Category Archives: Legal History
Peter Benson, ‘Some leading themes in the contract scholarship of Stephen Waddams’
ABSTRACT Among the leading themes in Stephen Waddams’s monumental contributions to the development and deeper understanding of modern contract law, this chapter focuses on two of the most fundamental that particularly preoccupied him throughout his career. The first concerns the proper significance and roles of equity and common law after their integration in 1875 in […]
Katy Barnett, ‘The Role of Currency in the Development of Modern Expectation Damages in Contract at Common Law’
ABSTRACT Expectation damages as the default remedy in the modern common law of contract developed relatively late, in the mid to late nineteenth century. This lecture will argue that the presence of a stable and standardised currency was an important precursor to the development, because it allowed the non-breaching party to purchase a substitute performance […]
Quynh Nguyen Thi, ‘Foreseeability and Limitation of contractual damages in Roman law’
ABSTRACT This Article studies the limitation of liability for contractual damages in Roman law to examine whether foreseeability in contractual damages was formed in Roman law and its influence on the development of limitation of liability for contractual damages in modern law. It concludes that the limitation of contractual damages, without general rule, was discussed […]
Purnoor Tak, ‘Property Rights and Financial Access’
ABSTRACT This paper investigates the effect of property rights on financial inclusion and subsequent changes in labor market participation and human capital investment. Using hand-collected savings bank data linked to the English census, I exploit the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act, which granted married women ownership of their financial assets. A 10% increase in the […]
Jane Thomson, ‘“And Two Cows to my Wife … so Long as she Remains my Widow”: Public Policy and Testamentary Marriage Clauses in Canada’
ABSTRACT This article, part one of a two part project, provides a comprehensive review of the law surrounding marriage conditions in wills in Canada, including the civil law jurisdiction of Quebec, through a quantitative study of nearly every electronically reported Canadian decision involving a marriage clause in a will. It begins with an overview of […]
Weiwei Luo, ‘Beyond State/Market: Usury Law in Late-Ming China’
ABSTRACT This article examines the interdependent relationship between the state, law, and market in early modern China. Focusing on usury statutes, it analyzes how the Chinese state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed its legal framework to regulate a burgeoning money economy. The study underscores the critical role of law as an instrument of […]
Barbara Lauriat, ‘Borrowing Goodwill’
ABSTRACT The elusive intangible property right known as ‘goodwill’ serves as the central organizing concept for US trademark and unfair competition laws. It also plays an important, but very different, role in the common law tort of passing off in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. Yet the full history of goodwill has not been […]
Bell and McCunn, ‘Authoritative Ignorance: State knowledge and factual uncertainty in private law’
INTRODUCTION We might generally say, without necessarily reflecting much, that the state has an obligation to resolve private disputes brought to it, particularly to its courts, by its citizens. Parties present a dispute; relevant facts are established; appropriate legal rules and principles are applied; and an authoritative resolution follows. But a vital unsettling question arises: […]
Brian Chien-Kang Chen, ‘Jeremy Bentham and Legislators of the World’
ABSTRACT Between 1811 and 1830, Bentham engaged in extensive correspondence with politicians in many countries, advocating for adopting his codification proposal. He argued that the government should actively seek proposals for codification. In this open proposal competition, Bentham’s codification initiative would have been one of many proposals. He would have had to compete with other […]
Andrea Freeman, ‘The Roots of Credit Inequality’
ABSTRACT Debt oppression began before the United States became a country. Settlers enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, treating them as property that they could buy and sell for their economic and personal benefit. When enslavement became illegal, new economic systems and laws that included sharecropping, Black Codes, and Jim Crow kept Black people in servitude. […]