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Full-Text Articles in Law

What Can Corporations Teach Governments About Democratic Equality?, Tom W. Bell Dec 2014

What Can Corporations Teach Governments About Democratic Equality?, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

Democracies place great faith in the principle of one-person/one-vote. Business corporations and other private entities, in contrast, typically operate under the one-share/one-vote rule, allocating control in proportion to ownership. Why the difference? In times past, we might have cited the differing ends of public and private institutions. Whereas public democracies aim at promoting the general welfare of an entire political community, private entities aim at more specific goals, such as generating profits or managing a cooperative residence. As business entities have grown in size and in the range of services they provide, however, the distinction between public and private governance …


Graduated Consent In Contract And Tort Law: Toward A Theory Of Justification, Tom Bell Dec 2010

Graduated Consent In Contract And Tort Law: Toward A Theory Of Justification, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to 'yes' or 'no.' In truth, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions, too. Those gradations of consent mark a deep structure of our social world, one especially evident in the contours of contract and tort law. This article draws on those and other sources …


The Scale Of Consent, Tom Bell Dec 2008

The Scale Of Consent, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to "yes" or "no." In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This working paper reviews how legal and other authorities regard consent, revealing that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. The scale described here plays a …


Graduated Consent Theory, Explained And Applied, Tom W. Bell Jan 2008

Graduated Consent Theory, Explained And Applied, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to "yes" or "no." In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent. A mirror of that ordinal ranking appears in our judgments about unconsensual transactions. This article reviews how a wide range of authorities regard consent, discovering that they treat consent as a matter of degree and a measure of justification. By abstracting from that evidence, we …


Comment, Limits On The Privity And Assignment Of Legal Malpractice Claims, Tom Bell Dec 1991

Comment, Limits On The Privity And Assignment Of Legal Malpractice Claims, Tom Bell

Tom W. Bell

No abstract provided.