common law
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The Bigger Picture
The Chief Justice’s aversion to translating old Supreme Court decisions rests on even more misunderstandings than has been said so far Continue reading
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Why Read Cases?
Some advice for law students Continue reading
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The Chief Justice and the Law
The CBA National Magazine’s blog has just published a blog post of mine that comments on the speech which Chief Justice McLachlin gave at the “Supreme Courts and the Common Law” symposium held at the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Law last week. I argue that the Chief Justice misunderstands the history of the common Continue reading
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(La) Doctrine
What do legal doctrine and la doctrine have to do with each other? I was at the colloquium that McGill’s Crépeau Centre held on Friday for its 40th anniversary on the topic of “The Responsibility of Doctrine.” It was quite interesting, if a little uncanny for someone who, despite my McGill professors’ best efforts, never found the Continue reading
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The Judges’ Law
Did you always want to know what my dissertation is about? Let me tell you! I have occasionally mentioned the doctoral thesis I have been working on for the past four and a half years, and even posted a few tidbits (here, here, and here). But I don’t think I’ve ever even explained what the Continue reading
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Portalis versus Bentham (Part I)
A couple of years ago, I wrote about Jeremy Bentham’s pamphlet “Law as It Is, And as It Is Said to Be,” also (or better) known as “Truth versus Ashurst” (available here, at p. 145), most famous ― or infamous ― for its “dog law” diatribe against the common law. In the last part of the Continue reading
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Seasonal Thoughts
‘Tis the season for, among other things, lots of food, lots of drink, and legal philosophy. Because it’s always the season for legal philosophy, right? It’s also the season for being lazy. So instead of a serious blog post, here are two passages I’ve recently come across ― one about food, the other about drink, Continue reading
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Nothing Like It
Law, perhaps even more than man, is a creature of habit. It thrives on the humdrum. It likes nothing better than demonstrations that one case is just like some other in all relevant respects. It is a creature of habit in a more literal sense too, in that legal rules often crystallize out of the Continue reading
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Almost Arbitrary
On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Eugene Volokh has a post about an interesting case just decided by a federal district court in California. The case, Hebrew University of Jerusalem v. General Motors LLC, concerns GM’s right to use the image of Albert Einstein if an advertisement for one of its gas-guzzlers. Einstein died in 1955 Continue reading
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Right Answer Romantics
I was re-reading F.A. Hayek’s discussion of the common law in Chapters 4 and 5 of Rules and Order, the first volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty, and was struck by something I had missed when I first read it four years ago while working on a thesis on common-law constitutionalism. When deciding a case Continue reading
Double Aspect 