Common Law Commons^™

Juries, Judges, And The Politics Of Tort Reform, David Logan

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Installation Failure: How The Predominant Purpose Test Has Perpetuated Software’S Uncertain Legal Status Under The Uniform Commercial Code, Spencer Gottlieb

Michigan Law Review

Courts have struggled to uniformly classify software as a good or a service and have consequently failed to apply a consistent body of law in that domain. Instead, courts have relied on the predominant purpose test to determine whether the Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”) or common law should apply to a given software contract. This test, designed for traditional goods and services that do not share software’s complexity or rapid advancement, has perpetuated the uncertainty surrounding software’s legal status. This Note proposes that courts adopt the substantial software test as an alternative to the predominant purpose test. Under this proposal, …

Religious Tribunals And Secular Courts: Navigating Power And Powerlessness, Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin

Pepperdine Law Review

In this article, the author discusses the ways such as common law, and contracts employed by religious systems for navigating their relationship with legal systems of secular states. Topics discussed include the role of religious contracts in helping religious systems negotiate with secularism, the role of religious contracts in protecting autonomy of religious systems, and the structure of marriage and divorce in Jewish law.

The New Old Legal Realism, Tracey E. George, Mitu Gulati, Ann C. Mcginley

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hague Evidence Convention: A Practical Guide To The Convention, United States Case Law, Convention - Sponsored Review Commissions (1978 And 1985), And Responses Of Other Signatory Nations: With Digest Of Cases And Bibliography, Denise L. Dunham

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Prove Me Wrong Cases And Consideration Theory, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Arbitrators And Arbitral Institutions: Legal Risks For Product Liability?, V. V. Veeder

American University Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Postcolonial Theory Of Spousal Rape: The Carribean And Beyond, Stacy-Ann Elvy

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Many postcolonial states in the Caribbean continue to struggle to comply with their international treaty obligations to protect women from sexual violence. Reports from various United Nations programs, including UNICEF, and the annual U.S. State Department Country Reports on Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia (“Commonwealth Countries”), indicate that sexual violence against women, including spousal abuse, is a significant problem in the Caribbean. Despite ratification of various international instruments intended to eliminate sexual violence against women, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Commonwealth Countries have retained the …

Writing Reasoned Decisions And Opinions: A Guide For Novice, Experienced, And Foreign Judges, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

The primary focus of this Article is on providing practical advice on how to write a reasoned decision or opinion (Section IV). However, experts in education theory have found that adult learners do best when they understand why certain information is being presented, so the discussion of how to write reasoned judgments will be preceded by a brief section on why such judgments are necessary or useful (Section III). This Article also considers what a reasoned decision or opinion actually is as a preliminary matter (Section II), since it is impossible to write such a document without a true appreciation …

Reasoned Awards In International Commercial Arbitration: Embracing And Exceeding The Common Law-Civil Law Dichotomy, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

The primary focus of this Article is to analyze various process-oriented and structural issues relating to reasoned awards in international commercial arbitration so as to improve the practical and theoretical understanding of international awards. That discussion, which is found in Section IV, considers various factors from both the common law and civil law perspectives so as to take into account the blended nature of international commercial arbitration.

Of course, to be fully comprehensible, the detailed analysis in Section IV must first be put into context. Therefore, Section II describes the difficulties associated with defining a reasoned award in international commercial …

The Common Law Right To Information, Joseph Regalia

Scholarly Works

A once-thriving doctrine, today the common law right to information has been largely forgotten by U.S. courts at both the state and federal level. But courts have not paused to question whether the common law right still has a role to play in modern litigation. One reason may be the dearth of case law explaining the common law right's operation. Another may be that courts believe this doctrine has been eradicated by the advent of freedom of information laws. This article first brings together the disparate authority on the common law right in an attempt to pin down the precise …

The Role Of The Profit Imperative In Risk Management, Christopher French

Faculty Scholarship

Risks in the world abound. Every day there is a chance that each of us could be in a car accident. Or, one of us could be the victim of a tornado, flood or earthquake. Every day someone becomes deathly ill from an insidious disease. Our properties are in constant peril—one’s house could catch fire at any time or a tree could fall on it during a storm. Any one of these events could have devastating financial consequences, and they are just a few of the many risks that impact our daily lives. One of the principal ways we manage …

Reading Statutes In The Common Law Tradition, Jeffrey A. Pojanowski

Journal Articles

There is wide agreement in American law and scholarship about the role the common law tradition plays in statutory interpretation. Jurists and scholars of various stripes concur that the common law points away from formalist interpretive approaches like textualism and toward a more creative, independent role for courts. They simply differ over whether the common law tradition is worth preserving. Dynamic and strongly purposive interpreters claim the Anglo-American common law heritage in support of their approach to statutory interpretation, while arguing that formalism is an unjustified break from that tradition. Formalists reply that the common law mindset and methods are …

The Jury And Criminal Responsibility In Anglo-American History, Thomas A. Green

Articles

Anglo-American theories of criminal responsibility require scholars to grapple with, inter alia, the relationship between the formal rule of law and the powers of the lay jury as well as two inherent ideas of freedom: freedom of the will and political liberty. Here, by way of canvassing my past work and prefiguring future work, I sketch some elements of the history of the Anglo-American jury and offer some glimpses of commentary on the interplay between the jury—particularly its application of conventional morality to criminal judgments—and the formal rule of law of the state. My central intent is to pose questions …

Identifying An Interest In Land Sufficient To Support A Caveat: Salbiah Bte Adnan V Micro Credit Pte Ltd [2014] Sghc 249, Alvin W. L. See

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The difficult issue of what constitutes an interest in land sufficient to support a caveat (“caveatable interest”) recently presented itself before the High Court in the case of Salbiah Bte Adnan v Micro Credit Pte Ltd, which concerned a caveat lodged to protect an alleged security interest. The decision deserves the attention of property lawyers for it helpfully addressed various principles of property law relating, directly and indirectly, to the lodgment of caveats.

Accident Of Birth Or Matter Of Choice: Legal Recognition Of Transsexual People In The Common Law, Kevin K.S. Tso

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The purpose of the Article is to look at the recognition-or lack thereof-of transsexual people at common law in relation to the "proper" sex and gender with which they associate themselves. This Article will begin by addressing and defining transsexualism and how the medical community's position on this topic has evolved over the years. It will then look at the historical foundations of transsexualism in the common law, especially at the Corbett decision that held sway in England and Wales for over thirty-five years and was followed internationally. The Article will then provide an overview of the current positions in …

The Uneasy And Often Unhelpful Interaction Of Tort Law And Constitutional Law In First Amendment Litigation, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

There are increasing tensions between the First Amendment and the common law torts of intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation, and privacy. This Article discusses the conflicting interactions among the three models that are competing for primacy as the tort law governing expressive activities evolves to accommodate the requirements of the First Amendment. At one extreme there is the model that expression containing information which has been lawfully obtained that contains neither intentional falsehoods nor incitements to immediate violence can only be sanctioned in narrowly defined exceptional circumstances, even if that expression involves matters that are universally regarded as being …

Mos Americanus Or Common Law In Partibus Infidelium, Peter Goodrich

Articles

No abstract provided.

Structure And Value In The Common Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Scholarship

Common law concepts have fallen into disrepute among legal theorists. The rise of Legal Realism in the early twentieth century marked a turning point in legal thought and analysis. One of the defining characteristics of the movement was complete disregard, not to say contempt, towards legal conceptualism. The founding fathers of the movement viewed the core concepts of the common law as devoid of any independent meaning or functional significance. They considered the common law’s conceptual edifice indeterminate and manipulable so as to render it altogether contingent on the working of the system. Walking along the same path, efficiency-minded scholars …