Kategoria BISAC: Law >> Legal History

While innovative ideas and creative works increasingly drive economic success, the historic approach to encouraging innovation and creativity by granting property rights has come under attack by a growing number of legal theorists and technologists. In Laws of Creation, Ronald Cass and Keith Hylton take on these critics with a vigorous defense of intellectual property law. The authors look closely at the IP doctrines that have been developed over many years in patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law. In each area, legislatures and courts have weighed the benefits that...

Long ignored by historians and repudiated in their time, practitioners of private law opened the way toward Japan s legal modernity. From the seventeenth to the turn of the twentieth century, lawyers and their predecessors changed society in ways that first samurai and then the state could not. During the Edo period (1600 1868), they worked from the shadows to bend the shogun s law to suit the market needs of merchants and the justice concerns of peasants. Over the course of the nineteenth century, legal practitioners changed law from a tool for rule into a new epistemology and laid the...

Every legal system must decide how to distinguish between agreements that are enforceable and those that are not. Formal bargains in the marketplace and casual promises in a social setting mark the two extremes, but many hard cases lie between. When gaps are left in a contract, how should courts fill them? What does it mean to say that an agreement is legally enforceable? If someone breaks a legally enforceable contract, what consequences follow?

For 150 years, legal scholars have debated whether a set of coherent principles provide answers to such basic questions. Oliver Wendell...

In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers.

For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to...

Justice among Nations tells the story of the rise of international law and how it has been formulated, debated, contested, and put into practice from ancient times to the present. Stephen Neff avoids technical jargon as he surveys doctrines from natural law to feminism, and practices from the Warring States of China to the international criminal courts of today.

Ancient China produced the first rudimentary set of doctrines. But the cornerstone of later international law was laid by the Romans, in the form of natural law--a universal law that was superior to early laws and...

How did the federal judiciary transcend early limitations to become a powerful institution of American governance? How did the Supreme Court move from political irrelevance to political centrality? Building the Judiciary uncovers the causes and consequences of judicial institution-building in the United States from the commencement of the new government in 1789 through the close of the twentieth century. Explaining why and how the federal judiciary became an independent, autonomous, and powerful political institution, Justin Crowe moves away from the notion that the judiciary is...

Simpson argues...

A fast-growing legal system and economy in medieval and early modern Rome saw a rapid increase in the need for written documents. Brokers of Public Trust examines the emergence of the modern notarial profession--free market scribes responsible for producing original legal documents and their copies.

Notarial acts often go unnoticed, but they are essential to understanding the history of writing practices and attitudes toward official documentation. Based on new archival research, Brokers of Public Trust focuses on the government officials, notaries, and consumers who...

Courts today face a range of claims to redress historic injustice, including injustice perpetrated by law. In Canada, descendants of Chinese immigrants recently claimed the return of a head tax levied only on Chinese immigrants. Calling Power to Account uses the litigation around the Chinese Canadian Head Tax Case as a focal point for examining the historical, legal, and philosophical issues raised by such claims.

By placing both the discriminatory law and the judicial decisions in their historical context, some of the essays in this volume illuminate the larger patterns of...

The period 1870 1958 was revolutionary in the lives of women. Society s shifting perceptions of women and their role were apparent in the courtroom. Women Who Kill Men analyzes eighteen sensational cases of women on trial for murder in this period to identify the intersections of media, law, and gender in California.

The fascinating details of these murder trials, documented in court records and embellished newspaper coverage, mirrored the changing public image of women. Most women and their attorneys relied on gendered stereotypes and language to create their defense and...

This volume, spanning three millennia BCE, concentrates on the major ancient civilizations that left information about women and crime in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, namely, Sumer (Pt I), Babylonia (Pt II), Assyria (Pt III), and Khatti (Pt IV). Most of the extant writings are incomplete, and some are only brief fragments. No ancient document has been found that contains the entire civil or criminal code of a civilization or all of its laws affecting women. Each document contains a small piece of the puzzle. When put together here with other writings, art, and artifacts, a general picture...