Category Archives: Public policy
Alicia Mitchell-Mercer, ‘Public Policy and the Civil Access to Justice Crisis: Exploring Lawyers’ Perspectives on Regulatory Reform and Allied Legal Professionals’
ABSTRACT Access to justice faces challenges in the United States, with nearly half of all Americans unable to sufficiently address civil legal needs because of limited legal aid resources, the high cost of engaging a lawyer, and other factors. Since 2014, some states have implemented allied legal professional (ALP) programs to address this inequity. ALPs, […]
Doug Rendleman, ‘Illegal Contracts and Agreements: A New Standard for Prostitution and Marijuana Agreements’
ABSTRACT Agreements exchanging sex for money and those involving marijuana may encounter illegality defenses in court. Granting a legal remedy for breach of an agreement that exchanges seriously illegal consideration would lower the court’s public standing and endanger its legitimacy. On the other hand, the spectacle of a buyer claiming its own illegality to escape […]
Mark Giancaspro, ‘Coffin confessions and contract: Why agreements to divulge secrets post-mortem might be unenforceable’
ABSTRACT Death and taxes are not only life’s two guarantees but also lucrative industries. The former has historically been dominated by morticians and funeral directors but now ‘coffin confessors’ have entered the market. These professionals are engaged to divulge specified information at the client’s funerary service, normally in an abrasive or humorous manner, for a […]
Meera Sossamon, ‘Private Policy: The Role of Private Remedies in Protecting Public Interest in Civil Law Jurisdictions’
ABSTRACT For civil law jurisdictions – those that base their tradition on Roman law – the distinction between private law and public law is a foundational principle. Meanwhile, those legal systems based on the Anglo-American common law tradition are not so anathema to the mixing of public and private remedies – see, eg, the proliferation […]
Eric Boot, ‘The Public Interest: Clarifying a Legal Concept’
ABSTRACT Appeals to the public interest in law are commonplace, but typically made without clarifying what the public interest is and how it can be determined. In law, this has led to ad hoc applications of the public interest and, consequently, to ‘judicial idiosyncrasy’, posing a threat to legal certainty. This paper aims to remedy […]
‘What Does Sex Have To Do With Contract?’
Albertina Antognini and Susan Frelich Appleton, ‘Sexual Agreements’, 99 Washington Law Review 1807 (2022). This thought-provoking article analyzes the interaction between contract and sex. Seemingly they belong to two utterly different and separate worlds, with no connection between the two. As the authors show, the conventional wisdom is that a contract for sex is unenforceable, […]
‘The FTC Abolishes Non-Complete Clauses’
On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission enacted one of the most significant regulations of the Biden years: a comprehensive ban on non-compete clauses. The final rule prohibits new non-compete clauses for all workers, regardless of line of work or income, and makes existing non-competes null and void for everyone except senior executives. A neurologist making […]
Athul Mohan, ‘Public policy and restraints on transfer’
ABSTRACT Property is one of the most important factors that influences an individual’s social status and mobility. It’s ownership and free transfer has significant impact on an individual’s life. Law generally supports free transfer and is against the restrictions on free transfer of property. Section 10 of the TPA has tried to avoid these types […]
Philip Sales, ‘Exploring the interface between the common law of tort and statute law’
Twenty years ago, Professor Jack Beatson attacked what he termed the ‘oil and water’ approach to the relationship between common law and statute, which sees them as separate sources of law which do not intermingle. But as he said: ‘Why should statutory manifestations of principle … not be part of the armoury of the common […]
Kenneth Dau-Schmidt and Jozie Barton, ‘Non-Compete Covenants’
ABSTRACT In this chapter, we outline the current problems posed by employee non-competes and possible solutions. We first discuss the theory and empirical evidence on employer labour market power and the way in which non-competes aggravate this problem. We then present a brief outline of the current law on employee non-competes in the United States, […]