scholarly journals THE COMPARATIVE LEGAL HISTORY OF LIMITATION AND PRESCRIPTION

Obiter ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eltjo Schrage

Within both the civil law and the common law (as well as in mixed legal systems), there are means of acquiring and losing rights, or of freeing ourselves from obligations with the passage of time. The reason for this is at least twofold: on the one hand, for a claimant, a dispossessed owner or a creditor, limitation and prescription provide stimuli for bringing the action; on the other, this sanction upon the negligence of the claimant implies in many cases a windfall for the defendant. If a creditor is negligent in protecting his assets, the law at a certain stage no longer protects him or her. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said aptly some 100 years ago: “Sometimes it is said that, if a man neglects to enforce his rights, he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example”.

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Mahendra Pal Singh ◽  
Niraj Kumar

Examination of Indian legal history illustrates the presence of multiple legal orders that coexisted in India through the ages. Moreover, certain ‘modern’ conceptions of law were present in similar forms in India before the medieval period, contrary to Western assumptions. Largely ignoring these legal traditions, the British attempted to re-give law and legal systems to the Indians. This was part of the larger project of ideologically justifying the presence of the British Raj in India. The British used India’s extant legal diversity to argue for the lack of a dominant legal tradition, leading to the introduction of British common law as the law of the land.


Author(s):  
Hein Kötz

This chapter examines how the law deals with contracts that a party entered into by mistake. After a brief discussion of the historical background of the rules in the civil law and the common law, the question is raised whether there is a relevant mistake if a party’s ‘motive’ for entering into the contract turns out to be incorrect, if the party’s mistake refers to the value of what it promised or was to receive under the contract, or if the party’s mistake is due to its carelessness. Should the relevance of a mistake not depend on whether it was caused or shared by the other party? Finally, the chapter outlines some common threads in the development of a European law on mistake.


Pro Futuro ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Márta Plásztán-Brehószki

The law of fiduciary duty is as old as common law. It is the key element of the law of equity. The agency relationship creates a fiduciary relationship between the parties, which means that the fiduciary (agent) is subject to the direction of the one on whose behalf he acts (principal). This high standard of conduct – in the scope of the agency relationship – has become a separate liability form in the common law countries and has appeared not only in company law but in other parts of civil law as well. This paper presents the development and the basic elements of fiduciary duty in the field of general partnerships.


Author(s):  
Daniel Visser

The emergence of unjust enrichment as a cause of action in its own right in England and Australia sparked a remarkable debate between, on the one hand, civil and common lawyers, who were confronted with thinking which was often completely outside the paradigm to which they had become accustomed, and, on the other hand, between common lawyers inter se about the merits of the various ways in which unjust enrichment may be understood and organized. At the heart of this debate was the struggle of the common law to confront and deal with the deficit caused by its reliance solely on ‘unjust factors’ to make sense of enrichment liability without taking account of the notion of ‘absence of basis’. This chapter argues that comparative lawyers can make an important contribution to the future of the fractured and fractious world of unjustified enrichment by uncovering the enormous wealth of learning of which both the common law and the civil law are the repositories, and so bring the same level of understanding to the law of unjustified enrichment which has, over the years, been achieved between the systems in regard to contract and tort.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 418-423
Author(s):  
Codrin Codrea

Abstract The mortis causa donation is a particular form of donation, made in the anticipation of death. Its regime was subjected to particular different norms in some continental-European legal systems, such as the French and the Romanian ones, and in some common law legal systems, such as the English and the American ones. This article investigates in a comparative manner the different legal solutions regarding the status of mortis causa donations in French and Romanian legal systems, on one hand, and in the English and American legal systems, on the other. Although in the history of French law the donation mortis causa was recognized under the customary norms of the ancien droit, contemporary continental-European legal systems do not recognize an intermediary gratuitous act between testamentary provisions and donation contracts, while in the common law legal systems the mortis causa donation is recognized as a particular form of gratuitous transfer, but it has different legal effects in English and American legal systems.


Verba luris ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 117-128
Author(s):  
DAVID AUGUSTO ECHEVERRY BOTERO

In the Common Law system judges have the power to create subsidiary laws: they make rules in strict sense. This Kind of power responds to a special way in which the Common Law develops and adapts itself to achieve the best rules for a given society. Understanding how the Australian law system works, as an example of a common law structure, and how judges interact with the parliament in the creation of the best rules of law -which makes the process coherent- is paramount for other legal systems that have a mixture of legal institutions from both civil and common law systems, as Colombia. Colombia has an unclear mixture of law systems, which generates an uncertainty of the application of the law producing both by judges and parliament, and serious structural law problems; so, understanding the basis of the common law system it is important to clarify the limits in the competence of each authority and the interaction between the law made by the Parliament and the one that the judges produce.


1943 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lord Wright

It may seem odd at a crisis like this in the history of the empire and of mankind to be thinking and writing of academic questions of law, but the Editor has asked me to contribute an article to the University of Toronto Law Journal as a token of the sympathy and fellow-feeling of lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic. I am glad to be able to comply with his request and I do so also as a token of appreciation of the noble efforts that Canada is making for the cause which is so dear to the hearts of all of us. What Canada is doing is also being done by the other sister nations of the empire—the great Dominions—the colonies and India. All are united not by material or formal bonds, but by ties of kindred and by a common devotion to the cause of the free spirit and dignity of man, of the supremacy of law over tyranny, treachery, and brute force. The common law which binds together the English-speaking countries has been well called the law of the free peoples. We are confident that the forces of evil are ephemeral compared with that law. We can without impropriety forget for a brief space the pressing evils and dwell a little on that which will survive them, the common law.


1995 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brice Dickson

This article examines a variety of legal systems with a view to assessing the role currently played within each of them by the principle of unjust enrichment. By focusing on the characteristic features of unjust enrichment claims it seeks to demonstrate that, although there are significant differences between the ways in which different countries handle such claims, there is also much that those systems have in common. While under the common law the principle of unjust enrichment has endured a long struggle for recognition, in civil law systems it has been acknowledged for centuries. This may be because in civil law countries the principle has been expected to play only a residual, and therefore non-threatening, role in the law of obligations while in common law countries it has been called upon, if at all, to serve as the basis for the whole of the law of restitution. We should not assume, however, that all common law systems share one set of characteristics while all civil law systems share another. In some respects there is more in common between systems drawn from each category than there is between systems drawn from the same category. Mixed legal systems, as one might expect, tend to display characteristics drawn from both.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Farihan Aulia ◽  
Sholahuddin Al-Fatih

The legal system or commonly referred to as the legal tradition, has a wealth of scientific treasures that can be examined in more depth through a holistic and comprehensive comparative process. Exactly, the comparison of the legal system must accommodate at least three legal systems that are widely used by countries in the world today. The three legal systems are the Continental European legal system, Anglo American and Islamic Law. The comparative study of the three types of legal systems found that the history of the Continental European legal system is divided into 6 phases, while Anglo American legal history began in the feudalistic era of England until it developed into America and continues to be studied until now. Meanwhile, the history of Islamic law is divided into 5 phases, starting from the Phase of the Prophet Muhammad to the Resurrection Phase (19th century until nowadays). In addition to history, the authors find that the Continental European legal system has the characteristic of anti-formalism thinking, while the Anglo American legal thinking characteristic tends to be formalism and is based on a relatively primitive mindset. While the thinking character of Islamic Law is much influenced by the thought of the fuqoha (fiqh experts) in determining the law to solve a problem, so relatively dynamic and moderate.


Author(s):  
V. Кroitor

The article studies the issue of scientific and practical validity of applying ethical principles of society as regulatory factors of civil law of Ukraine. Taking into account the lack of validity of ethical principles of society as regulatory factors, the author attempts to make a correlation between the content of such principles of civil law as fairness, integrity and reasonableness, on the one hand, and ethical principles of the society, on the other hand. The author of the paper proves that it is inappropriate to apply the provisions of morality as regulatory factors for the regulation of civil relations. The conclusion on the objection to the civil regularity of ethical principles of society is based on several theses. Firstly, moral rules are not formalized, which creates a threat of arbitrary interpretation of their content. Secondly, ethical principles do not have a definite source of origin. Thirdly, the fundamental ethical rules have already been taken into account in the content of the principles of fairness, integrity and reason, which in turn create competition between the two types of regulatory factors. Unreasonable duplication of regulatory requirements reduces the functionality of the law, complicates the perception of its requirements. The competition between the principles of law and the ethical principles of society must be eliminated by refusing to give the latter the function of regulatory factors. The author of the paper does not deny the possibility of taking into account the ethical principles of society while regulating the relations that have been neglected by the "official law".


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