Common law

About: Common law is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 30135 publications have been published within this topic receiving 280701 citations. The topic is also known as: judicial precedent & judge-made law.

World jury systems

Abstract: 1. A Historical and Comparative Perspective on the Common Law Jury 2. The Continuing Decline of the English Jury 3. The American Criminal Jury 4. Criminal Trial Juries in Australia 5. The New Zealand Jury 6. The Canadian Criminal Jury 7. The Scottish Criminal Jury 8. The Jury System in Contemporary Ireland: In the Shadow of a Troubled Past 9. Europe's New Jury Systems: The Cases of Spain and Russia 10. Reviving the Criminal Jury in Japan 11. The Civil Jury in America 12. 'Guardian of Civil Rights' ... Medieval Relic: The Civil Jury in Canada 13. The Jury Elsewhere in the World

A Theory of Self-Enforcing Indefinite Agreements

Abstract: All contracts are incomplete. But incomplete contracts differ along several key dimensions. Many contracts are incomplete because parties decline to condition performance on future states that they cannot observe or verify to courts. In these cases, the incompleteness is exogenous to the contract. Other agreements, however, appear to be "deliberately" incomplete in the sense that parties decline to condition performance on available, verifiable measures that could be specified in the contract at relatively low cost. Thus, incompleteness is endogenous to these agreements suggesting that the parties had other reasons for leaving the terms in question unspecified. Traditional contract law doctrine appears to track this distinction. One of the core principles of contact law is the requirement of definiteness. An agreement will not be enforced as a contract if it is uncertain and indefinite in its material terms. It is widely believed, however, that the indefiniteness doctrine is largely ignored by contemporary courts. But a study of the contemporary case law on indefinite contracts reveals some striking facts. In literally dozens of cases, American courts dismiss claims for breach of contract on the grounds of indefiniteness, often without granting any relief to the disappointed promisee. This evidence raises a fundamental question: Why do parties write deliberately incomplete agreements in the shadow of a robust indefiniteness doctrine? One hypothesis is that these agreements may be self-enforcing. But most of the recently litigated cases do not appear to be self-enforcing in the traditional sense. Rather, most are isolated transactions between strangers trading at arms length. Recent work in experimental economics suggests, however, that the domain of self-enforcing contracts may be considerably larger than has been conventionally understood. A robust result of these experiments is that a significant fraction of individuals behave as if reciprocity were an important motivation (even in isolated interactions with strangers) while a comparable fraction react as if motivated entirely by self interest. These experiments support a theory that predicts that deliberately incomplete contracts that rely on self-enforcement through reciprocal fairness are more efficient than the alternative of more complete, legally enforceable agreements. The potency of reciprocal fairness as a method of self-enforcement explains (and justifies) the resiliency of the common law indefiniteness doctrine in the face of a contemporary academic consensus in favor of expanding the scope of legal regulation.

Zero Tolerance for Children: Two Wrongs Do Not Make a Right.

Abstract: The federal government, through the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 (GFSA), required states to enact zero tolerance legislation mandating school districts to expel students automatically for a period of one year if they brought weapons to school. Under threat of losing federal education dollars, states complied. In turn, school districts developed disciplinary policies that reflected state mandates. In Virginia, as in other states, concern has mounted that application of these policies sometimes results in inequitable and nonsensical treatment of children. In this paper, the evolution of zero tolerance policies is traced from their progenitor, the GFSA, to the school district level. Utilizing Virginia as an example for the emergent case law, this article illustrates the debate on zero tolerance consequences among which may deny students access to schooling and ultimately development as reflective members of a democratic society.

The Real Difference in Corporate Law between the United States and Continental Europe: Distribution of Powers

Abstract: This paper challenges some common assumptions in comparative corporate law. It argues that differences in the degree of shareholder protection between common law and civil law countries are often overestimated, while some more fundamental corporate law differences remain overlooked. A milestone publication in this regard is the article of La Porta et al. entitled Law and Finance. The authors introduce an index to measure investor protection statistically and find that common law countries perform better on average than civil law countries. However, a broad array of legal sources reveals many mechanisms that interfere with, or substitute for, the mechanisms for shareholder protection used to construct the index. A recoding of the index to include these sources yields no significant differences between common law and civil law jurisdictions. This finding casts doubt on the received premise of recent research that common law jurisdictions offer better shareholder protection than civil law jurisdictions. It highlights instead the existence of a fundamentally different distribution of legal powers within U.S. and Continental European corporations. This paper shows that this difference shapes the functioning of the mechanisms of shareholder protection that comprise the index of La Porta et al. Furthermore, the difference in power distribution undermines the relationship they allege between shareholder protection and ownership structures and better explains in itself the differences in ownership structures, as well as many other aspects of corporate life. 1 LL.M. Harvard Law School, Licentiaat rechten University Leuven. An earlier draft of this paper was awarded the Irving Oberman Memorial Award at Harvard Law School for the best paper related to corporate governance. I thank Professor Mark Roe, Professor Detlev Vagts, and especially Jane Fair Bestor for their helpful comments and the Belgian American Educational Foundation for its support. Comments and suggestions for improvement are very welcome at slcools@post.harvard.edu.

Trusting Records: Legal, Historical and Diplomatic Perspectives

Abstract: Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. The Evolution of Legal and Historical Methods for Assessing the Trustworthiness of Records. 2. Trusting Records as Legal Evidence: Common Law Rules of Evidence. 3. Trusting Records as Historical Evidence: Modern Historical Methods. 4. Creating and Maintaining Trustworthy Records in Electronic Systems: Archival Diplomatic Methods. Conclusion. Notes. Bibliography. Index.