scholarly journals The Law of Obligations

Author(s):  
Michael Lobban

The Anglo-American law of obligations was profoundly reshaped in the two centuries after 1800, driven by social and economic changes, and changes in legal institutions and doctrines. In contract law, nineteenth-century jurists increasingly sought to put the rules of law into a coherent rational framework (inspired by continental models resting on will theory), though they soon found that this theory could not explain many contractual doctrines. In tort law, jurists were also divided over whether unifying principles underlying tort could be uncovered, with formalist efforts to find such principles being challenged by Realists who argued that tort was in effect ‘public law in disguise’. The quest for underlying principles was also pursued by scholars of unjust enrichment, first in the United States and subsequently in England; though as in the other areas of obligations, by the end of the twentieth century, there was no consensus on whether this was possible.

Author(s):  
Anne Norton

This chapter examines how the Muslim question is tied to the question of democracy. In his book Voyous (translated as Rogues), Jacques Derrida referred to the United States and Islam as the enemies of democracy. In particular, he called Islam “the other of democracy.” Only Islam, Derrida insisted, refuses democracy. Derrida was not the only scholar to have made that claim. His account echoes Samuel Huntington. John Rawls thought Islam so alien that he was obliged to treat it separately. There are countless scholars, left and right, Anglo-American and Continental, who have insisted that Islam is the other of democracy. The chapter suggests that political philosophy in the Muslim (but not simply Muslim) tradition offers visions of democracy, cosmopolitanism, immigration, and integration that are remarkably familiar.


Author(s):  
Amanda L. Tyler

The Introduction provides an overview of the history of the writ of habeas corpus and an overview of the book, which tells the story of what is sometimes known as “the Great Writ” as it has unfolded in Anglo-American law. The primary jurisdictions explored are Great Britain and the United States, yet many aspects of this story will ring familiar to those in other countries with a robust habeas tradition. The book chronicles the longstanding role of the common law writ of habeas corpus as a vehicle for reviewing detentions for conformity with underlying law, as well as the profound influence of the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 on Anglo-American law. The Introduction highlights how the writ has at times failed to live up to its glorification by Blackstone and others, while noting that at other times it has proven invaluable to protection of liberty, including as a vehicle for freeing slaves and persons confined solely based on a King’s whim.


1983 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Jolowicz

If an English lawyer looks at modern American literature on civil procedure, his first reaction tends to be one of incredulity or incomprehension; the literature deals with subjects of which he has never heard and seeks solutions to questions he has never thought of asking. After some reflection, however, it probably dawns on him that American scholars are writing against a background of assumptions about the process of litigation which he does not share and that those assumptions stem from developments which have occurred in the United States but which have not yet occurred in England or, for that matter, in the other countries of Western Europe. No one in England could write an article such as I received recently from the United States on “Conflict and Dissent in Class Actions” for the simple reason that the class action as it exists in the United States has not yet developed on our side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, it is now clear that new demands are being made in Europe on the process of litigation, demands which may in time lead to developments such as have already occurred in the United States, and it is these demands which lead to the dilemmas to which my title refers. I want, therefore, to draw attention to two such demands—both very broadly stated—and to the dilemmas they produce, limiting myself mainly to England but with occasional glances elsewhere. This is not a lecture on American law, but it could perhaps be described as one on “pre-American” law.


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 931-956 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE L. ESQUIROL

This essay focuses on Alejandro Álvarez's seminal article, ‘Latin America and International Law’, published in 1909 in the American Journal of International Law. Offering and in-depth analysis of the text, it foregrounds the strategic meaning of Álvarez's work in the light of the international politics of his day. It posits that, more than simply a diplomatic history of Latin American particularity, Álvarez presents the case for a different hemispheric international order, based on an ‘American international law’ extending to the United States. He draws primarily an Latin American Precedents – based on historical and stituational commonalities – to argue for a common public law. He then grafts an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine as the United States' main contribution to this common law, as well as the fact of US sponsorship of various Americas-wide conferences resulting in the ratification of regional treaties. Notably, and this is one of the main points of this is one of the main points of this essay, Álvarez elevates certain Latin American states as leaders in regional international law and capable agents of its enforcement across the hemisphere. In short, this essay advances the claim that Álvarez's project of pan-American law in effect entreats the United States to share its hegemony and wield its power in the region jointly with Latin America's ‘better-constituted’ states.


2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce A. Kimball

During the first decade of his tenure as dean of Harvard Law School (HLS) from 1870 to 1895, Christopher C. Langdell (1826–1906) produced closely related works on contracts and sales that exercised great influence pedagogically and jurisprudentially. Pedagogically, the casebooks on contracts and sales introduced case method teaching into American legal education. In jurisprudential terms, these works placed Langdell with Frederick Pollock and William R. Anson in England and Oliver W. Holmes, Jr., in the United States, as the leading theorists of contract during its “golden age” of “overwhelming predominance” in Anglo-American law.


1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald J. Cioeta

Since the first printed books and newspapers, official censorship has been the norm, not the exception. Although we often regard freedom of the press as an integral part of Anglo-American law, the principle was only established after 1688. The English press did not completely escape such press control measures as seditious libel prosecutions and confiscatory taxes until the 1860s.1 Official censorship in the United States has been directed against left-wing agitation, alleged pornography, and most recently, exposure of national secrets. France and Germany have suffered various degrees of official censorship, including the most draconian. Russia has scarcely known any period in which both preand postpublication censorship was not practiced. In view of the universality of censorship, Ottoman censorship in Lebanon and Syria deserves close examination in its historical context instead of the unanimous condemnation accorded it heretofore.


1960 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene V. Rostow

There may be a point in reviewing the controversy occasioned by Lord Justice Devlin's Maccabaean lecture from an American point of vantage. For the Justice's brilliant and original paper has been heatedly attacked as “illiberal.” In the popular sport of classifying all positions on all subjects as either Liberal or Conservative— and the sport is quite as popular in the United States as it is in other countries—there is an intriguing difference between the rules of the game as it is conventionally played on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. In Great Britain, the suggestion that law has a moral content seems to raise theocratic ghosts in many quarters, perhaps in most; and clearly, theocracy is “Conservative.” In the United States, however, it is just the other way around. Every American schoolboy—or at least every American law student—considers Austinian Positivism, and the strict separation of law and morals, to be certain hallmarks of a position labelled “Conservative,” “Rigidly Technical,” “Reactionary,” or worse. And the view of law as an instrument for carrying out the moral purposes of its own tradition, and those of the society it rules, is a familiar touchstone of orthodox “Liberalism.”


1925 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Whitla Stinson

Mr. J. Holmes had told us that the object of the study of law is to make the prophecies of precedent more precise, to generalize them into a thoroughly connected system; that that object is “the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentalities of courts.” The framers of our constitutional jurisprudence were clearly concerned with the incidence of just principles upon governmental powers. Kent declares that when the United States ceased to be a part of the British Empire, and assumed the character of an independent nation, they became subject to that system of rules, which reason, morality and custom had established among the civilized nations of Europe, as their public law. It was recognized that the law of nations prescribed “what one nation may do without giving just cause for war, and what of consequence, another may or ought to permit without being considered as having sacrificed its honor, its dignity, or its independence.” Story avers that the general law of nations is “equally obligatory upon all sovereigns and all states." It is "the umpire and security of their rights and peace,” declared Jefferson. It is a law which “binds all nations,” declared the Supreme Court of the United States in 1794.


1948 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 433-433
Author(s):  
R.D. MACLEOD

Much concern has been expressed by librarians, booksellers and publishers at the recently‐proclaimed decision of the H. W. Wilson Company to limit in future the Cumulative Book Index to titles published in the United States and Canada. It may be suggested that those who have followed with interest and practical support the fortunes of this magnificent work, and the other splendid guides published by the Wilson Company, cannot but feel somewhat sardonic at the noisiness of the protest. The Cumulative Book Index has been before British librarians for many years, and the large majority have had the opportunity of handling it, and of subscribing to it; but notwithstanding its patent usefulness and uniqueness the number of libraries subscribing to it runs to a few dozen only. And yet this is a tool without which no reference library can be complete.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (16) ◽  
pp. 15-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henriette W. Langdon ◽  
Terry Irvine Saenz

The number of English Language Learners (ELL) is increasing in all regions of the United States. Although the majority (71%) speak Spanish as their first language, the other 29% may speak one of as many as 100 or more different languages. In spite of an increasing number of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who can provide bilingual services, the likelihood of a match between a given student's primary language and an SLP's is rather minimal. The second best option is to work with a trained language interpreter in the student's language. However, very frequently, this interpreter may be bilingual but not trained to do the job.


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