A Symposium on Restitution

The editors of the Vanderbilt Law Review deserve praise for arranging this symposium on the neglected subject of Restitution, a great and growing area of our private law whose literature is extra-ordinarily meager. Partly because of this neglect by legal scholars,the practicing profession as a whole remains unaware of the range and variety of restitutionary remedies and the possibilities they offer for solving problems that are otherwise intractable. The volume of restitution cases reported in current advance sheets shows that courts and lawyers are learning to make use of restitution remedies, but the subject still inspires hesitation and diffidence, for knowledge is diffused in fragments and an overview is difficult to acquire

THE PRIVY COUNCIL AND PRIVATE LAW IN THE TUDOR AND STUART PERIOD: II

In a previous instalment an attempt was made to describe the main subjects of private litigation dealt with by the English Privy Council under the Tudors and early Stuarts. It was suggested that the subjects were most heterogeneous and that the total volume of such litigation was large. In the present instalment will be discussed, first, the methods used to reduce the volume of private litigation by direct and indirect means; then the powers of coercion possessed by the Privy Council; and finally, its relations to the ordinary courts

The Oracles of the Law

Based on the lectures delivered at The University of Michigan March 12, 13, 16, 17, and 18, 1959, on The Thomas M. Cooley Lectureship, under the title Judges: Oracles of the Law. This study will examine the nature and extent of the contribution that case law has made to the legal systems of England, Rome, France, and Germany. The emphasis will be historical, but the object will be to show the lasting effects of historical experience on modern usage and attitudes.https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1111/thumbnail.jp

THE CODIFICATION OF THE FRENCH CUSTOMS

A renewed attack on central problems of English legal history can gain fresh perspective from the history of French law. France and England entered the later middle ages with a common fund of legal and political institutions. Much of the area that was to be included in modern France was united with England under a common sovereign; political institutions were shaped by the same basic forces into similar forms of feudal organization; private law was largely composed of unformulated popular custom, remarkably similar even in detail. As early as the thirteenth century the tendencies toward divergence, both in law and government, had made themselves apparent. But we have even now no connected account of the processes by which this divergence occurred, or of the numerous parallels that persisted in later history. We know the main stages of political development by which in England a feudal monarchy was slowly transformed into a constitutional, parliamentary democracy and in France similar institutions had been molded by the eighteenth century into a centralized, bureaucratic state. As to private law, we know the methods by which the common law was constructed; and in France we know the end result, how six hundred years of continuous development were climaxed by the Napoleonic Code of 1804. The rest of the story must be filled in from scattered sources

Cooper: \u3cem\u3eLiving the Law\u3c/em\u3e

A Review of LIVING THE LAW. By Frank E. Coope

UNDISCOVERED FRAUD AND STATUTES OF LIMITATION

Statutes of limitation are framed in terms of the interval between the accrual of a cause of action and the filing of suit. How far is the operation of this mathematical formula varied by the circumstance that the existence of the cause of action was for some time unknown to the suitor? In most American States statutes have given a partial answer to the question, but in uncertain terms. There, as well as in States where statutes are silent, an effort to provide a full and final answer would face a tangled web of history and legal doctrine, interwoven with imponderable factors of social policy which are but vaguely mirrored in the ideas and language lawyers have used

DURESS THROUGH CIVIL LITIGATION: I

Duress through the use of civil litigation provides a convenient starting point for an analysis of modern doctrines of economic duress. The propriety of this form of pressure, used alone or in conjunction with other means of coercion, may become an issue in a variety of situations in which relief for duress is asked. At the same time it is in this area that the extension of duress as a remedial principle has encountered the greatest resistance

ESTOPPEL AND STATUTES OF LIMITATION

Among all the spheres of its activity estoppel probably performs no more useful service than in the alleviation of hardship caused by statutes of limitation. Here as in other places the elements of estoppel and its relations to more basic legal concepts are exceedingly hard to define. At some points its effects on limitation acts could be described in terms of express contract; at other points it merges into fraud ; in general it provides the medium for official expressions of disapproval where civil litigation exceeds the permissible limits of private warfare