Statutes in Common Law Courts

Physician-assisted suicide: a common law roadmap for state courts.

Part I examines the development of the law legalizing passively hastening death and how this development relied significantly on distinguishing passively hastening death from actively hastening death. Part II subjects the arguments used to legitimate passively hastening death to a traditional criminal law analysis and demonstrates their weaknesses which were simple to conceal when there was lit...

Is tobacco a drug? Administrative agencies as common law courts.

Professor Cass Sunstein argues that the FDA has the authority to regulate tobacco products. He considers the text of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which supports the FDA assertion, and the context of its enactment, which argues against the FDA. He resolves the tension between text and context in favor of FDA jurisdiction by turning to the emerging role of administrative agencies. ...

The Constitution, the Courts and the Common Law

Choking on Statutes Revisited: A History of Legislative Preemption of Common Law Regarding Child Custody

In 1982, Professor (later Dean, and still later Judge) Guido Calabresi, published a book entitled A Common Law for the Age of Statutes.' The book deservedly achieved wide recognition in the academic world, netting 1,253 citations in a recent Westlaw search.2 Surprisingly, acceptance by the intended audience, i.e., the judiciary, was significantly more mutedonly nineteen citations of the book co...

LAW & ENTREPRENEURSHIP : Do COURTS MATTER ?

We briefly survey the economics literatures that relate to law and entrepreneurship, including the "law and finance" literature launched by the work of Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny ("LLSV"). Relying on the suggestive work of LLSV and other economists who have labored over the connections between entrepreneurship and law, we suspect that courts ...