Licensing lifesavers: possible routes to overcome errors and omissions in licence agreements

Legal context. This article is about the possible ways the correctionof errors in a written agreement can be achieved. These errorsmight be in the way that the agreement has been written or thatthe parties misunderstood the agreement each thought they weremaking. Key points. English law provides a number of ways in which suchmistakes or misunderstandings might be resolved, ultimatelyby a court if further agreement cannot be reached. First, thewritten agreement might simply be unenforceable. If not, thena court might construe the wording in the agreement in a waythat reflects the intention of the parties, implying terms intothat contract, or rectify the words used in the agreement. Practical significance. The intention of the article is to makepractitioners aware of these various routes to remedy mistakeswhich have been made in connection with written agreements.This knowledge will enable an informed approach to be takento resolving the dispute of which the mistake or alleged mistakeis the cause. Negotiations can take place around the possibleeffect of the mistake and the available remedies. This knowledgecan be used to resolve disputes arising out of such errors eitherby negotiation, possibly through mediation, and ultimately byappropriate action in the courts.     

Patriotic Liberalism

Law and Philosophy -     

Jurisprudential Regimes and Supreme Court Decisionmaking: The Lemon Regime and Establishment Clause Cases

In this research note, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article in American Political Science Review to the area of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. We hypothesize that Lemon v. Kurtzman represented a jurisprudential regime in the Supreme Court's decisionmaking in this area of law. Our analysis shows that the predictors of the Court's decisions in the two periods differed in ways that are very consistent with the types of changes one would expect the hypothesized regime shift to produce.     

Trusts in prime jurisdictions * By Alon Kaplan and Barbara R Hauser, Eds

It is six years since the first edition of this book was reviewedin Trusts & Trustees (See Trusts & Trustees Volume 7,Issue 5, April 2001, pp. 30–33. The new edition reflectsmany of the changes in international trust jurisdictions. Geoffrey Shindler sets the scene in his preface. His commentthat we have barely seem to have drawn breath since that firstedition is reflected in the numerous new and revised chaptersof the book. In every jurisdiction where trusts are practised,he says, the overriding concern is the extent that our thoughtshave been dominated by regulation and anti-money launderingmeasures. The trust has been used as the scapegoat for the government'sinability to deal with crime—internal and external. Heuses succinct phrases in referring to the occasional assumptionby governments that: ‘trusts must, by definition, be involvedin money laundering in     

Why Does Employment Legislation Not Damage Small Firms?

Business rhetoric and conventional theory expect that employment regulations will have negative effects on small firms. Prior research has shown that effects are quite rare, but has not explained why. Case studies of 18 firms from three sectors identified four explanations. (1) Perceptions of effects tend to be broad and general, rather than reflections of concrete experience. (2) 'The law' is not uniform, with older laws being largely taken for granted. (3) Effects depend on competitive conditions, which are more important influences on firms than are regulations; where conditions are benign, regulations can be absorbed, but in other circumstances employment regulations can exacerbate competitive pressures. (4) A degree of informality in small firms further eases responses. By the same token, however, hopes that regulation will stimulate modernization are rarely realized.     

Pain, Impairment, and Disability in the AMA Guides

Physicians use the American Medical Association's Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, 5th edition to evaluate millions of disability applicants each year. As major contributors to the chapter in the Guides devoted to assessing impairment associated with pain, we confronted the difficulties of incorporating pain into the Guides' overall evaluation system. Analysis of these difficulties is complicated by the paucity of research on the Guides, and by ambiguities and contradictions that pervade it. We propose that the ambiguities can be reduced if impairment is consistently defined in terms of organ or body part derangement, and disability in terms of activity limitations at the level of the whole person. We also propose a distinction between objective factors that may influence a person's ability to perform activities following injury. We suggest that when physicians examine disability applicants, they should evaluate both objective measures of organ or body part dysfunction and subjective reports of applicants -- especially ones regarding pain. We conclude that a comprehensive medical evaluation of disability applicant encompasses more than an impairment assessment.     

"The Quest": The Strange Life of W. J. Garnett

This article investigates the career of a British diplomat, William Garnett, whose unusual life has until know been neglected by historians. Garnett's papers, held at Lancashire Record Office, are a particularly rich source for historians of British diplomacy, the British Foreign Office, and overseas travel in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Garnett was often outspoken and indiscreet in his private correspondence and his archive, on which this article draws, provides valuable insights into British representation and British policy in the countries to which he was posted in the period 1902-1919.