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Full-Text Articles in Law

Of Equal Wrongs And Half Rights, Gideon Parchomovsky, Peter Siegelman, Steven Thel Jun 2007

Of Equal Wrongs And Half Rights, Gideon Parchomovsky, Peter Siegelman, Steven Thel

All Faculty Scholarship

With a tiny handful of exceptions, common law jurisprudence is predicated on a “winner-take-all” principle: the plaintiff either gets the entire entitlement at issue or collects nothing at all. Cases that split an entitlement between the two parties are exceedingly rare. While there may be sound reasons for this all-or-nothing rule, we argue in this Article that the law should prefer equal division of an entitlement in a limited but important set of property, tort and contracts cases. The common element in such cases is a windfall, a gain or loss that occurs despite the fact that no ex ante …


Common Law Police Powers And The Rule Of Law, Steve Coughlan Jan 2007

Common Law Police Powers And The Rule Of Law, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Common law police powers have long been a source of some dispute in the Canadian criminal justice system. On the one hand, their existence is difficult to reconcile with predictability in the law, since in any individual case where a new power is created (generally referred to as use of the "ancillary powers doctrine"), it would not have been possible to know in advance that the police were actually acting legally. On the other hand the benefit for society purchased with that ambiguity is a more tailored response to the particular problem, which might also lead to better results in …