic historical-legal narrations, especially those concerning Blackstone: Rediscovering Blackstone and Sir William Blackstone and the Shaping of American Law. Alschuler argues that Blackstone’s Commentaries inspired the evolution of American and British law. He introduces not only the profile of William Blackstone, but also examines to which extent the concepts of Blackstone have become the basis for the development of the American legal thought.

The Law of Contract

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
World Market ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Certainty ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

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.

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