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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian Jan 2005

Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

This Article is an intellectual history of classical contracts scholar Samuel Williston. Professor Movsesian argues that the conventional account of Williston's jurisprudence presents an incomplete and distorted picture. While much of Williston's work can strike a contemporary reader as arid and conceptual, there are strong elements of pragmatism as well. Williston insists that doctrine be justified in terms of real-world consequences, maintains that rules can have only presumptive force, and offers institutional explanations for judicial restraint. As a result, his scholarship shares more in common with today's new formalism than commonly supposed. Even the under-theorized quality of Williston's scholarship—to contemporary …


Joseph Baxendale, James J. Fishman Jan 2005

Joseph Baxendale, James J. Fishman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The defendant in the great case of Hadley v. Baxendale is Joseph Baxendale, managing partner of Pickford and Co., the common carrier that delayed the delivery of the Hadley's shaft. Baxendale was named the defendant, because Pickfords was a partnership and did not incorporate until 1901. Joseph Baxendale was born in 1785, the son of a Lancastershire surgeon. In 1806, he moved to London, where he worked for a wholesale linen draper. Later, he became a partner in that firm, and developed the managerial and accounting skills that would serve him so well at Pickfords.