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The incidents in Coriolanus which reflect the Midlands riots of 1607 and the parliamentary quarrels of 1606 are well known. Less obvious perhaps is the place of these topical echoes of contemporary troubles in the larger orchestration of the play. Topical references on their own do little more than date the play, in both senses of the word. A fresh look at the belly fable and how Shakespeare sets it out at the beginning of the play might help to clarify where the food riots and the jibes at Yelverton and Hyde as tribunes of the people fit in the larger pattern. Both topical events raised questions of power and authority by posing the problem of sectional interests in a commonwealth which was clearly less than organically united. Through his presentation in Coriolanus , I think, Shakespeare was exposing some basic anomalies in the belly fable's cognate concept, the body politic, which shaped traditional thinking about authority in the state. The body politic had a long and respectable history, traceable back to Plato and Aristotle. Its substantive medieval version was the one analysed by Kantorowicz, the legal fiction of the king's two bodies, one the private flesh and one the politic body which never dies. In Tudor times Henry VIII promoted the more metaphysical idea of the whole state as a corporate organism, symbolised in parliament with the king as head and lords and commons as 'members', a concept which became the dominant one in the course of the century. Corporate sovereignty, the supreme authority of rex in parliamento , was written into the chief statutes of the Reformation Parliament.

The European Monetary System, which came into being on 13 March, 1979, clearly demonstrated — both in the Resolution of the Council of Ministers of 5 December 1978 — as well as in the mechanisms used in the System — fundamental economic and monetary aims which had been missing from its predecessor. Thus, the author discerns the following aims in the EMS: (i) a greater degree of convergence of the economies of the participating Member States, (ii) the adoption of a common public policy choice for these countries — more specifically — the control of levels of inflation — also aiming at convergence, (iii) exchange-rate stability, (iv) the promotion of a central role for the ECU, and, (v) hopefully some moves to a greater degree of integration among the Community’s Member States.

Article Published in Cochin University Law Review 1980

To suggest his own biographical relationship to Ulysses Joyce has Stephen propose his expressive theory of the relationship between Shakespeare’s art and life. What makes Shakespeare a man of genius is that he encompassed in his vision “all in all in all of us” (U.213; IX.1049–50). Joyce recreates Shakespeare according to his own experience of him and thus becomes the father of his own artistic father and the artist whose imagination is so inclusive and vast that it contains the “all in all” of Shakespeare plus the very substantial addition — or, in current terminology, the supplement — of his own imagination. Like Joyce, Shakespeare used the details of everyday life for his subject: “All events brought grist to his mill” (U.204; IX.748). The major creative artist discovers in his actual experience the potential within his imagination: “He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible” (U.213; IX.1041–2).

The intimate connection which existed between chivalry and feudalism in the early age of both these institutions has not been sufficiently observed. Those who have set themselves to write the history of chivalry have been attracted by its romantic side, and have neglected the more substantial aspect which it presents when considered in relation to the political fabric. Our legal antiquaries, on the other hand, have sparingly recognised the influence of chivalry in the early history of the feudal establishment; and, while it was impossible to banish knight's service and tenure in chivalry from any account of the feudal system, they have been rather disposed to regard feudal knighthood as a legal fiction, and to disconnect the chivalry of tenure from the chivalry of arms.

El reconocimiento jurídico-civil de la realidad de la transexualidad no se ha producido hasta tiempos muy recientes. No obstante, este reconocimiento venía realizado en un ámbito exclusivamente jurisprudencial, y además de modo muy restringido, pues se exigía haber completado totalmente el proceso quirúrgico de cambio de sexo y, partiendo de que se trataría de una ficción jurídica, se reconocían efectos meramente registrales y de cambio de nombre. La Ley 3/2007 vino a suponer un cambio radical, al eliminar el requisito del tratamiento quirúrgico, reconocer a la reasignación todos los efectos que se derivan para el interesado de su nueva condición y desjudicializar el procedimiento, integrándolo en el ámbito del expediente gubernativo de rectificación registral. Ahora, los únicos requisitos, junto a los personales de nacionalidad española, mayoría de edad y capacidad suficiente, serán los del informe médico o psicológico de diagnóstico de disforia de género y ausencia de trastornos de personalidad que pudieran influir determinantemente en su existencia y tratamiento médico de adaptación de al menos dos años, salvo que razones acreditadas de salud o edad imposibiliten su seguimiento.The civil legal recognition of transsexuality has not occurred until recently. However, this recognition came only carried out in case law, and also in a very restricted way, as it was required to have fully completed the surgical process of sex change and, assuming that it would be a legal fiction, they were recognized only registration effects and change of name. The Act No. 3/2007 came to mean a radical change, by eliminating the requirement of surgical treatment, recognizing to registration reallocation all the effects that accrue to the applicant from his/her new status and dis judicializing the procedure, integrating it into the field of gubernatorial record registration correction. Now, the only requirements, along with Spanish nationality, age and sufficient capacity shall be those of medical or psychological diagnosis of gender dysphoria and absence of personality disorders that could influence decisively in its existence, and treatment adjustment of at least two years unless proven reasons of health or age make impossible its fulfillment.

Theories of the firm inform and undergird corporate law,' but they only intermittently appear as principal points in corporate law discourse. They stayed in the background during the half century ending in 1980, while a conception of the firm as a management power structure prevailed unchallenged in legal theory.2 The situation changed around 1980, when a new theory of the firm3 appeared, imported from economics. This "new economic theory of the firm" asserted a contractual conception. The firm, said its leading text, is a legal fiction that serves as a nexus for a set of contractual relationships among individual factors of production.4 According to the theory, corporate relationships and structures could be explained in terms of contracting parties and transaction costs. Law and economics writers restated corporate law in the new theory's terms5 and successfully reoriented legal discourse on corporations.6 The new theory already has sunk into the

IN THE PROCESS WHICH CREATED the developed Roman Republic of the third to the first centuries B.C., one of the most crucial developments was the opening of the important political magistracies and priesthoods, and especially the consulship, to the plebeian majority, instead of keeping them reserved for the patrician aristocracy as in the fifth and early fourth centuries. This development, according to the annalistic tradition as represented (in its most fully worked up form) by Livy, occurred in several stages during the fourth century, with key legislation concerning the consulship coming in 367 (the Leges Liciniae-Sextiae) and 342 (the Leges Genuciae). It has long been noticed, however, that the consular fasti-the list of annual consuls holding office at Rome-does not accord with the legislative stages recorded by Livy. This has led to two opposed lines of historical treatment of this problem: one, represented in recent times by J. Pinsent and M. Elster, for example, is sceptical of the annalistic/literary tradition and produces alternative accounts of the development of plebeian socio-political power; the other, represented notably in recent years by R. Develin, accepts the literary evidence as fundamentally reliable and seeks to reconcile it with the consular fasti by juggling with hypotheses of special exceptions and military emergencies leading to breaches of genuine and normally valid laws.' Both approaches to the problem, at least as thus far put into practice, seem to me methodologically flawed. One cannot, as Develin and others

In Thaler v. Thaler, a 1977 New York divorce case awarding alimony to the husband, the judge had occasion to summarize the nineteenth-century shift in the legal status of married women. At common law, he asserted, "the husband and wife were orne and the husband was the one .... But with the advent of the married woman's property acts ... any previous justification for this one-way support duty faded."' In the same year, however, an unemployed Brooklyn construction worker aired his reservations about his wife's employment by evoking the old common law image of marriage. "When you get married," he said, "you figure it's gonna be like one. Only it's always the husband's one."2 The first of these comments suggests the focus of this essay: challenges to the common law doctrine of marital unity during a pivotal era of American law, roughly 1820-1860.3 The second comment reflects its emphasis: the uncanny persistence of that doctrine far beyond its Christian and common law origins. The judge in Thaler v. Thaler based his decision, in part, on an 1848 statute extending to married women the right to own their own property. He interpreted the statute as a significant legal alteration in the patriarchal family and implied that like the many other statutes passed in common law jurisdictions during this period, it marked the beginning of legal equality between wives and husbands.4 By contrast, this essay contends that the married women's property acts failed to make such a significant alteration. Admittedly, if one defines patriarchy in the husband-wife relationship as the reduction of the wife to the status of property owned and controlled by the husband, one could argue that it never existed in its purest form in the Anglo-American legal tradition.5 Yet, basic elements of that patriarchal construct underpinned all of Anglo-American domestic relations law, and they continued to exist long after the enactment of the married women's property acts of the mid-nineteenth century.

Although there is no substantial agreement about how the income from close corporations should be taxed, there appears to be virtual unanimity with respect to the defects of the present system. The basic weakness of the method adopted by the federal income tax for taxing corporate income is that it is predicated upon a legal fiction which ignores economic realities. In the case of a partnership, the partnership is disregarded and the partners are taxed directly upon their distributive shares of the partnership income.1 In the case of a corporation, however, the law gives full credence to the corporate fiction. Although in substance a close corporation represents an incorporated partnership, or perhaps an incorporated sole proprietorship, the corporate entity is treated as an independent taxable entity, and the income of the undertaking is taxed to the legal convention, rather than to the real owners of the enterprise. The recognition of the corporation as a distinct taxable entity has several unhappy corollaries. Even in the case of the publicly owned corporation, it results in a complete disregard of the ability to pay principle, which is supposed to be one of the cardinal desiderata of an income tax. Although there is considerable speculation about the actual incidence of the corporate income tax,2 and whether the burden of the tax is shifted to the consumer in the form of higher prices, or to the corporate employees in the form of lower wages, or to the stockholders in the form of diminished dividends, it is clear that the actual burden of the tax is not imposed upon the corporation, which is a legal fiction. The corporate tax, which in recent years has been graduated according to the size of the corporate income, obviously bears no relation to the wealth or the ability to pay of the person who actually pays the tax, whoever he may be. In the case of close corporations there are more fundamental objections to the current system of taxing corporate income. Some taxes are unjust because they bear

THIS PAPER EXPLORES THE JUDGMENTAL process involved in the determination of liability in accident cases. The law of negligence, unlike other branches of the civil law and the criminal law, lacks a body of substantive rules by which a jury may determine the legality of conduct. The acts of one person which may result in property loss or physical injury to another are extremely varied. This variety makes it all but impossible to specify, in advance, what kind of behavior constitutes adequate caution or due care in given situations. Hence, the law has devised a general procedure by which to reach a judgment on this matter for any particular case. It directs the members of the jury to consider what precautions a person should take while engaged in some potentially hazardous endeavor in order to minimize the risk of possible harm to others, and offers a model of behavior " . . . the supposed conduct, under similar circumstances, of a hypothetical person, the reasonable man of ordinary prudence who represents a community ideal of reasonable behavior."' The vagueness of this criterion has prompted a few legal essayists to attempt to objectify the concept of reasonableness by specifying its logically necessary components. One such effort distinguished by the parsimony of its formulation is found in an opinion delivered by Judge Learned

The involuntary confinement of the "mentally ill" creates disquieting tensions for a society which in other ways of life values the liberty of the individual. Opposing wishes to neglect and to care, to protect and to abandon can be identified in involuntary commitment proceedings; therefore, no conflict-free resolution of the problems inherent in such deprivations of liberty is possible. Recently, in order to mitigate the deprivations suffered, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals in Rouse v. Cameron' has invoked the principle that individuals so confined have an enforceable "right to treatment." Some of the possible consequences of this "right," however, bring into sharper focus the uneasiness about current practices of involuntary commitment.2 To the extent to which deprivations of liberty for "mental illness" are increasingly justified on the basis of "being in need of treatment," the danger is very real that the right to treatment not only will serve the purpose of improving therapeutic opportunities but also will further support, or even aggravate, existing indiscriminate practices of incarceration on therapeutic grounds. If a right to treatment is to escape this fate, its ambit must be carefully defined, especially once treatment is elevated to a constitutional right.3

MODERN student of primitive law has written that "Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law still remains after eight decades the preeminent work on the origin and nature of primitive legal institutions." 1 Without stopping to do more than wonder why anthropologists who have been studying primitive peoples failed in eighty years to produce a better work on the subject, one may review Maine's book in the terms in which it is praised by Hoebel: as the pre-eminent work on the origin and nature of primitive legal institutions. This paper will look at the book only as it gives understanding of the law and custom of primitive societies.2 No consideration will be given to Maine's important contributions to the history of Roman and European law and to method and viewpoint in historical jurisprudence. Hence no attention will be directed to those parts of the book which deal with such subjects as the effects of legal fiction, equity and legislation in making western law flexible to meet changing circumstances, the steps by which the Romans developed a comprehensive idea of contract into separate legal conceptions appropriate to a more complex society, the historical development of the conception of natural law out of the Roman law of nations and other elements, the nature of and transformations in the Roman principle of patriarchal authority, and the history of testamentary disposition. These are all matters of the history of the law of our Graeco-Roman-European tradition. They are the principal subjects of Maine's book, and of Sir Frederick Pollock's notes. This essay will consider only so much of Maine's treatise as bears upon our understanding of primitive law and of primitive society. Although occasional reference will be made to Dissertations on Early Law and Custom,3 which Maine published twenty-two years after the Ancient Law appeared, attention will center on the earlier and greater book: it is Ancient Law that Hoebel rightly regards as pre-eminent. If the admiration accorded the book by the writer of this essay appears greater than that of others who have discussed it in recent years,4 it should be