Category Archives: General
Telia Williams, ‘The Court of Small Things: Small Claims Courts and the Democratic Meaning of Law’
ABSTRACT This essay addresses the precipitous decline of small claims courts in the United States and argues that their erosion is more than administrative; it is a democratic and constitutional crisis. Small claims courts were once the laboratories of everyday justice, where ordinary citizens could access law without lawyers, ritual, or mystery. The seemingly minor […]
Matthew Cavedon, ‘Eden America: John Locke and the School of Salamanca on Natural Property Rights’
ABSTRACT This book contends that there is a way to understand natural property rights that avoids the historical inaccuracy, imperialist imperatives, and anti-environmentalism of John Locke’s approach. Locke was not the only early-modern thinker to draw parallels between America and Eden, and some of his forebears took from this comparison very different conclusions about property. […]
Ilya Andreevich Kotlyar, ‘Regulae Iuris organized by conceptual, structural, genealogical and bibliographical criteria: A dataset’
ABSTRACT This is a partially complete relational database of Latin regulae iuris, assembled from the early modern collections of rules, maxims and principles of law. The regulae are organized by the criteria of concepts they consist of, their similarity and opposition to each other, their exceptions (fallentiae) and ampliations, found in the same sources, as […]
Kong and Wang, ‘Towards a Unified Commercial Legal System in China’s Greater Bay Area’
ABSTRACT China’s mainland and its two special administrative regions (SARs) – namely, Hong Kong and Macao – practise their own legal systems separately, which harbours legal conflicts associated with inter-regional commercial transactions in the context of closer economic ties between the three jurisdictions. While the conventional ‘conflict-of-law’ rules plus judicial assistance arrangement’ approach may help, […]
Allen and Krever, ‘Who is an Employee? The Unfortunate Tax and Superannuation Legacy of a Transplanted Category’
ABSTRACT In the absence of statutory definitions of terms used in modern statutes, common law judges will rely on longstanding meanings imported from long-established areas of common law, a phenomenon known as transplanted categories. A notable example in Commonwealth income tax and superannuation legislation is the transplantation of the common law definition of an employee […]
Aditi Bagchi, ‘From Private to Public Right: Resizing Correlativity and Systematicity’
ABSTRACT This essay on Ernest Weinrib’s Reciprocal Freedom argues that his conceptions of correlativity and systematicity are at odds. Correlativity as he conceives it is inexplicably all-encompassing; it does not track the complexity of interpersonal fairness in either morality or law. Correlativity can be understood as a formal constraint or as a requirement of mutual […]
David Campbell, ‘Is There Such A Thing As Private Law?’
ABSTRACT In Justice in Private Law, Professor Jaffey seeks to give a comprehensive and unified ‘interpretively’ adequate account of the ‘traditional private law’, the main areas of which are property, contract, and tort. Jaffey argues that both ‘corrective justice’ and ‘distributive justice’ theories of private law are seriously inadequate, and puts forward a ‘reconciliation’ of […]
Henri Plauché Dart, ‘The Sources of the Civil Code of Louisiana’
INTRODUCTORY NOTE Henry Plauché Dart (1858-1934) was one of Louisiana’s most distinguished legal scholars and practitioners. A member of the New Orleans Bar and the first president of the Louisiana Bar Association, Dart devoted much of his career to exploring and preserving the unique civilian legal heritage of Louisiana – a heritage that sets the […]
Jon Chung, ‘Structural Defect Framework’
ABSTRACT This Article introduces the Structural Defect Framework (SDF) to address a critical failure in modern liability doctrine: the law’s tendency to misclassify harms produced by invisible structural defects—architectural design choices hidden from end-users but controlled by institutional designers. Across four disparate case studies – adaptive streaming (Netflix-style bitrate attenuation), model quantization in legal AI, […]
Philip Sales, ‘Purpose in Law and in Interpretation’
ABSTRACT The common law tradition has always been sceptical of philosophy, prioritising the importance of practical experience in real world cases over abstract general ideas. This article attempts to demonstrate how the ideas of two philosophers – Fuller and Wittgenstein – help to explain the widespread use of the notion of purpose in real world […]