Book Review: Helping Library Users with Legal Questions: Practical Advice for Research, Programming, and Outreach

Deborah A. Hamilton’s new book sheds light on the access to justice crisis in the American legal system and illustrates valuable strategies for how libraries can help. Hamilton’s passion for assisting the public with research and discovery of legal information makes her well-suited to share practical advice for research, programming, and outreach related to legal information literacy. Hamilton’s message to readers is clear: libraries can play a significant role in making the justice system more accessible and equitable by providing access to laws and legal information.

Current Issues in Reforming the Institution of Acquisitive Prescription in Russia, England, Hong Kong and Australia

The author examines the problems of reforming the institution of acquisitive prescription in Russia, England, Hong Kong and Australia, and suggests some ways to solve them. The study was conducted with the aim of a detailed study of the institution of acquisitive prescription in continental and Anglo-American legal families. In addition, the author sets the goal of establishing the influence of foreign experience of changing the provisions on acquisitive prescription on the Russian reform of prescription ownership based on a comparative legal analysis of the already carried out legislative reform in England and the proposed changes in the real law of Russia, Hong Kong and Australia. The author makes conclusions on the controversial nature of the alleged provision on the rejection of the criterion of good faith of prescription ownership in Russia, on the narrowness of the declared goal of the Russian reform of the institution of acquisitive prescription; the indirect influence of the foreign experience of reforms in the jurisdictions of the Anglo-American legal system on the Russian reform of property law has been established.

Dispute Processing beyond the Courts: New Complexity, Old Problems

Nearly four decades after Frank E.A. Sander addressed the Pound Conference, his conception of the role alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can and should play in the American legal system remains profoundly influential. Sander’s remarks focused on alleviating overburdened courts and questioning the fundamental assumption that judges hold a monopoly on resolving disputes. He developed a matrix that crossed dispute characteristics—the nature of a dispute, the relationship between disputants, the amount in dispute, litigation costs, and need for speedy resolution—with different methods of dispute resolution, ranging from courtroom litigation to less formal alternatives such as mediation and negotiation. Sander envisioned a court of the future that considered carefully the interplay of dispute characteristics in order to match dispute types with methods of dispute resolution. By “fitting the forum to the fuss,” courts could lighten judges’ dockets, better serve disputants, and improve the delivery of justice. This idea, that courts could facilitate dispute resolution without judges, was revolutionary....

The Decline of Natural Law

Before the late 19th century, natural law played an important role in the American legal system. Lawyers routinely used it in their arguments, and judges often relied upon it in their opinions. Today, by contrast, natural law plays virtually no role in the legal system. When natural law was part of a lawyer’s toolkit, lawyers thought of judges as finders of the law, but when natural law dropped out of the legal system, lawyers began thinking of judges as makers of the law instead. The Decline of Natural Law explores the causes and consequences of this change. It discusses the ways in which lawyers used natural law and why the concept seemed reasonable to them. It examines several long-term trends in legal thought that weakened the position of natural law, including the use of written constitutions, the gradual separation of the spheres of law and religion, the rapid growth of legal publishing, and the position of natural law in some of the 19th century’s most contested legal issues. It describes the profession’s rejection of natural law in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it explores the ways in which the legal system responded to the absence of natural law.

Restatements of Statutory Law: The Curious Case of the Restatement of Copyright

For nearly a century, the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatements of the Law have played an important role in the American legal system. And in all of this time, they refrained from restating areas of law dominated by a uniform statute despite the proliferation and growing importance of such statutes, especially at the federal level. This omission was deliberate and in recognition of the fundamentally different nature of the judicial role and of lawmaking in areas governed by detailed statutes compared to areas governed by the common law. Then in 2015, without much deliberation, the ALI embarked on the task of restating U.S. copyright law, an area dominated by a detailed federal statute. In so doing, the ALI ignored not just calls to revisit the form and method of its traditional Restatements projects but also the extensive history of the deep mismatch between the Restatements and statutory domains that has informed the working of the enterprise over the course of the last century. This Article explores the analytical and historical foundations of that mismatch and shows how the Restatement of Copyright reinforces the need to tailor a methodological template and perspective that is sensitive to the nature of statutory interpretation. It explains why perfunctory extension of the common law Restatement model to copyright law produces incoherent, misleading, and seemingly biased results that risk undermining the legitimacy of the eventual product. Finally, the Article explains how the mismatch between the two is capable of being remedied by a series of modest—yet significant—changes, which could allow the project to serve as a template for future statutory Restatements. These include: emphasizing the centrality of the statutory text and relevant interpretive sources, adopting crucial perspectival differences between incremental lawmaking and statutory interpretation, and highlighting the unique legislative process through which the statute was developed.

Ang lo - American Common Law and the Implementation in Vietnam

Due to characteristics of the socialist legal system, in the process of development and integration, Vietnam needs to absorb the advantages of other legal systems. The paper analyzes the features and advantages of sources of the Anglo-American legal system and lessons for Vietnam.

Informing reform: The views of legal professionals on the unique aspects of Scottish Law

The unique Scottish legal system stands apart from the better-known Anglo-American legal system, with variations relating to jury size (15 vs. 12), the number of verdicts available (3 vs. 2) and majority size (simple majority vs. unanimous). At present, only a handful of investigations have explored the effects of the Scottish ‘not proven’ verdict on jurors, and only a single study has explored the combined impact of the unique elements of the Scottish legal system on juror and jury decision making. The current study is the first to investigate the views of Scottish legal professionals on the three-verdict system, 15-person jury and simple majority verdict system. The aim of the study is to inform public and political debate, involve legal stakeholders in policy changes and decision making and compare legal professionals’ views with findings from previously conducted juror studies. Seventy-eight legal professionals took part in an online survey which asked for ratings and open responses on their attitudes to the Scottish (a) three-verdict system, (b) 15-person jury and (c) simple majority system. The results highlighted strong positive attitudes towards the ‘not proven’ verdict (particularly in a binary-verdict system of proven and not proven), 15-person juries and both the simple and qualified majority verdict systems. There was minimal support for reform towards an Anglo-American system. Instead, the reforms preferred by the legal professionals would be to require a qualified majority of 12/15 jurors, and to use a binary-verdict system of proven and not proven.

British-American Case Law and the Application in Vietnam

The paper analyzes some characteristics and advantages of the source of the Bristish-American legal system and earned experiences for Vietnam.