Common Law Commons^™

Relying On Restatements, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Restatements of the Law occupy a unique place in the Americanlegal system. For nearly a century, they have played a prominent and influential role as legal texts that courts routinely rely on in a wide variety of fields. Despite their ubiquitous and pervasive use by courts, Restatements are not formal sources of law. While they resemble statutes in their form and structure, Restatements are produced entirely by a private organization of experts set up to clarify and simplify the law and thus lack the force of law on their own. And yet, courts treat them as formal and authoritative sources …

Masthead & Table Of Contents

Dalhousie Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Zoom Paradox: Schrodinger’S Witness, Christopher J. Vidrine

Louisiana Law Review

The article explains the role of the common law and federal civil statutes in the evolution of convenience concept in civil procedure through the development of videoconferencing technology.

'Good Administration' And The 'Good': The Normative Foundation For The Protection Of Legitimate Expectations, Wei Yao, Kenny Chng

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

An idea that has gained significant traction in both case law and academic commentary as a justification for the protection of legitimate expectations is the concept of ‘good administration’. Going beyond the usual criticisms of the concept’s ambiguity, this article aims to highlight an additional set of difficulties with the invocation of ‘good administration’ as the normative justification for the doctrine. This article’s central argument is that the concept of ‘good’ invoked by the idea of ‘good administration’ inevitably falls to be substantiated by a particular conception of what the ‘good’ requires as a matter of political philosophy. And given …

You Are Not A Commodity: A More Efficient Approach To Commercial Privacy Rights, Benjamin T. Pardue

Washington Law Review

United States common law provides four torts for privacy invasion: (1) disclosure of private facts, (2) intrusion upon seclusion, (3) placement of a person in a false light, and (4) appropriation of name or likeness. Appropriation of name or likeness occurs when a defendant commandeers the plaintiff’s recognizability, typically for a commercial benefit. Most states allow plaintiffs who establish liability to recover defendants’ profits as damages from the misappropriation under an “unjust enrichment” theory. By contrast, this Comment argues that such an award provides a windfall to plaintiffs and contributes to suboptimal social outcomes. These include overcompensating plaintiffs and incentivizing …

Deepfake Privacy: Attitudes And Regulation, Matthew B. Kugler, Carly Pace

Northwestern University Law Review

Using only a series of images of a person’s face and publicly available software, it is now possible to insert the person’s likeness into a video and show them saying or doing almost anything. This “deepfake” technology has permitted an explosion of political satire and, especially, fake pornography. Several states have already passed laws regulating deepfakes, and more are poised to do so. This Article presents three novel empirical studies that assess public attitudes toward this new technology. In our main study, a representative sample of the U.S. adult population perceived nonconsensually created pornographic deepfake videos as extremely harmful and …

Divine Intervention, Part Ii: Narratives Of Norm Entrepreneurship In Canadian Religious Freedom Litigation, Kathryn Chan, Howard Kislowicz

Dalhousie Law Journal

Constitutional litigation has become a central arena for debate about human rights. Groups from all points on the political spectrum have turned to legal advocacy, “intervening” in judicial proceedings in an effort to advance their preferred interpretations of particular rights.

Judges and scholars remain divided on whether and how interveners are valuable. This paper evaluates a main rationale for intervention: interveners improve adjudication by enriching courts’ understandings of the issues before them. We use qualitative analysis to examine the extent to which interveners in Canada have succeeded in contributing to judicial pronouncements on the scope and meaning of religious freedom. …

The Implausibility Standard For Environmental Plaintiffs: The Twiqbal Plausibility Pleading Standard And Affirmative Defenses, Celeste Anquonette Ajayi

Washington Law Review

Environmental plaintiffs often face challenges when pleading their claims. This is due to difficulty in obtaining the particular facts needed to establish causation, and thus liability. In turn, this difficulty inhibits their ability to vindicate their rights. Prior to the shift in pleading standards created by Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, often informally referred to as “Twiqbal,” plaintiffs could assert their claims through the simplified notice pleading standard articulated in Conley v. Gibson. This allowed plaintiffs to gain access to discovery, which aided in proving their claims.

The current heightened pleading standard …

Copyrighting Tiktok Dances: Choreography In The Internet Age, Ali Johnson

Washington Law Review

TikTok is a video-sharing social media application that launched in 2018 and has grown wildly since its inception. Many users are drawn to the platform by “dance challenges”—short dance routines of varying complexity set to popular songs that are recreated by other users, eventually going “viral” (i.e., recreated on a massive scale by other users) on the app. Going viral can provide young dancers and choreographers an opportunity to break into the highly competitive entertainment industry. However, there is a problem: due to TikTok’s interface and community practices, the original creators of a dance (who, significantly, are often young women …

A Study On The Legal Status Of Removal Costs Of Oil Pollution From Ship Under Chinese Maritime Law, Weipeng Zhang

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Judicial Biography In The British Empire, Victoria Barnes, Emily Whewell

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article adds to the biographic ''turn" in legal studies. While there is a large body of scholarship examining judges in the United States and the United Kingdom, comparatively little is written on their legal counterparts in the common law world. What can judicial biographies offer for comparative law? Do these studies generate useful information about the movement of law? What can be gained by a better awareness of the lives of those at the top of the colonial legal profession? This article shows that within the common law world, judges, like those in the United States and the United …

But Why Him? A Review Of The Tenth Justice: Judicial Appointments, Marc Nadon, And The Supreme Court Act Reference, By Carissima Mathen And Michael Plaxton, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Dalhousie Law Journal

To the great benefit of the Canadian legal community and the Canadian public, the authors have created an extensive, concise, and highly readable account of the Nadon saga. Anyone unfamiliar with the purported appointment of Justice Nadon to the Supreme Court of Canada, the Reference re Supreme Court Act, ss 5 and 6 (also known as the Nadon Reference), and the aftermath will find this book invaluable. I expect this work will become the definitive and authoritative account of this saga and that it will be indispensable to future scholars.

I begin this review with a brief overview of the …

Landlord Bounty Hunters: Qui Tam As An Effective Tool For Housing Code Enforcement, Alex Ellefson

Journal of Law and Policy

Millions of American renters live in substandard housing. Conditions in these homes not only affect individual renters’ quality of life, but in the aggregate create enormous burdens on public resources in the form of higher healthcare costs, demand for public benefits, and lower economic productivity. Furthermore, the legacy of racist housing policies in the United States has concentrated poor housing conditions in low-income communities of color. This Note argues that existing methods of housing code enforcement are inadequate. Instead, housing advocates should turn to an ancient remedy that has been used to prosecute fraud, labor violations, and even pirates: qui …

Inheritance Crimes, David Horton, Reid Kress Weisbord

Washington Law Review

The civil justice system has long struggled to resolve disputes over end-of-life transfers. The two most common grounds for challenging the validity of a gift, will, or trust— mental incapacity and undue influence—are vague, hinge on the state of mind of a dead person, and allow factfinders to substitute their own norms and preferences for the donor’s intent. In addition, the slayer doctrine—which prohibits killers from inheriting from their victims—has generated decades of constitutional challenges.

But recently, these controversial rules have migrated into an area where the stakes are significantly higher: the criminal justice system. For example, states have criminalized …

Masthead & Table Of Contents

Dalhousie Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Divorce Without Marriage: Taxing Property Transfers Between Cohabiting Adults, Keeva Terry

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Civil Disobedience From A Biblical Perspective, Gabriel Reed

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

To say that civil disobedience is a complicated topic is to severely understate the topic. It is a subject matter that has derived many different and disparate opinions, points of view, and public policies. Specifically, within America today, we observe calls for civil disobedience from both sides of the political spectrum, over several divergent political ideals. These issues are, primarily, driven from both sides’ desire to provide protection and provision for the oppressed and those who cannot necessarily speak for themselves. The definition of who is necessarily oppressed and whom their oppressors are varies from person to person, regardless of …

A Rejection Of Absolutist Duties As A Barrier To Creditor Protection: Facilitating Directorial Decisivness Surrounding Insolvency Through The Business Judgment Rule, Philip Gavin

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This Article draws attention to the difficulties that directors may face when seeking to discharge their duties as a corporation approaches insolvency, in particular when directors must discern the point at which a corporation has become insolvent. It argues that discretion allowed to directors by the business judgment rule will be crucial to overcoming these difficulties. To do this, this article examines the nature of duties owed by directors both before and after insolvency, and accepts the stance taken by Delaware courts in recent years towards an expansive understanding of a corporation’s interests upon insolvency. It then considers unresolved issues …

Lawyers Response To Covid-19 Infodemic On Social Media, Jibran Jamshed

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Objectives: The primary objective of this study is to examine and analyze the skills and practices of lawyers in response to the misinformation/Infodemic of COVID-19 on Social Media platforms.

Research Methodology: In this quantitative study an online survey was conducted among lawyers in Pakistan. The population of the study was made up of practicing lawyers from different District Bar Associations in Pakistan. A questionnaire was distributed to collect data regarding demographic information, use of social media, response to misinformation about COVID-19 on social media and to identify the methods employed by lawyers to check the authenticity of such …

Environmental Justice Class Action Rises Above The Rubbish: The Third Circuit Revives Common-Law Nuisance Remedies In Baptiste V. Bethlehem Landfill Co., Kyra G. Bradley

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.