Texas Law

Christina Swarns L’93, who has dedicated her career to criminal justice reform, speaks with Essence about her position as Executive Director of the Innocence Project. The JD Class of 2025 embodies Penn Carey Law’s strong commitments to cross-disciplinary learning, advocacy, service, and academic excellence. Wisconsin Law in Action is a monthly podcast featuring new or forthcoming scholarship from the UW Law School Faculty, exploring a variety of legal topics and examining new developments in the legal academic field.

In exceptional circumstances defences can apply to specific acts, such as killing in self defence, or pleading insanity. Another example is in the 19th-century English case of R v Dudley and Stephens, which tested a defence of “necessity”. Three crew members and Richard Parker, a 17-year-old cabin boy, were stranded on a raft. They argued it was necessary to kill the cabin boy to preserve their own lives. Writing in the early 20th century, Max Weber believed that a definitive feature of a developed state had come to be its bureaucratic support. The executive in a legal system serves as the centre of political authority of the State.

Yet Ancient Greek law contained major constitutional innovations in the development of democracy. The most prominent economic analyst of law is 1991 Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase, whose first major article, The Nature of the Firm , argued that the reason for the existence of firms (companies, partnerships, etc.) is the existence of transaction costs. Rational individuals trade through bilateral contracts on open markets until the costs of transactions mean that using corporations to produce things is more cost-effective. His second major article, The Problem of Social Cost , argued that if we lived in a world without transaction costs, people would bargain with one another to create the same allocation of resources, regardless of the way a court might rule in property disputes.

• Professor Sanford Levinson is a guest on the podcast “Politics in Question” to discuss aspects of the U.S.
• The UK Sale of Goods Act 1979 and the US Uniform Commercial Code are examples of codified common law commercial principles.
• Ancient Egyptian law, dating as far back as 3000 BC, was based on the concept of Ma’at and characterised by tradition, rhetorical speech, social equality and impartiality.
• The G20 meetings are composed of representatives of each country’s executive branch.
• These institutions are allowed the ability to enforce legal norms both against or for member states and citizens in a manner which is not possible through public international law.

John Austin’s utilitarian answer was that law is “commands, backed by threat of sanctions, from a sovereign, to whom people have a habit of obedience”. Natural lawyers on the other side, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argue that law reflects essentially moral and unchangeable laws of nature. The concept of “natural law” emerged in ancient Greek philosophy concurrently and in connection with the notion of justice, and re-entered the mainstream of Western culture through the writings of Thomas Aquinas, notably his Treatise on Law.

Law, Lawyers, and Transformation in Democratic South Africa

At first, jurists and legal philosophers were suspicious of sociology of law. Civil law jurisdictions treat contracts differently in a number of respects, with a more interventionist role for the state in both the formation and enforcement of contracts. In France, an ordinary contract is said to form simply on the basis of a “meeting of the minds” or a “concurrence of wills”. Germany has a special approach to contracts, which ties into property law. Their ‘abstraction principle’ means that the personal obligation of contract forms separately from the title of property being conferred.

McCoubrey and White said that the question “what is law?” has no simple answer. Glanville Williams said that the meaning of the word “law” depends on the context in which that word is used. He said that, for example, “early customary law” and “municipal law” were contexts where the word “law” had two different and irreconcilable meanings.

The boy said he would prefer the jewel back, so the apprentice gave it to him, but without the stones. Lord Chief Justice Pratt ruled that even though the boy could not be said to own the jewel, he should be considered the rightful keeper (“finders keepers”) until the original owner is found. In fact the apprentice and the boy both had a right of possession in the jewel , but the boy’s possessory interest was considered better, because it could be shown to be first in time. These rules enable the translation of the will of the people into functioning democracies. Significant to the practice of law in the common law tradition is the legal research to determine the current state of the law. This usually entails exploring case-law reports, legal periodicals and legislation.

Cases in Brief: HLS faculty summarize and comment on important cases in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States

Immanuel Kant believed a moral imperative requires laws “be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature”. Jeremy Bentham and his student Austin, following David Hume, believed that this conflated the “is” and what “ought to be” problem. Bentham and Austin argued for law’s positivism; that real law is entirely separate from “morality”. Kant was also criticised by Friedrich Nietzsche, who rejected the principle of equality, and believed that law emanates from the will to power, and cannot be labeled as “moral” or “immoral”. There have been several attempts to produce “a universally acceptable definition of law”. In 1972, Baron Hampstead suggested that no such definition could be produced.

The Halakha is a code of Jewish law that summarizes some of the Talmud’s interpretations. Nevertheless, Israeli law allows litigants to use religious laws only if they choose. Canon law is only in use by members of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion. Socialist law is the legal systems in communist states such as the former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Academic opinion is divided on whether it is a separate system from civil law, given major deviations based on Marxist–Leninist ideology, such as subordinating the judiciary to the executive ruling party.