This comprehensive Research Handbook provides an unparalleled overview of contemporary private law theory. Featuring original contributions by leading experts in the field, its extensive examinations of the core areas of contracts, property and torts are complemented by an exploration of a breadth of topics that cross the divide between private and public law, including labor law and corporate law.
This illuminating Research Handbook analyses the role that emotions play and ought to play in legal reasoning and practice, rejecting the simplistic distinction between reason and emotion.
The Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence surveys feminist theoretical understandings of law, including liberal and radical feminism, as well as socialist, relational, intersectional, post-modern, and pro-sex and queer feminist legal theories.
Critical theory, characteristically linked with the politics of theoretical engagement, covers the manifold of the connections between theory and praxis. This thought-provoking Research Handbook captures the broad range of those connections as far as legal thought is concerned and retains an emphasis both on the politics of theory, and on the notion of theoretical engagement. The first part examines the question of definition and tracks the origins and development of critical legal theory along its European and North American trajectories. The second part looks at the thematic connections between the development of legal theory and other currents of critical thought such as; Feminism, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, varieties of post-modernism, as well as the various ‘turns’ (ethical, aesthetic, political) of critical legal theory. The third and final part explores particular fields of law, addressing the question how the field has been shaped by critical legal theory, or what critical approaches reveal about the field, with the clear focus on opportunities for social transformation.
This volume brings together essays by scholars from around the world covering issues in general private law theory as well as specific fields including the theoretical analysis of tort law, property law, and contract law.
"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."--
There have been important developments in commercial practice, technology, shipping infrastructure and sustainability policies in recent times. This Research Handbook examines the major themes surrounding the thinking and studies of maritime law and practice. The stellar panel of contributors take a diverse range of approaches to identify any emerging theoretical and conceptual perspectives in law on what is essentially a fast paced sector of the global economy.
This Research Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of scholarship on not-for-profit law. The chapters, written by world leading experts, explore key ideas and debates in relation to: theories of the not-for-profit sector, the composition and scope of that sector, not-for-profit organisations and the constitution, the legal conception of charity, the tax treatment of not-for-profit organisations and the regulation of not-for-profits. The book serves to represent not-for-profit law as a field of academic inquiry, and to point the way to future research in that field.
Leading scholars in the field of law and economics contribute their original theoretical and empirical research to this major Handbook. Each chapter analyzes the basic architecture and important features of the institutions of property law from an economic point of view, while also providing an introduction to the issues and literature. Property rights and property systems vary along a large number of dimensions, and economics has proven very conducive to analyzing these patterns and even the nature of property itself. The contributions found here lend fresh perspectives to the current body of literature, examining topics including: initial acquisition; the commons, anticommons, and semicommons; intellectual property; public rights; abandonment and destruction; standardization of property; property and firms; marital property; bankruptcy as property; titling systems; land surveying; covenants; nuisance; the political economy of property; and takings. The contributors employ a variety of methods and perspectives, demonstrating the fruitfulness of economic modeling, empirical methods, and institutional analysis for the study of both new and familiar problems in property. Legal scholars, economists, and other social scientists interested in property will find this Handbook an often-referenced addition to their libraries.
