Law Commons^™

Private Law In The Gaps, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Private law subjects like tort, contract, and property are traditionally taken to be at the core of the common law tradition, yet statutes increasingly intersect with these bodies of doctrine. This Article draws on recent work in private law theory and statutory interpretation to consider afresh what courts should do with private law in statutory gaps. In particular, it focuses on statutes touching on tort law, a field at the leading edge of private law theory. This Article's analysis unsettles some conventional wisdom about the intersection of private law and statutes. Many leading tort scholars and jurists embrace a regulatory …

Dualism And Doctrine, Alex Stein, Dov Fox

Alex Stein

What kinds of harm among those that tortfeasors inflict are worthy of compensation? Which forms of self-incriminating evidence are privileged against government compulsion? What sorts of facts constitute a criminal defendant’s intent? Existing doctrine pins the answer to all of these questions on whether the injury, facts, or evidence at stake are “mental” or “physical.” The assumption that operations of the mind are meaningfully distinct from those of the body animates fundamental rules in our law.

A tort victim cannot recover for mental harm on its own because the law presumes that he is able to unfeel any suffering arising …

What Is An Accident?, Daniel B. Yeager

Daniel B. Yeager

Please consider for publication my attached 5000-word, 28-page, lightly annotated (39 footnotes) Essay, entitled “What Is an Accident?”

Here I attempt to decode the most frequently proferred excuse in and out of law. Surprisingly, as central as accidents are to questions of responsibility, their criteria have received almost no attention at all. From what I can tell, mine is the first sustained attempt to identify the grammar of accidents, an endeavor that follows up on similar efforts to do the same with the excuse of mistake in my book J.L. Austin and the Law: Exculpation and the Explication of Responsibility …

Constructing Autonomy: A Kantian Framework, Bailey H. Kuklin

Bailey H. Kuklin

No abstract provided.