1982 Annual Survey Of American Law

The hunt for beneficial owners is on. Like an elephant, the beneficial owner hides in the jungle of complex legal structures, waiting to be discovered by eager prosecutors. But what lies behind this metaphor? What is a Beneficial Owner? Is beneficial ownership a right? What does this right encompass? What is the value of this right compared to other rights? And if beneficial ownership is not a right, is it still a legally relevant relation? How do courts, namely the U.S. Supreme Court deal with the concept? When do Anglo-American judges and European scholars resort to the concept? This book approaches these questions from two perspectives: legal fundamentals and the field of U.S. federal Indian law. Both legal theories and case law are scrutinized with the aim to find a better understanding of the basic conception and characteristics of beneficial ownership. Federal Indian law has been chosen for the study of the concrete implications of the beneficial ownership concept in what Roscoe Pound referred to as “the law in action.” To some, this choice of legal field might seem somewhat unusual. What answers could federal Indian law possibly offer with regard to pressing questions from the financial industry? As always, there is a short and a long answer. The short answer is that the analysis of an equally sophisticated field of law can open new perspectives on a given field of law. For example, not only potential criminals and tax evaders but also members of an older civilization are beneficial owners. The long answer can be found in this very book.

Republishes articles by two senior legal historians. Besides summarizing what has now become classical literature in the field, it offers illuminating insight into what it means to be a professional legal historian.

This volume brings together a selection of the most important published research articles from the ongoing debate about the moral rights of prisoners. The articles consider the moral underpinnings of the debate and include framework discussions for a theory of prisoners rights as well as several international documents which detail the rights of prisoners, including women prisoners. Finally, detailed analysis of the moral bases for particular rights relating to prison conditions covers areas such as: health, solitary confinement, recreation, work, religious observance, library access, the use of prisoners in research and the disenfranchisement of prisoners.

One of the academy’s leading legal historians, William E. Nelson is the Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. For more than four decades, Nelson has produced some of the most original and creative work on American constitutional and legal history. His prize-winning books have blazed new trails for historians with their substantive arguments and the scope and depth of Nelson’s exploration of primary sources. Nelson was the first legal scholar to use early American county court records as sources of legal and social history, and his work (on legal history in England, colonial America, and New York) has been a model for generations of legal historians. This book collects ten essays exemplifying and explaining the process of identifying and interpreting archival sources—the foundation of an array of methods of writing American legal history. The essays presented here span the full range of American history from the colonial era to the 1980s.Each historian has either identified a body of sources not previously explored or devised a new method of interrogating sources already known.The result is a kaleidoscopic examination of the historian’s task and of the research methods and interpretative strategies that characterize the rich, complex field of American constitutional and legal history.