From Personal Life To Private Law

Mounting a lawsuit against someone who has wronged you is a prospect no less fearful than being on the receiving end of such a lawsuit. Litigation in the courts has a reputation for being a byzantine process far removed from ordinary life, often failing to address people's real grievances while adding to their pain. Yes, there is money to be had if you win. But beyond that, what is it all in aid of? In this book John Gardner argues that, in spite of their legal intricacy, many of the questions that perennially occupy the courts in civil cases are actually timeless puzzles about the human condition. The architecture of the law of torts and the law of contract turns out to track the contours of personal life much more closely than you might expect. Using a wide range of examples from literature and life as well as law, Gardner explores big questions about our relationships to our own pasts and our own futures as well as to other people. What are friends for? Why does it matter how your actions turn out? What is the good of saying sorry? Why regret your mistakes? How can anyone be compensated for an irreversible loss? Why would you want to hold onto the life you already have? And what does any of this have to do with all those protracted legal disputes about damaged cars, ruined holidays, and leaky roofs?

"This book discusses developments in scholarship dedicated to reinvigorating the study of the broad domain of private law. This field, which embraces the traditional common law subjects-property, contracts, and torts-as well as adjacent, more statutory areas, such as intellectual property and commercial law, also includes important subjects that have been neglected in the United States but are beginning to make a comeback. The book particularly focuses on the New Private Law, an approach that aims to bring a new outlook to the study of private law by moving beyond reductively instrumentalist policy evaluation and narrow, rule-by-rule, doctrine-by-doctrine analysis, so as to consider and capture how private law's various features fit and work together, as well as the normative underpinnings of these larger structures. This movement is resuscitating the notion of private law itself in United States and has brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the more traditional, doctrinal approach prevalent in Commonwealth countries. The book embraces a broad range of perspectives to private law-including philosophical, economic, historical, and psychological- yet it offers a unifying theme of seriousness about the structure and content of private law."--

Drawing on many revealing and sometimes colorful court cases of the past two centuries, Private Lives offers a lively short history of the complexities of family law and family life--including the tensions between the laws on the books and contemporary arrangements for marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing.

Torts and other Wrongs is a collection of eleven of the author's essays on the theory of the law of torts and its place in the law more generally. Two new essays accompany nine previously published pieces, a number of which are already established classics of theoretical writing on private law. Together they range across the distinction between torts and other wrongs, the moral significance of outcomes, the nature and role of corrective and distributive justice, the justification

In what, if any sense are our torts and our breaches of contract 'wrongs'? These two branches of private law have for centuries provided philosophers and jurists with grounds for puzzlement and this book provides both an outline of, and intervention in, contemporary jurisprudential debates about the nature and foundation of liability in private law.

This publication aims at establishing a clear analysis of the nature and growth of the C-factor (C for constitutionalisation) in Germany, France, the UK and The Netherlands.

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

Analysis of the power of multinational corporations in moulding international law on intellectual property rights.