The common law derivative action was developed as a result of decades of case law in common law jurisdictions. Hong Kong and Singapore continue to retain the common law derivative action within their respective legal frameworks, despite both having enacted statutory derivative actions. This...

The requirement of disclosure in the patent specification is commonly presented as an essential arm of the patent bargain. This paper tests the assumption that disclosure requirements in a number of common law jurisdictions continue to reflect this and other shared origins of this doctrine....

Common law and civil law property appear to be quite different, with the former emphasizing pieces of ownership called estates and the latter focusing on holistic ownership. And yet the two systems are remarkably similar in their broad outlines, for functional reasons. This paper offers a...

In 2005, Professor Phillipa Weeks published an insightful chapter entitled ‘Employment Law – A Test of Coherence Between Statute and Common Law' in S Corcoran and S Bottomley (eds) Interpreting Statutes. That chapter examined the emergence, development and ultimate emasculation of an implied...

In the common law tradition contracts and torts have been considered separate areas of the law in both teaching and texts, while in civil law jurisdictions the law of contracts and delicts are generally not segregated to the same extent falling under the law of civil obligations. The common law...

When Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement from the Supreme Court in April 2010, the news was accompanied by the inevitable counting of votes on the Supreme Court. The conventional wisdom was that Stevens's retirement meant the departure of the most senior liberal Justice from the...

In the aftermath following the Asian financial crisis, the World Bank prescribed regulatory reforms as a remedy for weak financial fundamentals. These reforms reflect the claims of the strong form legal origins hypothesis that countries with common law legal traditions have stronger investor...

The central concept underlying access to employment rights is based on a binary divide between contract of service (the employee) and contract for services (independent contractor). New classifications of work relationships have however been added over time. These new categories do not sit...

The common law process appears to have checks and balances that prevent the self-interest of a particular embedded actor (judge or lawyer) from having a substantial distortive effect. The question that follows is whether the Restatement project is also immune, to the same extent as the common...