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.

The Common Law and Economic Growth: Hayek Might Be Right

Abstract: Recent finance scholarship finds that countries with legal systems based on the common law provide better investor protections and have more developed financial markets than civil law countries. These findings echo Hayek's claims of the superiority of English to French legal institutions. In this paper, I present evidence that common law countries experienced faster economic growth than civil law countries during the period 1960-1992. I suggest that the difference reflects the common law's greater orientation toward private economic activity and the civil law's greater orientation toward government intervention.

A Concise History of the Common Law

Abstract: As always during its long history, English common law, upon which American law is based, has had to defend itself against the challenge of civil law's clarity and traditions. That challenge to our common law heritage remains today. To that end, Liberty Fund now makes available a clear and candid discussion of common law. "A Concise History of the Common Law" provides a source for common-law understanding of individual rights, not in theory only, but protected through the confusing and messy evolution of courts, and their administration as they struggled to resolve real problems. Plucknett's seminal work is intended to convey a sense of historical development - not to serve merely as a work of reference. The first half of the book is a historical introduction to the study of law. Plucknett discusses the conditions in political, economic, social, and religious thought that have contributed to the genesis of law. This section is a brief but astoundingly full introduction to the study of law. The second half of the book consists of chapters introducing the reader to the history of some of the main divisions of law, such as criminal, tort, property, contract, and succession. These topics are treated with careful exposition so that the book will be of interest to those just embarking on their quest in legal history while still providing enough substantial information, references, and footnotes to make it meaningful for the well-versed legal history reader.

Rediscovering Principles of Public Administration: The Neglected Foundation of Public Law.

Abstract: Over the past five decades, the field of public administration has gradually lost its theoretical distinctiveness. Today, public administration has largely abandoned or forgotten its roots in public law - in the Constitution, statutes, and case law - and has accepted, to varying degrees, the generic behavioral principles of management as taught in schools of business. In this intellectual climate, those who study government and those who are practitioners of governmental management were understandably caught off guard by the sheer audacity of the entrepreneurial management advocates, actively led by no less a personage than the Vice President of the United States. The entrepreneurial management model outlined first in Osborne and Gaebler's popular book, Reinventing Government,[1] and later in the Vice President's National Performance Review Report,[2] seemed to many practitioners and major professional organizations of public administration, not as a challenge to fundamental values, but simply as the next logical step in the grand synthesis of management science. The difficulty is that this grand synthesis does not comport with the daily experience of managing government agencies and programs. This discontinuity between the contemporary management theory synthesis and reality has been difficult for Public administrators to articulate since most have lost touch with the theoretical foundation of their field's intellectual tradition. That foundation is in public law, not in behavioral theories of management.[3] Ironically, the legal constraints and demands in the governmental work environment are evident enough. To a considerable extent they are evident in the business world as well. Nonetheless, the fact is that the private and governmental sectors are based on fundamentally different streams of legal doctrine: one traditionally rooted in judge-made common law, protecting rights and asserting duties in the relations of private individuals; the other founded on the body of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and articulated by a truly enormous body of statutory, regulatory, and case law to ensure continuance of a republican form of government and to protect the rights and freedoms of citizens at the hands of an all-powerful state. The intent of the authors is to revisit the protective purposes of the Constitution as designed by the framers and the basic tenets of our administrative state as adapted by their successors (legislators, presidents, jurists, and other government officials) to meet contemporary administrative realities. It is our understanding that the basic theory guiding governmental organization and management - structures, processes, and procedures - is to be found in public law, that it is valid today, and that it will remain so as long as the Republic endures. The principles that make up this theory can in many settings embrace useful precepts such as those of "management by objectives" (MBO) or "total quality management" (TQM) and they can accommodate and be enhanced by an almost infinite variety of technological innovations. But such techniques and advances are not - and cannot be - a substitute or replacement for the traditional, constitution-based method of doing the public's business. To accept such a substitution would be to trade away the constitutionally protected, known means of ensuring accountability for yet to be established measures of government performance. Protective Purposes of the Constitution As a matter of cultural preference, intensified by the experiences of colonial dependency, the Revolutionary War, and the operation of fledgling states during the Confederation period thereafter, the framers of the Constitution consciously designed a government better suited to frustrate the concentration of political power than to govern effectively. As James Madison expressed the common assumption that led to this result: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands . …

When Formality Works: Authority and Abstraction in Law and Organizations

Abstract: In this innovative exploration of the concept of formality, or governing by abstraction, Arthur Stinchcombe breathes new life into an idea that scholars have all but ignored in recent years. We have come to assume that governing our social activities by advance planning by creating abstract descriptions of what ought to happen and adjusting these descriptions as situations change is not as efficient and responsive as dealing directly with the real substance of the situation at hand. Stinchcombe argues the opposite. When a plan is designed to correct itself and keep up with the reality it is meant to govern, it can be remarkably successful. He points out a wide range of examples where this is the case, including architectural blueprints, immigration law, the construction of common law by appeals courts, Fannie Mae's secondary mortgage market, and scientific paradigms and programs. Arguing that formality has been misconceived as consisting mainly of its defects, Stinchcombe shows how formality, at its best, can serve us much better than ritual obedience to poorly laid plans or a romantic appeal to "real life.""

Law and the shaping of the American labor movement

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Broad Contexts Recasting American "Exceptionalism" The State of Courts and Parties 2. Judicial Review in Labor's Political Culture Samuel Gompers and in Jacobs Hours Laws in Illinois Hours Laws in Colorado Pressed toward a Minimalist Politics 3. Government by Injunction The Origins and Dimensions of Government by Injunction The Origins of Governmentby Injunction in Railway Strikes The Rise and Repression of City-Wide Boycotts 4. Semi-Outlawry The Usurpation of Local Polities Courts and the Uses of Police, Guards and Troops Labor's Resort to Injunctions 5. The Language of the Law and the Remaking of Labor's Rights Consciousness "Labor's Whole Gospel Is Liberty of Contract" Labor's Constitution A Great Popular Defiance Anti-Injunction Laws before Norris-LaGuardia The Norris-LaGuardia Act Conclusion Appendix A: Labor Legislation in the Courts, 1885-1930 Appendix B: Approximating the Numbers of Labor Injunctions and Their Relation to Other Strike Statistics, 1880-1930 Appendix C: Judicial Treatment of Statutes Seeking to Protect Union Organizing and Action by Revising Equity and Common Law Doctrine Index