Principal (commercial law)

About: Principal (commercial law) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1579 publications have been published within this topic receiving 35379 citations. The topic is also known as: Principal (commercial law).

Irish Matrimonial Property Division in Practice: a Case Study

Abstract: This article analyses patterns of property division on marital breakdown in Ireland. At present, little information is available on the operation of marital breakdown legislation (the Family Law Act 1995 and the Family Law (Divorce) Act 1996). This is primarily due to a strict in camera rule, which has prevented proper study of judicial decisions; lack of reporting and of written judgments are also problems. Little information is available on the nature or frequency of property orders or agreements. Consequently, practical evaluation and informed policy discussion have been severely curtailed. In an attempt to fill this gap, this study analyses 89 divorce, separation and judicial separation cases, using data collected from 44 private and Legal Aid family law practitioners in multiple locations. The principal focus is on the types of orders or agreements made and the reasons (if any) given for those orders. Differences between private practice and Legal Aid cases are considered, as are regional variations in orders. Consent and contested outcomes are contrasted, as are divorce and judicial separation cases. The impact of factors such as gender, age, employment status, dependent children and marriage duration is analysed. The conclusion highlights key issues and discrepancies which may give rise to concern.

Children through Tort

Abstract: This chapter seeks to reveal how children and childhood are conceptualized by English tort law. It proceeds by presenting an overview of the tort duties imposed by English law on, to and about children. Three principal conclusions are reached. First, although children are regarded as capable of owing and being owed legal duties they are not equated with adults. Consequently, every person in society must take the risk of being injured by children behaving like children, though this burden is in practice borne largely by children. This risk is limited to some extent by the imposition of duties on those who control children and the dangers which children may trigger. These duties fall principally on parents, and those such as teachers who take on quasi-parental roles. Indeed, parental obligations are relied on to justify reducing the obligations that others, such as occupiers of land, might otherwise owe children. Further, although tort law is willing to permit injured children to sue their own parents this opportunity is rarely taken in practice. Secondly, the role of the state in protecting and providing for children is still an area of controversy within English tort law. But during the last decade English law has gradually become more willing to treat failures of the social welfare system as giving rise to claims for damages. There has been a pronounced improvement in protection through tort law of children's interests in educational attainment. Thirdly, it is arguable that English law offers inadequate protection to a child's interest in the life and health of its parents. Statute allows children to claim for loss of financial and other dependency following the death of a supporting parent, but where a supporting parent is injured the same interest is only protected indirectly since it is up to the injured parent to claim for the cost of providing substitute care and support. Furthermore, compensation will never be paid for grief or loss of the emotional bond. The reason for this is not that tort law regards the financial role of parents as more important than the emotional role. Rather the special emotional interests of children fall victim to a more general concern that tort law does not have the capacity to try to redress most forms of distress and emotional harm.

Agency by Analogy: A Comment on Odious Debt

Abstract: This paper explores the application of doctrines drawn from common-law agency to the phenomenon of odious debt and the circumstances under which debt incurred by a regime should not bind a sovereign borrower following a change in regime. The paper demonstrates that, although aspects of agency doctrine appear to hold promise as solutions for odious debt incurred by a sovereign borrower, this promise is offset by other agency doctrines. Most generally, the central point of common-law agency doctrine is to specify the circumstances under which the legal consequences of a representatives's actions should be attributed to the representative's principal. This body of doctrine is deeply incompatible with concepts of proportional or partial responsibility which seem often to describe circumstances in which some constituents of an earlier regime approved or benefitted from the proceeds of debt incurred by the regime. To make these points concretely, the paper develops an extended series of comparisons between the consequences of borrowing by a sovereign and by a private corporation afflicted with inept or corrupt management. As the paper demonstrates, the concepts developed within common-law agency apply only indirectly or by analogy.

Accountability in an agency model: Project selection, effort incentives, and contract design*

Abstract: We analyze an agency model of project choice and implementation where the agent is held accountable for his performance. We show that implementation of the ex ante efficient project may be impossible, irrespective of how the principal sets fixed wage and bonus rate. If it is possible, the principal may be forced to increase the bonus rate above the optimal project‐specific rate. The higher profit share compensates the agent for pressure he faces when he has to justify/explain his performance.

England's Legal Monsters

Abstract: This article offers a history of the English legal category monster, a legal category that entered English law in the mid-thirteenth and survived until the mid-nineteenth century. The aim of the article is to provide a close textual analysis of an otherwise absent legal history and to locate law's monsters, and the anxieties that they suggest, within their appropriate contexts: social, political, religious and legal. However, while the principal aim of the article is to address a lacuna in legal historical scholarship, and perhaps precisely because of this fact, the history to be detailed offers a series of valuable insights for future study, particularly in the areas of legal history, philosophy and feminist theory. While full elaboration of these themes is beyond its ambit, the article will draw attention to four different and specific contexts in relation to which future scholarship might benefit from an historical study of England's legal monsters.