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.

Tradition of the law and law of the tradition: Law, state and social control in China

Abstract: Foreword by Marvin Wolfgang Preface Editorial Notes on Pinyin Transliteration Abbreviations Introduction: Law, State, and Social Control in China: Marxism or Confucianism? Tradition of the Law The Chinese Legal Tradition: Law and Morality The Rules of Punishment Law of the Tradition Political Power and Judicial Independence: Marxist Ideology, the Communist Party, and the Role of Law The Class Division and Equal Rights before the Law Punishing for Thought: Counterrevolutionary Crime in Chinese Law The Principle of Voluntariness in Chinese Law and Morality Conclusion: Chinese Law under a Socialist Mantle Appendix: Chronology of Chinese History Bibliography Index

Dignity and the Politics of Protection: Abortion Restrictions Under Casey/Carhart

Abstract: This essay on the law and politics of abortion analyzes the constitutional principles governing new challenges to Roe. The essay situates the Court’s recent decision in Gonzales v. Carhart in debates of the antiabortion movement over the reach and rationale of statutes designed to overturn Roe—exploring strategic considerations that lead advocates to favor incremental restrictions over bans, and to supplement fetal-protective justifications with womanprotective justifications for regulating abortion. The essay argues that a multi-faceted commitment to dignity links Carhart and the Casey decision on which it centrally relies. Dignity is a value that bridges communities divided in the abortion debate, as well as diverse bodies of constitutional and human rights law. Carhart invokes dignity as a reason for regulating abortion, while Casey invokes dignity as a reason for protecting women’s abortion decisions from government regulation. This dignity-based analysis of Casey/Carhart offers principles for determining the constitutionality of woman-protective abortion restrictions that are grounded in a large body of substantive due process and equal protection case law. Protecting women can violate women’s dignity if protection is based on stereotypical assumptions about women’s capacities and women’s roles, as many of the new woman-protective abortion restrictions are. Like old forms of gender paternalism, the new forms of gender paternalism remedy harm to women through the control of women. The new woman-protective abortion restrictions do not provide women in need what they need: they do not alleviate the social conditions that contribute to unwanted pregnancies, nor do they provide social resources to help women who choose to end pregnancies they otherwise might bring to term. The essay concludes by reflecting on alternative—and constitutional—modes of protecting women who are making decisions

Procedural Innovation and Institutional Change in Medieval English Manorial Courts

Abstract: In England during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the royal courts cast a longer and longer shadow over private and local jurisdictions. By a series of steps embracing much innovation, the custom of the king's court gradually became the common law of England, and the royal courts asserted their supremacy over other jurisdictions in many areas. Foremost among these were disputes over freehold land and cases involving felonies. It has been suggested that the royal innovations’ jurisdictional effects on private courts were “neither intended nor foreseen.” Nonetheless, they reduced private jurisdictions—with the exception of the palatinates—to constitutional insignificance during the thirteenth century. Occasional baronial objections, such as that enshrined in clause thirty-four of Magna Carta or the bluff waving of a rusty sword at a quo warranto inquest do not disguise this basic fact of English legal and constitutional history.

The Royal Forests of Medieval England

Abstract: The distinction between the forest and the trees is fundamental to this study, for the royal forest of medieval England was a complex institution with legal, political, economic, and social significance. To protect the "beasts of the forest" and their habitat, initially for the king's hunting and later for economic exploitation, an elaborate organization of officials and courts administered a system of "forest law" that was unique to medieval England. The subject can first be studied in detail in the records and chronicles of the Angevin kings, which reflect the restless activity of Henry II and his growing corps of officials that led to the expansion of the area designated as royal forest. At its height in the thirteenth century, an estimated one-fourth of the land area of England and its riches came under the special jurisdiction of forest law. Barons whose holdings lay within the royal forest were restricted in their use of the land, and the activity of all who lived or traveled in the forest was circumscribed. Until the institution of new taxes overshadowed the economic importance of the forest and the king divested himself of large areas of forest in 1327, the extent of the royal forest, with its special jurisdiction, was often a source of conflict between king and barons and was a major political issue in the Magna Carta crisis of 1215. This is the first general history of the royal forest system from its beginning with the Norman Conquest to its decline in the later Middle Ages. The author pays special attention to the development of forest law alongside common law, and the interrelationship between the two types of law, courts, and justices. The preservation of extensive unpublished records of the forest courts in the Public Record Office makes possible this intensive study of the legal and administrative aspects of the royal forest; chronicles and the records of the Exchequer, among other sources, shed light on the political and economic importance of the royal forests in medieval England. The author's ultimate objective is to show the influence of the royal forest upon the daily lives of contemporaries-both the barons who held land and the peasants who tilled land within the royal forests.