Story Of Law Research Articles

Development Risks, Strict Liability, and the Insurability of Industrial Hazards

The economic analysis of accident law is a success story of Law and Economics: theoretical research has increased the knowledge of efficient tort liability rules and insurance, and the results have been of practical importance in the legal development. Nonetheless, the analysis fits poorly with many serious industrial hazards of our time, such as nuclear melt-downs, widely spread chemical pollution, sickness due to additives in food, etc. One reason is that the liable party may become insolvent and/or the risk may be uninsurable. Reasons for uninsurability are potentially very large claims or great uncertainty about the accident risk. A major problem is that new risks cannot be estimated with any accuracy, either empirically or technically. Therefore, compensation and prevention are inefficient.

How to Tell Law Stories: [Commentary

How to Tell Law Stories: [Commentary

How to Tell Law Stories

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Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives Ian Ward Law and Literature Perspectives Bruce L. Rockwood Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law Peter Brooks Paul Gewirtz

Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives Ian Ward Law and Literature Perspectives Bruce L. Rockwood Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law Peter Brooks Paul Gewirtz

: Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives . Ian Ward. ; Law and Literature Perspectives . Bruce L. Rockwood. ; Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law . Peter Brooks, Paul Gewirtz.

: Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives . Ian Ward. ; Law and Literature Perspectives . Bruce L. Rockwood. ; Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law . Peter Brooks, Paul Gewirtz.

Law stories

Law stories

Law's stories: narrative and rhetoric in the law

The law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court opinions. How those stories are told and listened to makes a crucial difference to those whose lives are reworked in legal storytelling. The public at large has increasingly been drawn to law as an area where vivid human stories are played out with distinctively high stakes. And scholars in several fields have recently come to recognize that law's stories need to be studied critically. This notable volume-inspired by a symposium held at Yale Law School-brings together an exceptional group of well-known figures in law and literary studies to take a probing look at how and why stories are told in the law and how they are constructed and made effective. Why is it that some stories-confessions, victim impact statements-can be excluded from decisionmakers' hearing? How do judges claim the authority by which they impose certain stories on reality? Law's Stories opens new perspectives on the law, as narrative exchange, performance, explanation. It provides a compelling encounter of law and literature, seen as two wary but necessary interlocutors.

Protecting Business Secrets in National and International Commerce

This article argues for elevating trade secrets from stepchild to full member of the intellectual property family. The case for doing so rests on sound social policy, empirical evidence, case law, and anecdotal stories that have attained a great deal of media attention. The article describes how the changing U.S. domestic legal environment for protecting trade secrets is influencing practices within a distinct community of business concerns that owns trade secrets. The author surveyed New Mexico manufacturers and asked them whether they owned trade secrets, how they protect their trade secrets, and whether their trade secrets have ever been stolen. The survey revealed that manufacturers doing business in multiple jurisdictions are more likely to own trade secrets, to protect their trade secrets by having employees sign secrecy agreements and covenants not to compete, and to have had their trade secrets stolen. Nevertheless, these manufacturers rarely resort to the legal system to redress trade secret theft. Further, the article examines the many changes in international treaties that protect trade secrets and suggests that domestic and international economics will profit from increased trade secret protection because protecting undisclosed information increases the need for independent scientific investigation and thus augments the number of choices available to consumers.

Law and People in Colonial America

How did American colonists transform British law into their own? What were the colonies' first legal institutions, and who served in them? Did the special issue of gender play a significant role? Why did the early Americans develop a passion for litigation that continues to this day? In 'Law and People in Colonial America' Peter Charles Hoffer tells the story of early American law from its beginnings in the British mainland to its maturation in the crisis of the American Revolution. For the men and women of colonial America, Hoffer explains, law was a pervasive influence in everyday life. Because it was 'their' law, the colonists continually adapted it to fit changing circumstances. They also developed a sense of legalism that influenced virtually all social, economic, and political relationships. This sense of intimacy with the law, Hoffer argues, assumed a transforming power in times of crisis. In the midst of a war for independence, American revolutionaries labored to explain how their rebellion could be lawful, while legislators wrote republican constitutions that would endure for centuries. Today the role of law in American life is more pervasive than ever. And because our system of law involves a continuing dialogue between past and present interpreting the meaning of precedent and of past legislation the study of legal history is a vital part of every citizen's basic education. 'Law and People in Colonial America' provides an essential, rigorous, and lively introduction to the beginnings of American law. Peter Charles Hoffer is professor of history at the University of Georgia. His previous books include 'The Law's Conscience', 'Impeachment in America', 'Revolution and Regeneration', and 'Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558-1803.'

‘Positively Postmodern Stanley’ and Other Law Stories

The legal academy stands on the brink of yet another wave of self-evaluation. While the proliferation of interdisciplinary perspectives on law in the past three decades has resulted in much soul-searching within legal scholarship and legal education, it is arguable that the discipline's quest for self-understanding and change is about to reach new heights (or depths) in the light of some theoretical challenges stemming from recent Continental social and political philosophy. The Fate of Law' provides an engaging contribution to this process. The book consists of five substantial essays which examine, the covernote informs us, the 'problems and prospects of law in the late twentieth century.' The editors of the collection state in the Introduction that their aim in soliciting contributions to the book was to 'invite contemplation about how, if at all, law and legal scholarship have responded, or should respond, to feminist and poststructuralist challenges to claims about law's neutrality, objectivity, and capacity to limit and channel the exercise of power in American life' (p 2). In reply, the contributors, along with the editors jointly, have provided essays dealing in quite distinctive ways with a broad range of issues and movements within contemporary American legal thought. Each essay's treatment of these issues reflects in some way the influence of feminist and post-modernist/structuralist thinking upon the legal academy in recent times. To try and identify a common theme for the collection with greater particularity inevitably invites consideration of the significance and appropriateness of the title, in particular the use of the wordfate. Indeed, this issue seems to give rise to sustained self-consciousness by the two editors towards the end of their Introduction. As one might expect in what undoubtedly is a fin-de-siecle exercise, the editors and contributors confront the issue not just of what has law been like and what position has it brought us to, but also what does it portend. The book thus represents a profound exercise in legal reflexivity, an extended self-conscious intellectual stocktaking by legal theorists. It is not revealing too much to state that each contributor reaches a point of accommodation with the idea of the continued relevance of law. Albeit different narratives are told, no essay suggests a demise for law's story. In view of the title, nevertheless, the question may be asked whether the contributors view law's future from a point of detached, almost tragic hopefulness, or whether greater possibilities exist and something more is required of us both as legal scholars and as subjects of late twentieth-century law. The sense the collection leaves one with, having read each contribution carefully, is the latter rather than the former. Just how far each essay takes this line is question-

Two cheers for the energy policy act!

Given the complexity, confusion and unpredictability of the legislative process, there is particular reason to feel optimistic about potential for the recently passed Energy Policy Act of 1992. Here is one insider's story of the new law and ‘how it got that way.’

Recent Book: Great Law and Order Stories

Recent Book: Great Law and Order Stories

The Power of Narrative in Empathetic Learning: Post-Modernism and the Stories of Law; A Review-Essay Based on Patricia J. Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Prodessor. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press

The Power of Narrative in Empathetic Learning: Post-Modernism and the Stories of Law; A Review-Essay Based on Patricia J. Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Prodessor. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press

The Stories of Law

The Stories of Law

A Political Theory of American Corporate Finance

Why is the public corporation-with its fragmented shareholders buying and selling on the stock exchange-the dominant form of enterprise in the United States? Since Berle and Means, the conventional corporate law story begins with technology dictating large enterprises with capital needs so great that even a few wealthy individuals cannot provide enough. These enterprises consequently must draw capital from many dispersed shareholders. Shareholders diversify their own holdings, further fragmenting ownership. This combination of a huge enterprise, concentrated management, and dispersed, diversified stockholders shifts corporate control from shareholders to managers. Managers can pursue their own agenda, at times to the detriment of the enterprise.' In the classic story, the large public firm survived because it best balanced the problems of managerial control, risk sharing, and capital needs. In a Darwinian evolution, the large public firm mitigated the managerial agency problems with a board of directors of outsiders, with a managerial headquarters of strategic planners overseeing the operating divisions, and with managerial incentive compensation. Hostile takeovers, proxy contests, and the threat of each further disciplined managers. Fragmented ownership survived because public firms adapted. They solved enough of the governance problems created by the large unwieldy structures needed to meet the huge capital needs of modern technology. In the conventional story, the large public firm evolved as the efficient response to the economics of organization. I argue here that the public corporation is as much a political adaptation as an economic or technological necessity. The size and technology story fails to completely explain the corporate patterns we observe. There are organizational alternatives to the fragmented ownership of the large public corporation; the most prominent alternative is concen-

Ready for the Plaintiff! A Story of Personal Injury Law

Ready for the Plaintiff! A Story of Personal Injury Law

Newton's Knowledge of the Radius of the Earth

IN a paper entitled "The Story of Newton's Inverse Square Law and his Use of a False Radius of the Earth" (J. Brit. Astro. Assoc., 50, 2; 1939), John Miller states that the story of Newton's alleged ignorance of the true radius of the earth is open to considerable doubt. The data at the disposal of Newton were the time the moon required to revolve around the earth and the moon's distance from the earth in terms of the earth's radius. The latter was known from the days of Greek astronomy to be about 60, and this was independent of the true radius of the earth. A few simple formulæ are derived by Mr. Miller, and from these a relationship is established between the true radius of the earth and certain constants, the basic assumption being the inverse square law. Miller's final formula enables the true radius of the earth to be found, but, of course, if a false value of the radius is used in this formula, the equality breaks down; in other words, the inverse square law seems invalid. It is alleged that Newton took the radius of the earth to be 3,440 miles, and as it was impossible to fit this value in with the inverse square law, his work was delayed nearly twenty years.

The Story of Law

The Story of Law

The Story of Law

The Story of Law

The Story of Law

The Story of Law