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Lawrence Lessig called the most recent battle ‘‘Hollywood v. Silicon Valley,’’1 but one could just as well dub it ‘‘Code v. The Common Law.’’ The content industries’ latest efforts to re-calibrate the balance of copyright2 imply that the United States copyright system has reached a crisis that cannot be resolved under existing law. In particular, bills such as the Consumer Broadband & Digital T...

This past year, Judge Richard Posner published a pair of essays endorsing the common law method of constitutional interpretation. “David Strauss is right,” he wrote, in a contribution to Slate’s annual Supreme Court Breakfast Table. “The Supreme Court treats the Constitution like it is authorizing the court to create a common law of constitutional law, based on current concerns, not what those ...

This Foreword begins with the descriptive claim that much of administrative law is really administrative common law: doctrines and requirements that are largely judicially created, as opposed to those specified by Congress, the President, or individual agencies. Although governing statutes exert some constraining force on judicial creativity, the primary basis of these judge-fashioned doctrines...

the principle of legality is a fundamental principle of criminal law within all statutory legal systems. the principle has been recognized in the iranian legal system which has been influenced by islamic law as well as french law especially since the beginning of the codification era. conversely, in english law which is mainly defined by common law, recently have been taken significant steps to...

An account of legal change in a common law system is developed. Legal 1 change takes place incrementally through court decisions that are constrained by 2 previous decisions in other courts. The assumption is that a court’s decision has to 3 be consistent with the rules set out in earlier court decisions. However, the court is 4 allowed to make add new distinctions and therefore make a differen...