Law Commons^™

Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset

Journal Articles

The prohibition against advisory opinions is fundamental to our understanding of federal judicial power, but we’ve misunderstood its origins. Discussions of the doctrine begin not with a constitutional text or even a court case, but a letter in which the Jay Court rejected President Washington’s request for legal advice. Courts and scholars have offered a variety of explanations for the Jay Court’s behavior. But they all depict the earliest Justices as responding to uniquely American concerns about advisory opinions.

This Article offers a different explanation. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, it shows that judges throughout the anglophone world—not only …

Equity, Samuel L. Bray

Book Chapters

From the Publisher
Chapter 2
How has equity been received in the United States? Two themes stand out. One is that of ‘nice adjustment’: the case-specific adjustment of legal rules to avoid the harsh results of applying rules to unforeseen circumstances. The second is the idea of judicial command: ordering the particular defendant in the circumstances to do equity without contradicting the common law. While the former has waned in the US, the latter has overly strengthened. The reasons of legal culture are discussed.

Outlining The Case For A Common Law Duty Of Care Of Business To Exercise Human Rights Due Diligence, Douglass Cassell

Journal Articles

This article outlines the case for a business duty of care to exercise human rights due diligence, judicially enforceable in common law countries by tort suits for negligence brought by persons whose potential injuries were reasonably foreseeable. A parent company’s duty of care would extend to the human rights impacts of all entities in the enterprise, including subsidiaries. A company would not be liable for breach of the duty of care if it proves that it reasonably exercised due diligence as set forth in the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. On the other hand, a company’s failure to …

Reading Statutes In The Common Law Tradition, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

There is wide agreement in American law and scholarship about the role the common law tradition plays in statutory interpretation. Jurists and scholars of various stripes concur that the common law points away from formalist interpretive approaches like textualism and toward a more creative, independent role for courts. They simply differ over whether the common law tradition is worth preserving. Dynamic and strongly purposive interpreters claim the Anglo-American common law heritage in support of their approach to statutory interpretation, while arguing that formalism is an unjustified break from that tradition. Formalists reply that the common law mindset and methods are …

Foreward: Erie's Gift, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

Sometimes described as "one of the modem cornerstones of our federalism," Erie stands at its narrowest for a simple proposition: When a federal court decides a claim whose source is state law, the court must apply the same substantive common-law rules that a state court would apply to the claim. Dictated by statute, by policy, and by the Constitution, this result seems "superbly right" to many. Indeed, Erie's narrow holding is not controversial today.

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

Journal Articles

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 …

Procedural Common Law, Amy Coney Barrett

Journal Articles

Debates about the common lawmaking power of the federal courts focus exclusively on substantive common law. But federal common law is not limited to matters of substance; it reaches matters of procedure as well. Federal law includes a robust body of what might be called procedural common law - common law primarily concerned with the regulation of internal court processes rather than substantive rights and obligations. This body of law includes many doctrines that are fixtures in the law of procedure and federal courts. For example, abstention, forum non conveniens, remittitur, stare decisis, and preclusion can all fairly be characterized …

Sosa, Federal Question Jurisdiction, And Historical Fidelity, Anthony J. Bellia

Journal Articles

In his paper "International Human Rights in American Courts," Judge Fletcher concludes that Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain “has left us with more questions than answers.” Sosa attempted to adapt certain principles belonging to the "general law" to a post-Erie positivistic conception of common law while maintaining fidelity to certain historical expectations. “[I]t would be unreasonable,” the Court thought, “to assume that the First Congress would have expected federal courts to lose all capacity to recognize enforceable international norms simply because the common law might lose some metaphysical cachet on the road to modern realism.” The Court was unwilling, however, out …

Addressing The Incoherency Of The Preemption Provision Of The Copyright Act Of 1976, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

Section 301 of the Copyright Act of 1976 expressly preempts state law actions that are within the "general scope of copyright" and that assert claims that are "equivalent to" the rights conferred by the Act. The Act eliminated the previous system of common law copyright for unpublished works, which had prevailed under the prior 1909 Copyright Act. By federalizing copyright law, the drafters of the statute sought to achieve uniformity and to avoid the potential for state protection of infinite duration.

The legislative history of § 301 stated that this preemption provision was set forth "in the clearest and most …

A Suggestion For The Renewal Of The Canon Law, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

Among the recommendations adopted by the Canon Law Society of America at its last annual meeting was one for bringing the insights of legal traditions besides the Roman to bear on the canonical system. The following suggestions are derived from the insights of my tradition, the common law tradition. That aspect of the common law tradition that I believe has most to contribute to the development of the canon law is concerned not so much with the particular rules of law as with the basic techniques of legal analysis. The common law tradition of legal analysis, as it has been …