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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Running Backs, Wolves, And Other Fatalities: How Manipulations Of Coherence In Legal Opinions Marginalize Violent Death, Jonathan Yovel Jan 2004

Running Backs, Wolves, And Other Fatalities: How Manipulations Of Coherence In Legal Opinions Marginalize Violent Death, Jonathan Yovel

Jonathan Yovel

By examining legal cases that involve violent death and its marginalization by the courts, this essay looks into the relations between narrative coherence and narrative absurd in judicial opinions. Coherence, rather than a static, unequivocal characteristic of legal narratives, is studied here as a highly manipulable narrative and rhetorical performance. Giving a performative twist to reader-response approaches I do not really ask what is the meaning of this text (as construed by its reading)? but rather, working from the position of the text's discursive community, what does this text do? The reading of these cases explores how judicial narration and …


Acquisition Of Living Things By Specification, Ernest Metzger Jan 2004

Acquisition Of Living Things By Specification, Ernest Metzger

Ernest Metzger

Ownership of the product of living things, such as human tissue or cultures developed from human cells, is difficult for the law to determine. Civilian jurisdictions, with their legal heritage grounded in Roman law, offer one solution. Civilian jurisdictions would resolve such cases under the rules of specification. A recent case from the Outer House of the Scottish Court of Session (Kinloch Damph Ltd v Nordvik Salmon Farms Ltd) addresses the problem. The case was properly decided, though the grounds of the decision could be improved. Specifically, on civil law principles, civilian courts ought to award ownership of a living …


Roman Judges, Case Law, And Principles Of Procedure, Ernest Metzger Jan 2004

Roman Judges, Case Law, And Principles Of Procedure, Ernest Metzger

Ernest Metzger

Roman law has been admired for a long time. Its admirers, in their enthusiasm, have sometimes borrowed ideas from their own time and attributed them to the Romans, thereby filling some gap or fixing some anomaly. Roman private law is a well known victim of this. Roman civil procedure has been a victim as well, and the way Roman judges are treated in the older literature provides an example. For a long time it has been accepted, and rightly so, that the decision of a Roman judge did not make law. But the related, empirical question, whether Roman judges ever …