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.

Economic loss in tort

Abstract: The law of torts severely restricts recovery by a plaintiff for financial losses suffered in consequence of the negligent conduct of the defendant.' In American law this is usually, and perhaps misleadingly, summarized by saying that there is no recovery for negligent interference with a contract. It is misleading because the restriction extends beyond contracts to other expected or normal financial gains that, but for the tort, would have been realized. In the other common law jurisdictions, this is referred to, perhaps again misleadingly, as the problem of economic loss. Here the term may mislead because many financial losses may not be losses at all in an economic sense, that is from the point of view of net social welfare.

Knowledge-management systems for law firms

Abstract: The present inventors devised unique systems, methods, interfaces, and software for managing and leveraging knowledge in law firms and potentially other enterprises. For example, one system provides a single user interface (220) for researching case law for online legal research (210) service and identifying and accessing law-firm documents.

The Foundations of European Community Law: An Introduction to the Constitutional and Administrative Law of the European Community

Abstract: COMMUNITY INSTITUTIONS 1 The Political Institutions 2 The European Court and the Court of Auditors THE COMMUNITY LEGAL SYSTEM 3 Acts of the Member States 4 Community Acts 5 General Principles of Law 6 Agreements with Third Countries COMMUNITY LAW AND THE MEMBER STATES 7 Direct Effect and National Remedies 8 The National Response 9 Preliminary References 10 Enforcement Actions ADMINISTRATIVE LAW 11 Reviewable Acts 12 Locus Standi 13 Failure to Act 14 Indirect Challenge 15 Review and Annulment 16 Community Obligations

Why the Law Hates Speculators: Regulation and Private Ordering in the Market for OTC Derivatives

Abstract: A wide variety of statutory and common law doctrines in American law evidence hostility towards speculation. Conventional economic theory, however, generally views speculation as an efficient form of trading that shifts risk to those who can bear it most easily and improves the accuracy of market prices. This Article reconciles the apparent conflict between legal tradition and economic theory by explaining why some forms of speculative trading may be inefficient. It presents a heterogeneous expectations model of speculative trading that offers important insights into antispeculation laws in general, and the ongoing debate concerning over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives in particular. Although trading in OTC derivatives is presently largely unregulated, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently announced its intention to consider substantively regulating OTC derivatives under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA). Because the CEA is at heart an antispeculation law, the heterogeneous expectations model of speculation offers policy support for the CFTC’s claim † Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. Much of the work on this Article was completed while I was a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and I am grateful to Brookings for its support. Earlier versions were presented at workshops at the law schools of Cornell, Fordham, Georgetown, Harvard, Iowa, Michigan, Toronto, and Vanderbilt, and at the Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economics Association. I thank the participants at those sessions for their many helpful comments. I owe a special debt to the following individuals for their guidance and insights: George Akerlof, Margaret Blair, Stephen Cohen, William Dickens, Jill Fisch, Merritt Fox, Mark Geistfeld, Bruce Hay, Jack Hirshleifer, Louis Kaplow, Donald Langevoort, Harold Maier, George Martin, Martin Mayer, James Oldham, Douglas Olin, Eric Posner, Sam Rea, Steven Shavell, Steve Thel, Randall Thomas, and William Vukowich. Finally, I am grateful to Wells Engledow, Mark Fitzpatrick, Karen Jennings and Joseph Vitale for their assistance in preparing this Article. STOUT TO PRINTER 04/15/99 4:22 PM 702 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol:48:701 of regulatory jurisdiction. This model also, however, suggests an alternative to the apparently binary choice now available to lawmakers (i.e., either regulate OTC derivatives under the CEA, or exempt them). That alternative would be to regulate OTC derivatives in the same manner that the common law traditionally regulated speculative contracts: as permitted, but legally unenforceable, agreements. By requiring derivatives traders to rely on private ordering to ensure the performance of their agreements, this strategy may offer significant advantages in discouraging welfare-reducing speculation based on heterogeneous expectations while protecting more beneficial forms of derivatives trading.

'A Union Founded on the Rule of Law': Meaning and Reality of the Rule of Law as a Constitutional Principle of EU Law

Abstract: This article examines the substance and scope of this constitutional principle before subjecting the EU’s constitutional framework to 'a rule of law audit.' It will first be shown that the EU constitutional principle of the rule of law is, to paraphrase Lord Bingham, no meaningless verbiage. Not only has the rule of law unsurprisingly become one of the defining principles undergirding the Union’s constitutional system, but the EU courts have correctly understood it as a multifaceted legal principle, with formal and substantive elements, and whose normative impact should not be underestimated. The fact that the EU rule of law is no hollow slogan, however, does not necessarily imply that there is no gap between rhetoric and practice. Adopting the Court of Justice’s understanding of the rule of law as a benchmark, this article will propose that the post-Maastricht Union’s constitutional framework illustrated a serious ‘rule of law deficit’ that has been considerably remedied by a set of long-awaited reforms contained in the 2007 Lisbon Treaty.