Law Commons^™

The Appropriations Power And Sovereign Immunity, Paul F. Figley, Jay Tidmarsh

Michigan Law Review

Discussions of sovereign immunity assume that the Constitution contains no explicit text regarding sovereign immunity. As a result, arguments about the existence-or nonexistence-of sovereign immunity begin with the English and American common-law doctrines. Exploring political, fiscal, and legal developments in England and the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this Article shows that focusing on common-law developments is misguided. The common-law approach to sovereign immunity ended in the early 1700s. The Bankers' Case (1690- 1700), which is often regarded as the first modern common-law treatment of sovereign immunity, is in fact the last in the line of English …

Legal Fictions In Pierson V. Post, Andrea Mcdowell

Michigan Law Review

American courts and citizens generally take the importance of private property for granted. Scholars have sought to explain its primacy using numerous legal doctrines, including natural law, the Lockean principle of a right to the product of one's labor, Law & Economics theories about the incentives created by property ownership, and the importance of bright line rules. The leading case on the necessity of private property, Pierson v. Post, makes all four of these points. This Article argues that Pierson has been misunderstood. Pierson was in fact a defective torts case that the judges shoe-horned into a property mold …

Same Old, Same Old: Scientific Evidence Past And Present, Edward K. Cheng

Michigan Law Review

For over twenty years, and particularly since the Supreme Court's Daubert decision in 1993, much ink has been spilled debating the problem of scientific evidence in the courts. Are jurors or, in the alternative, judges qualified to assess scientific reliability? Do courts really need to be concerned about "junk science"? What mechanisms can promote better decision making in scientific cases? Even a cursory scan of the literature shows the recent explosion of interest in these issues, precipitating new treatises, hundreds of articles, and countless conferences for judges, practitioners, and academics. To this literature, Professor Tal Golan adds Laws of Men …

Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

There are a number of good biographies of judges, but very few of individual legal academics; indeed, so far as American legal academics are concerned, the only one of note that comes to mind is William Twining's life of Karl Llewellyn. Llewellyn was, of course, a major figure in the evolution of American law, and his unusual life was a further advantage for his biographer. In this biography, Nicola Lace has taken as her subject an English academic who also had an unusual career, one whose contribution was principally not to the evolution of the English legal system but to …

Law's Territory (A History Of Jurisdiction), Richard T. Ford

Michigan Law Review

Pop quiz: New York City. The United Kingdom. The East Bay Area Municipal Utilities District. Kwazulu, South Africa. The Cathedral of Notre Dame. The State of California. Vatican City. Switzerland. The American Embassy in the U.S.S.R. What do the foregoing items have in common? Answer: they are, or were, all territorial jurisdictions. A thesis of this Article is that territorial jurisdictions - the rigidly mapped territories within which formally defined legal powers are exercised by formally organized governmental institutions - are relatively new and intuitively surprising technological developments. New, because until the development of modern cartography, legal authority generally followed …

Revenge For The Condemned, Sara Sun Beale, Paul H. Haagen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868

English Law In The Age Of The Black Death, 1348-1381: A Transformation Of Governance And Law, Daniel B. Kosove

Michigan Law Review

A Review of English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348-1381: A Transformation of Governance and Law by Robert C. Palmer

Hail Britannia?: Institutional Investor Behavior Under Limited Regulation, Bernard S. Black, John C. Coffee Jr.

Michigan Law Review

The two authors of this article have been on opposite sides of this debate, but both recognize that no single explanation is complete and that other factors, such as the self-interest of fund managers, the conflicts of interest faced by institutions who want to retain corporate business, cultural forces, collective action problems, and what we can call path dependence- the difficulty of changing the structure and behavior of highly evolved and specialized institutions - have causal roles in explaining shareholder passivity. The central question in research on American corporate governance is how these forces interact to produce the characteristic …

Strings Attached--Violin Fraud And Other Deceptions, Carla J. Shapreau

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Violin Fraud: Deception, Forgery, Theft, and the Law by Brian W. Harvey

Executive Detention In Time Of War, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

A Review of In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain by A.W. Brian Simpson

Justice, Mercy, And Late Medieval Governance, Pat Mccune

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Kingship, Law, and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V by Edward Powell

From Blackstone To Bentham: Common Law Versus Legislation In Eighteenth-Century Britain, James Oldham

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth Century Britain by David Lieberman

Transfers Of Property In Eleventh-Century Norman Law, William John Gallagher

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law by Emily Zack Tabuteau

Prejudice, Politics, And Proof, Peter Tillers

Michigan Law Review

In the last fifteen years there has been a great resurgence of interest in fundamental theoretical analysis of the nature of factual proof in litigation. Many serious scholars, both in the law school world and outside it, have turned their energies in this direction. William L. Twining, Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, has been a major figure in this growing movement. He recently published a painstaking and scholarly study of Bentham's and Wigmore's theories of evidence, inference, and proof in adjudication. This book is part of Twining's broader, long-term effort to develop a general theoretical framework for …

Freedom Of Speech, Melissa H. Maxman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Freedom of Speech by Eric Barendt

Crime And The Courts In England 1660-1800, Frank C. Shaw

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 by J.M. Beattie

Preventative Pretrial Detention And The Failure Of Interest-Balancing Approaches To Due Process, Albert W. Alschuler

Michigan Law Review

This article, echoing Highmore's treatise of 1783, maintains that neither a legitimate nor a very important governmental interest can justify preventive detention in the absence of significant proof of past wrongdoing or an inability to control one's behavior. Both the Supreme Court's neglect of this issue and Congress' similar neglect in the preventive detention provisions of the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1984 reveal the extent to which cost-benefit analysis has captured American law and threatened core concepts of individual dignity.

The article does not oppose all forms of preventive pretrial detention. To the contrary, it recognizes that the detention …

Conscience And The Law: The English Criminal Jury, Robert C. Palmer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Verdict According to Conscience by Thomas Andrew Green

The Servants, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Barristers' Clerks, the Law's Middlemen by John Flood

Their Litigious Society, A.W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Whilton Dispute, 1264-1380: A Social-Legal Study of Dispute Settlement in Medieval England by Robert C. Palmer

The Unnecessary Doctrine Of Necessaries, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that neither the traditional nor the modem necessaries doctrines are justifiable in contemporary society. Part I investigates the practical effects of both the traditional and contemporary necessaries doctrines and demonstrates that neither is an effective mechanism for providing support to a needy spouse. While a more successful support remedy might be devised to replace modem and traditional versions of the necessaries rule, Part II shows that yet another reformulation would not be worthwhile because the theoretical underpinnings of the doctrine are faulty. There is no persuasive evidence to establish the existence of the narrow support problem the …

Tightening The Reins Of Justice In America: A Comparative Analysis Of The Criminal Jury I England And The United States, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Tightening the Reins of Justice in America: A Comparative Analysis of the Criminal Jury I England and the United States by Michael H. Graham

Equity, Due Process And The Seventh Amendment: A Commentary On The Zenith Case, Patrick Devlin

Michigan Law Review

The seventh amendment to the United States Constitution requires that "[i]n Suits at common law . . . the right of trial by jury shall be preserved." What exactly is a suit at common law? When the amendment was enacted in 1791, there was no law that was common to all the states. In 1812 Supreme Court Justice Story, in a Circuit Court ruling, held that the common law alluded to was the common law of England, "the grand reservoir of all of our jurisprudence." This means that when today an American judge has to decide whether in any set …

The Medieval English County Court, Stephen D. White

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The County Courts of Medieval England, 1150-1350 by Robert C. Palmer

On The Relation Between The Rule Of Law And Public Opinion, John V. Orth

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Rule of Law: Albert Venn Dicey, Victorian Jurist by Richard A. Cosgrove

Samuel E. Thorne And Legal History In Law Schools, Delloyd J. Guth

Michigan Law Review

A Review of On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne edited by Morris S. Arnold, Thomas A. Green, Sally A. Scully and Stephen D. White

The Feudal Framework Of English Law, Robert C. Palmer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Legal Framework of English Feudalism by S.F.C, Milsom

Judgment Non Obstantibus Datis, Reid Hastie

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Jury Trials by John Baldwin and Michael McConville

Thoughts About Judging, Henry J. Friendly

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Judge by Patrick Devlin

Law And Politics: The House Of Lords As A Judicial Body, 1800-1976, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Law and Politics: The House of Lords as a Judicial Body, 1800-1976 by Robert Stevens