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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
A Revisionist History Of Products Liability, Alexandra D. Lahav
A Revisionist History Of Products Liability, Alexandra D. Lahav
Michigan Law Review
Increasingly courts, including the Supreme Court, rely on ossified versions of the common law to decide cases. This Article demonstrates the risks of this use of the common law. The main contribution of the Article is to demonstrate that the traditional narrative about early products law—that manufacturers were not liable for injuries caused by their products because the doctrine of privity granted producers immunity from suit by the ultimate consumers of their goods—is incorrect. Instead, the doctrinal rule was negligence liability for producers of injurious goods across the United States in the nineteenth century. Courts routinely ignored or rejected privity …
Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage Of The Public Service Corporation, Evelyn Atkinson
Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage Of The Public Service Corporation, Evelyn Atkinson
Michigan Law Review
At the turn of the twentieth century, state courts were roiled by claims against telegraph corporations for mental anguish resulting from the failure to deliver telegrams involving the death or injury of a family member. Although these “telegraph cases” at first may seem a bizarre outlier, they in fact reveal an important and understudied moment of transformation in the nature of the relationship between the corporation and the public: the role of affective relations in the development of the category of the public utility corporation. Even as powerful corporations were recast as private, rights-bearing, profit-making market actors in constitutional law, …
Fault At The Contract-Tort Interface, Roy Kreitner
Fault At The Contract-Tort Interface, Roy Kreitner
Michigan Law Review
The formative period in the history of contract and tort (in the second half of the nineteenth century) may be characterized by the cleavage of contract and tort around the concept of fault: tort modernized by moving from strict liability to a regime of "no liability without fault," while contract moved toward strict liability. The opposing attitudes toward fault are puzzling at first glance. Nineteenth-century scholars of private law offered explanations for the opposition, reasoning that alternative ideas about fault account for the different character of state involvement in enforcing private law rights: tort law governs liabilities imposed by law …
The Many Faces Of Fault In Contract Law: Or How To Do Economics Right, Without Really Trying, Richard A. Epstein
The Many Faces Of Fault In Contract Law: Or How To Do Economics Right, Without Really Trying, Richard A. Epstein
Michigan Law Review
Modern law often rests on the assumption that a uniform cost-benefit formula is the proper way to determine fault in ordinary contract disputes. This Article disputes that vision by defending the view that different standards of fault are appropriate in different contexts. The central distinction is one that holds parties in gratuitous transactions only to the standard of care that they bring to their own affairs, while insisting on the higher objective standard of ordinary care in commercial transactions. That bifurcation leads to efficient searches. Persons who hold themselves out in particular lines of business in effect warrant their ability …
Legal Fictions In Pierson V. Post, Andrea Mcdowell
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 …
Women, Mothers, And The Law Of Fright: A History, Martha Chamallas, Linda K. Kerber
Women, Mothers, And The Law Of Fright: A History, Martha Chamallas, Linda K. Kerber
Michigan Law Review
This article presents a gendered history of the law's treatment of fright-based physical injuries. Our goal is to connect the law of fright to the changing cultural and intellectual forces of the twentieth century. Through a feminist lens, we reexamine the accounts of the legal treatment of fright-based injuries offered by Victorian-erajurists, traditionalist legal scholars of the first two decades of the twentieth century, a legal realist in the 1930s, and a Freudian medical-legal commentator from the 1940s, all of whom helped to shape present-day tort doctrine. We conclude with an account of Dillon v. Legg, in which the …
The Perils Of Writing An Intellectual History Of Torts, George C. Christie
The Perils Of Writing An Intellectual History Of Torts, George C. Christie
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History by G. Edward White
The Court, The Legislature, And Governmental Tort Liability In Michigan, Luke K. Cooperrider
The Court, The Legislature, And Governmental Tort Liability In Michigan, Luke K. Cooperrider
Michigan Law Review
In 1961, when Justice Edwards of the Michigan supreme court said, "From this date forward the judicial doctrine of governmental immunity from ordinary torts no longer exists in Michigan," he went on to say that he was eliminating from the law of Michigan "an ancient rule inherited from the days of absolute monarchy," a "whim of long-dead kings." Justice Carr, dissenting, agreed that the doctrine in question "came to us as a part of the common law," for which reason he thought it was protected by the reception clause of the Constitution of 1850 from the overruling action of the …
Latin-American Land Reform: The Uses Of Confiscation, Kenneth L. Karst
Latin-American Land Reform: The Uses Of Confiscation, Kenneth L. Karst
Michigan Law Review
This article examines the legislative techniques for taking land, showing their confiscatory operation. For many lawyers, the analysis would then be easily completed: confiscation is wrongful and must be condemned. Rejecting the implicit absolutism of that conclusion, this article inquires into the justifications that can be pleaded on behalf of selective confiscation as an aid in solving some of Latin America's economic and social ills.
The Lex Fori - Basic Rule In The Conflict Of Laws, Albert A. Ehrenzweig
The Lex Fori - Basic Rule In The Conflict Of Laws, Albert A. Ehrenzweig
Michigan Law Review
The following summary of this thesis will show its essential connection with the progressing reform of the law of jurisdiction.
Trial Of Legal Issues In Injunction Against Tort, Edgar N. Durfee
Trial Of Legal Issues In Injunction Against Tort, Edgar N. Durfee
Michigan Law Review
This essay appeared in a casebook on Equitable Remedies that was used for years in mimeographed form at the University of Michigan Law School. It was never prepared for final publication by Professor Durfee himself, but the numerous changes made in his own personal copy indicate that he had given much thought to the subject. Professor John P. Dawson who had collaborated with Professor Durfee has incorporated these changes in the present text. More changes might have been made by Professor Durfee if he had planned to publish it. The editors believe that as it stands it deserves a wider …
Torts In English And American Conflict Of Laws: The Role Of The Forum, S. I. Shuman, S. Prevezer
Torts In English And American Conflict Of Laws: The Role Of The Forum, S. I. Shuman, S. Prevezer
Michigan Law Review
''Private international law owes its existence to the fact that there are in the world a number of separate territorial systems of law that differ greatly from each other in the rules by which they regulate the various legal relations arising in daily life." Where the systems are those of member states of a federal union, there should be less difference in their laws than where they are those of sovereign nations divided by strong cultural, social and political barriers. Interstate conflicts and international conflicts are likely to give rise to somewhat different considerations and rules, and it is surely …
Gratuitous Promises-A New Writ?, Warren L. Shattuck
Gratuitous Promises-A New Writ?, Warren L. Shattuck
Michigan Law Review
Under the early common law, the fact situations which presented actionable wrongs were limited in number and stereotyped into various writs which issued from the Lord Chancellor. Only as new writs were devised by him was it possible for new fact situations to achieve the dignity of justiciability and so raise legal rights and duties. But with the liberalization of pleading the recognition of new legal rights and duties became a judicial function. In consequence, the constant struggle of new fact patterns for a place in the law is now principally waged before the courts. In this struggle some fail, …
Liability Without Fault And Proximate Cause, Fowler V. Harper
Liability Without Fault And Proximate Cause, Fowler V. Harper
Michigan Law Review
As a logical matter there seem to be two possible schemes of legal liability. The first one may be stated as follows: One may be liable for all consequences of all of his acts. While it has been suggested that this was the principle of the mediaeval law, it has been pointed out by Professor Winfield that such was never literally the case. Under this principle, as he has shown, everyone would be in jail except for these reasons: no one could legally put anyone else in jail, no one could legally keep anyone else in jail, and no one …
Torts-Imputed Negligence-Common Enterprise
Torts-Imputed Negligence-Common Enterprise
Michigan Law Review
The Supreme Court of Iowa has recently held that a family group engaged in a pleasure ride was a "common enterprise which no one had any particular right to control" and negligence on the part of the driver might be imputed to the other occupants of the car, barring recovery for an injury caused by the concurring negligence of the driver and the defendant. This, to say the least, is an expansion of the generally accepted doctrine of imputed negligence in America.