The Tale of Gresham’s Law

Gresham’s Law of Payments

Gresham’s Law is usually stated simply as ‘the bad currency drives out the good’ and it refers to a time when all transactions used coins. If you had to buy one pound’s worth of merchandise and you had two coins – one which you knew contained one pound’s worth of gold and another where some of the gold had been shaved off – you would pass the second coin and keep the fi rst one. In that way, mo...

Coinage, Debasements, and Gresham’s Laws

For hundreds of years, supplies of coins in Europe emerged, via a curious mechanism, from voluntary decisions of owners of old coins and bullion to exchange them at mints for new coins. Mints were sometimes private enterprises, licensed to produce on demand a list of coins whose design and neness was speciied by the sovereign. Citizens were free to take metal to the mint 1 to purchase newly min...

Culture Change

Introduction ............................................................................... 357 I. A Brief History of Law and Development ................................ 361 A. Law and Development After 9/11: Development as National Security............................................................. 361 B. Development as Human Rights ....................................... 365 II. Culture a...

An Architectural Tale of the Two Cities

A comparative study of the corresponding styles of Western and Iranian modern architecture has hardly ever been carried out in detail. This paper aims to sketch out an outline for such an investigation and to present a summary of empirical evidence accompanied by field observations to elaborate the ongoing trend of relationship between architectural styles in Iran and that of the West. This is ...

Informed consent--a fairy tale? Law's vision.