Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Publication Year
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 16 of 16
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
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 …
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
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.
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 …
Civil And Common Law: A Historical Analysis Of Colonial And Postcolonial Canada, Patrick S. Stroud
Civil And Common Law: A Historical Analysis Of Colonial And Postcolonial Canada, Patrick S. Stroud
Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research
Legal historians divide European law into two principal families: common law (British law) and civil law (continental European law). Common law judges favor cases; courts “discover” law on a case-by-case basis and those cases make precedents for future ruling. Civil law courts favor codes; courts compare cases to existing laws and those laws control judges’ rulings. The two rarely interact, save one prominent example: Canada. British common law supposedly superseded French legal traditions in colonial Canada. But is history so binary? Did British common law truly “conquer” French civil law? Through analysis of Canadian legal history, this article demonstrates how …
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 …
The Unwritten Law And Its Writers, Frederick J. Moreau
The Unwritten Law And Its Writers, Frederick J. Moreau
Pepperdine Law Review
No abstract provided.
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 …
Private Rights Or Public Wrongs? The Crime Victims Rights Act Of 2004 In Historical Context, Christopher J. Truxler
Private Rights Or Public Wrongs? The Crime Victims Rights Act Of 2004 In Historical Context, Christopher J. Truxler
Christopher J. Truxler
Historically, crime victims served as policemen, investigators, and private prosecutors, and were regarded as law enforcement’s most dependable catalyst. The Crime Victim’s Rights Act of 2004 grants crime victims eight substantive and procedural rights and breathes new life into the common law idea that crime is both a public wrong and a private injury. The Act has, however, elicited ardent criticism. Opponents contend that the Act is both bad policy and, most likely, unconstitutional. Without commenting on the Act’s policy or constitutionality, this Note places the Crime Victims’ Rights Act within a broader historical context where victims’ needs can be …
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.
Book Reviews, Donald P. Kommers, I. C. Rand
Book Reviews, Donald P. Kommers, I. C. Rand
Vanderbilt Law Review
Law and Social Process in United States History:
The excellence of Law and Social Process in United States History in every respect matches the high honor accorded Professor Hurst when invited to deliver the ninth series of the Thomas M. Cooley Lectures under the sponsorship of the University of Michigan Law School. This volume, following upon the heels of his Growth of American Law and Law and the Conditions of Freedom, the latter having won the James Barr Ames prize granted quadrennially by the Harvard Law School, merely affirms his stature as an eminent legal historian. Like the earlier volumes, …
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.