Law Commons^™

Abuse Of Rights: The Continental Drug And The Common Law, Anna Di Robilant

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores a crucial, though often neglected, episode in the history of modern private law: the nineteenth and early twentieth century debate over the concept of “abuse of rights”. In broad terms, the formula evokes the idea of an abusive, because malicious or unreasonable, exercise of an otherwise lawful right. The doctrine was applied in a variety of subfields of private law: property, contract, and labour law. It was conceived as a response to the urgent legal questions posed by the rise of modern industrial society: the limits of workers’ right to strike, the limits of industrial enterprises’ property …