Law Commons^™

Social Hierarchies And The Formation Of Customary Property Law In Pre-Industrial China And England, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative lawyers and economists have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites and, therefore, were unusually “despotic” towards the poor. Such assumptions are highly questionable: Quite the opposite, one of the most striking characteristics of Qing and Republican property institutions is that they often gave significantly greater economic protection to the poorer segments of society than comparable institutions in early modern England. In particular, Chinese property customs afforded much stronger powers of redemption to landowners who had pawned their land. In both societies, land-pawning occurred far more frequently among poorer households …

Restatements And Non-State Codifications Of Private Law, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a vantage point through which to assess the phenomenon of projects codifying private law that are undertaken by private persons or institutions, distinct from legislatures and state-sponsored codification and law-revision projects. The private institution on which this paper focuses is the American Law Institute (ALI). ALI works in statutory form—most notably the Uniform Commercial Code and the Model Penal Code—as well as through projects that generate “Principles” to guide legal development within their specific fields and “Restatements” that authoritatively cover the law in a field.

The history of the Restatements sketched in this essay fits within the …

Influences Of The Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Company’s American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that West’s digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berring’s scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were …

Saving Originalism’S Soul, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The National Security State: The End Of Separation Of Powers, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Contours And Composition Of Agency Doctrine: Perspectives From History And Theory On Inherent Agency Power, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores the history of formulations of agency doctrine, arguing that agency law can best be rationalized as a distinctive subject by recognizing that an agent acts as an extension of the principal. The Essay relies on historical material related to the drafting of the Restatements of Agency, the disagreements among Reporters and other participants about the contours agency law, and the intellectual backdrop against which these experts worked. Their disputes, preceded as they were by challenges to the fundamental coherence of agency law, led to successive formulations of agency doctrine; while attempting to provide a comprehensive level of …