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Full-Text Articles in Law
Advisory Opinions And The Problem Of Legal Authority, Christian R. Burset
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 …
Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen
Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen
Book Chapters
Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …
The Patriation Of Canadian Corporate Law, Camden Hutchison
The Patriation Of Canadian Corporate Law, Camden Hutchison
All Faculty Publications
Canadian corporate law belongs within a broader Anglo-American legal tradition, sharing many of the features of other common law jurisdictions, most notably England and the United States. Prior to Confederation, Canadian corporate law first emerged from nineteenth-century English legislation and continued to resemble English law – at least superficially – well into the twentieth century. Legislation is only one source of corporate law, however. Just as important is the creation of legal rules through the common law adjudicatory process. Thus, examining case law raises an important empirical question distinct from, though relevant to, the issue of legislative influence – namely, …
Equity, Samuel L. Bray
Equity, Samuel L. Bray
Book Chapters
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.
Law And Regime Change: The Common Law, Knowledge Regimes, And Democracy Between The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Kunal Parker
Law And Regime Change: The Common Law, Knowledge Regimes, And Democracy Between The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Kunal Parker
Articles
Using a change in knowledge regime as a paradigm of regime change, this paper explores the career of common law thinking in the United States between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how, under the pressures of anti-foundational thinking, knowledge moved from a nineteenth-century regime of “knowledge that,” a regime of foundational knowledge, to an early-twentieth-century regime of “knowledge how,” a regime of anti-foundational knowledge concerned with the procedures, processes, and protocols of arriving at knowledge. It then shows how common law thinkers adapted to this change in knowledge regimes, transforming the common law from a body of substantive …
Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen
Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen
Book Chapters
If the Supreme Court mythologizes Blackstone, it is equally true that Blackstone himself was engaged in something of a mythmaking project. Far from a neutral reporter, Blackstone has some stories to tell, in particular the story of the hero law. The problems associated with using the Commentaries as a transparent window on eighteenth-century American legal norms, however, do not make Blackstone’s text irrelevant today. The chapter concludes with my brief reading of the Commentaries as a critical mirror of some twenty-first-century legal and social structures. That analysis draws on a long-term project, in which I am making my way through …
Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen
Natural Law, Slavery, And The Right To Privacy Tort, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
In 1905 the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first state high court to recognize a freestanding “right to privacy” tort in the common law. The landmark case was Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. Must it be a cause for deep jurisprudential concern that the common law right to privacy in wide currency today originated in Pavesich’s explicit judicial interpretation of the requirements of natural law? Must it be an additional worry that the court which originated the common law privacy right asserted that a free white man whose photograph is published without his consent in …
Law "In" And "As" History: The Common Law In The American Polity, 1790-1900, Kunal Parker
Law "In" And "As" History: The Common Law In The American Polity, 1790-1900, Kunal Parker
Articles
No abstract provided.
The Origins Of American Felony Murder Rules, Guyora Binder
The Origins Of American Felony Murder Rules, Guyora Binder
Journal Articles
Contemporary commentators continue to instruct lawyers and law students that England bequeathed America a sweeping default principle of strict liability for all deaths caused in all felonies. This Article exposes the harsh "common law" felony murder rule as a myth. It retraces the origins of American felony murder rules to reveal their modern, American, and legislative sources, the rationality of their original scope, and the fairness of their original application. It demonstrates that the draconian doctrine of strict liability for all deaths resulting from all felonies was never enacted into English law or received into American law. This Article reviews …
The Legal Basis Of Aboriginal Title, Brian Slattery
The Legal Basis Of Aboriginal Title, Brian Slattery
Articles & Book Chapters
This paper considers a range of differing approaches to the question of Aboriginal land rights in the light of the judgment of the B.C. Supreme Court in the Delgamuukw case.
Book Review. Transcending Covenant And Debt, Morris S. Arnold
Book Review. Transcending Covenant And Debt, Morris S. Arnold
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Book Review. Ex Nihilo Nihil, Morris S. Arnold
Book Review. Ex Nihilo Nihil, Morris S. Arnold
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Dakota Civil Code: More Notes For An Uncelebrated Centennial, William B. Fisch
Dakota Civil Code: More Notes For An Uncelebrated Centennial, William B. Fisch
Faculty Publications
In an earlier article in this journal, I sketched and discussed the Dakota Civil Code as originally drafted for New York by David Dudley Field, the historical and conceptual background into which the work was cast, and some of the departures made in the Code from what appear to have been then generally accepted common law classifications, terminology and substantive rules. In this sequel I propose to consider the history of the Code after its completion in 1865 by Field's commission, concentrating on three jurisdictions: New York, where it was rejected after twenty-five years of wearying debate, amendment, parliamentary maneuver, …
What Is Consideration In The Anglo-American Law Of Contracts?, Hugh Evander Willis
What Is Consideration In The Anglo-American Law Of Contracts?, Hugh Evander Willis
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.