Law Commons^™

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

The forty-fifth presidency of the United States has sent lawyers reaching once more for the Founders’ dictionaries and legal treatises. In courtrooms, law schools, and media outlets across the country, the original meanings of the words etched into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 have become the staging ground for debates ranging from the power of a president to trademark his name in China to the rights of a legal permanent resident facing deportation. And yet, in this age when big data promises to solve potential challenges of interpretation and judges have for the most part agreed that original meaning should …

Agency Problems And Organizational Costs In Slave-Run Business, Barbara Abatino, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines the internal economic organization of the peculium servi communis — that is, of separate business assets assigned to a slave — and its (external) relationships with creditors. Literary, legal, and epigraphic evidence points predominantly to businesses of small or medium size, suggesting that there must have been some constraints to growth. We identify both agency problems arising within the business organization (governance problems) and agency problems arising between the business organization and its creditors (limited access to credit). We suggest that, although the praetorian remedies had a remarkable mitigating effect, agency problems operated as a constraint to …

The Dual Origin Of The Duty To Disclose In Roman Law, Barbara Abatino, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci

Faculty Scholarship

The Roman law remedies for failure to disclose in sales contracts were developed by two different institutions: that of the aediles, with jurisdiction on market transactions effected through auctions, and that of the praetor, with general jurisdiction including private transactions. The aedilician remedies — the actiones redhibitoria and quanti minoris — allowed for rapid transactions and inexpensive litigation but generated some allocative losses ex post, as they did not incentivize the parties to exchange information about idiosyncratic characteristics of the goods for sale. In contrast, the remedy developed by the praetor — the actio ex empto — implied …

Secret Knowledge Of Genocide: British Failure To Disclose The Killing Of Jews In 1941, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In the late summer and early autumn of 1941, the British military intercepted coded German radio messages that revealed that German troops were killing large numbers of Jewish civilians in German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. The British did not make this knowledge public at that time, nor did they use their still classified records during the war crimes trials after the end of World War II.

Commentators more expert than I have addressed themselves to the question of whether the British had a legal obligation to disclose the information from the coded messages. These remarks concentrate on the possible …

The Incompleat Burkean: Bruce Ackerman's Foundation For Constitutional History, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

With this book, the first in a projected series of at least three volumes, Bruce Ackerman confirms what attentive readers of his law review articles of the past ten years have already known-he is the most original and important writer on constitutional theory in the contemporary English-speaking world. We the People: Foundations, despite its informal, sometimes overly talky style, is not an easy book. Filled to the brim, even to overflowing, and containing many gestures in the direction of arguments to be made in future volumes rather than the substance of the arguments themselves, it presents both the casual reader …