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.

Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication

Abstract: The jurisprudence of rules is the body of legal thought that deals explicitly with the question of legal form. In private law, modern legal thought begins with the rejection of Classical individualism. The rhetoric of individualism so thoroughly dominates legal discourse that it is difficult even to identify a counterethic. Eighteenth century common law thinking does not seem to have been afflicted with a sense of conflict between two legal ideals. Modern legal thought is preoccupied with “competing policies,” conflicting “value judgments” and the idea of a purposive legal order, and to that extent has much in common with pre-Civil War thinking. The correspondence between the formal and substantive economic arguments is more intricate and harder to grasp than the moral debate. There is a connection, in the rhetoric of private law, between individualism and a preference for rules, and between altruism and a preference for standards.

Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans

Abstract: Ordinary Americans often bring family and neighborhood problems to court, seeking justice or revenge. The litigants in these local squabbles encounter law at its boundaries in the corridors of busy city courthouses, in the offices of court clerks, and in the church parlors used by mediation programs. "Getting Justice and Getting Even" concerns the legal consciousness of working class Americans and their experiences with court and mediation. Following cases into and through the courts, Sally Engle Merry provides an ethnographic study of local law and of the people who use it in a New England city. The litigants, primarily white, native-born, and working class, go to court because as part of mainstream America they feel entitled to use its legal system. Although neither powerful nor highly educated, they expect the law's support when they face intolerable infringements of their rights, privacy, and safety. Yet as personal problems enter the legal system and move through mediation sessions, clerk's hearings, and prosecutor's conferences, the citizen plaintiff rapidly loses control of the process. Court officials and mediators interpret and characterize the meaning of these experiences, reframing and categorizing them in different discourses. Some plaintiffs yield to these interpretations, but others resist, struggling to assert their own version of the problem. Ultimately, Merry exposes the paradox of legal entitlement. While going to court allows an individual to dominate domestic relationships, the litigant must increasingly yield control of the situation to the court that supplies that power.

An Introduction to English Legal History

Abstract: Tables of statutes and cases, Kings and Queens of England since 1066 and abbreviations. Law and Custom in early Britain. Origins of the Common Law. Superior Courts of Common Law. Forms of Action. Jury and Pleading. Court of Chancery and Equity. Conciliar Courts. Ecclesiastical Courts. Judicial Review of Decisions. Legal Profession. Legal Literature. Law Making. Real Property: Feudal Tenure. Real Property: Feudalism and Uses. Real Property: Inheritance and Estates. Real Property: Family Settlements. Other Interests in Land. Contract: Covenant and Debt. Contract: Assumpsit and Deceit. Quasi-contract. Property in Chattels Personal. Negligence. Nuisance. Defamation. Economic Torts. Persons: Status and Liberty. Persons: Marriage and its Consequences. Pleas of the Crown: Criminal Procedure. Pleas of the Crown: Substantive Criminal Law. Appendices: Specimien Writs. Specimen Entries.

Law, custom, and social order : the colonial experience in Malawi and Zambia

Abstract: This book explores the historical formation during the colonial period of that part of African law known as customary law. In treating the emergence of the customary law as part of the history of the social and economic transformation of African societies under colonial rule, it also provides an interpretation of the ways in which people tried to control the disrupting effects of the changes which they experienced. Martin Chanock shows how African ideas, aspirations and activities regarding law were shaped by interaction with the legal ideas of the British colonisers, their understandings of African societies, and the judicial institutions of the colonial state. These thematic considerations are illustrated by studies of how the customary law developed alongside criminal law in colonial society in Malawi and Zambia as part of the moral weaponry of a changing social order, and more specifically by describing the role of the customary law of the family in conflicts between men and women in the new colonial political economy.