Category Archives: Legal History
Edward Lee, ‘Copyright Re-Alignment: The Growth of New Works Outside the Copyright System’
ABSTRACT This Essay introduces the concept of copyright alignment to analyze the history of copyright law. Alignment refers to how the copyright system divides the universe of creative works into two: copyrighted works and uncopyrighted works in the public domain. Copyright law has developed in four periods of alignment: (1) during the 18th century, a […]
Katy Barnett, ‘Reflections on the Principles of Remoteness in Contract in Comparative Law’
ABSTRACT This paper traces the history of remoteness in contract law, namely the legal formants (in Rodolfo Sacco’s terms) constraining the availability of contract damages in various legal systems. Our journey takes us through different times, continents and cultures, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, across the law of France, United States, England […]
Lawrence Friedman, ‘Work Accidents: A Drama in Three Acts’
In the early 1840s, Nicholas Farwell brought a lawsuit against his employer, the Boston & Worcester Rail Road. Farwell was an ‘engineman’ who earned two dollars a day. One day in 1837, he suffered an accident, was thrown to the ground, and the wheels of a railroad car passed over his right hand and crushed […]
Markus Puder, ‘Dystopian or Not: Alternate Realities for Thibaut and Von Savigny’s Codification Debate’
ABSTRACT In 1814, after Napoleon’s military defeat and with major European political re-alignments afoot, two German law professors of Huguenot lineage – Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut and Friedrich Carl von Savigny – debated the question of whether Germany was ripe for a national code that could replace the motley patchwork of legislated and customary laws […]
‘Land Law poetry: ad-VERSE possession?’
There is plenty of poetry about land and landscape but, strangely, not so much on your actual Land Law. It is always nice, then, to come across a work of Land-Law-relevance. There is one such piece in the Welsh language newspaper, Y Darian, for 21st February 1918. Yes, in the depths of certain other global […]
Luke McDonagh, ‘Exploring authorship and ownership of plays at the time of William Shakespeare’s First Folio’
ABSTRACT In this this article I evaluate how authorship of theatre occurred in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. I explore whether individual playwrights such as William Shakespeare were viewed as authors, and thus owners, of plays at this time. I analyse the role of the Stationers’ Company as print monopolists, and the role of Elizabethan […]
Grajzl and Murrell, ‘From Status to Contract? A Macrohistory from Early-Modern English Caselaw and Print Culture’
ABSTRACT Most development models emphasize a growth in the scope of individual choice as the law becomes impartial, relevant to all. An early expression of this conceptualization appeared in the 19th century, when Henry Maine coined his celebrated dictum that progressive societies move from status to contract. We conduct a macro-historical quantitative inquiry into Maine’s […]
Guillaume Vuillemey, ‘The Origins of Limited Liability: Catering to Safety Demand with Investors’ Irresponsibility’
ABSTRACT Limited liability is a key feature of corporate law. Using data on asset prices and capital flows in mid-19th century England, I argue that its liberalization was not decided to relax firms’ financing constraints, but to satisfy investors’ demand for ‘safe’ stores of value. Limited liability eliminated adverse selection about the quality of other […]
Kellen Funk, ‘Sect and Superstition: The Protestant Framework of American Codification’
ABSTRACT Elite lawyers who debated codification in the nineteenth-century United States treated codification as inseparable from a liberal Protestant textualism that had taken hold in the early national era. Legislators declared codification to be the necessary final step of the Protestant Reformation and frequently characterized common law lawyers as beholden to ‘superstition’ and ‘priestcraft’. Their […]
G Edward White, ‘Reconsidering the Legacy of New York Times v Sullivan’
ABSTRACT This Article argues that the ‘actual malice’ standard for recovery in defamation cases should be abandoned outside cases in which the plaintiff is a ‘public official’, currently defined as an employee of the government whose office invites public scrutiny and comment. The actual malice standard prevents many categories of plaintiffs from recovering substantial amounts […]