Law School

Adverse possession, sometimes colloquially described as "squatter's rights", is a legal principle under which a person who does not have legal title to a piece of property — usually land (real property) — acquires legal ownership based on continuous possession or occupation of the property without the permission of its legal owner. In general, a property owner has the right to recover possession of their property from unauthorized possessors through legal action such as ejectment. However, in the English common law tradition, courts have long ruled that when someone occupies a piece of property without permission and the property's owner does not exercise their right to recover their property for a significant period of time, not only is the original owner prevented from exercising their right to exclude, but an entirely new title to the property "springs up" in the adverse possessor. In effect, the adverse possessor becomes the property's new owner. Over time, legislatures have created statutes of limitations that specify the length of time that owners have to recover possession of their property from adverse possessors. In the United States, for example, these time limits vary widely between individual states, ranging from as low as three years to as long as 40 years. Although the elements of an adverse possession action are different in every jurisdiction, a person claiming adverse possession is usually required to prove non-permissive use of the property that is actual, open and notorious, exclusive, adverse and continuous for the statutory period. Personal property, traditionally known as 'chattel', may also be adversely possessed, but owing to the differences in the nature of real and chattel property, the rules governing such claims are rather more stringent, and favor the legal owner rather than the adverse possessor. Claims for adverse possession of chattel often involve works of art.

Foreseeability. Legal Causation is usually expressed as a question of 'foreseeability'. An actor is liable for the foreseeable, but not the unforeseeable, consequences of his or her act. For example, it is foreseeable that if I shoot someone on a beach and they are immobilized, they may drown in a rising tide rather than from the trauma of the gunshot wound or from loss of blood. However, it is not (generally speaking) foreseeable that they will be struck by lightning and killed by that event. This type of causal foreseeability is to be distinguished from foreseeability of extent or kind of injury, which is a question of remoteness of damage, not causation. For example, if I conduct welding work on a dock that lights an oil slick that destroys a ship a long way down the river, it would be hard to construe my negligence as anything other than causal of the ship's damage. There is no novus actus interveniens. However, I may not be held liable if that damage is not of a type foreseeable as arising from my negligence. That is a question of public policy, and not one of causation. Example. An example of how foreseeability does not apply to the extent of an injury is the eggshell skull rule. If Neal punches Matt in the jaw, it is foreseeable that Matt will suffer a bodily injury that he will need to go to the hospital for. However, if his jaw is very weak, and his jaw is dislocated by the punch, then the medical bills, which would have been about $5,000 for wiring his jaw shut had now become $100,000 for a full-blown jaw re-attachment. Neal would still be liable for the entire $100,000, even though $95,000 of those damages were not reasonably foreseeable. Other relevant considerations. Because causation in the law is a complex amalgam of fact and policy, other doctrines are also important, such as foreseeability and risk. Particularly in the United States, where the doctrine of 'proximate cause' effectively amalgamates the two-stage factual legal causation inquiry favored in the English system, one must always be alert to these considerations in assessing the postulated relationship between two events.

Capacity or more fully mental capacity covers day-to-day decisions, including: what to wear and what to buy, as well as, life-changing decisions, such as: whether to move into a care home or whether to have major surgery. The UK's Mental Capacity Act 2005 or MCA sets out a two-stage test of capacity: 1. Is the person unable to make a particular decision? 2. Is the inability to make a decision caused by an impairment of, or disturbance in the functioning of, a person's mind or brain? The MCA states an individual is unable to make their own decision, if they are unable to do at least one of four things: 1. Understand information given to them. 2. Retain that information long enough to be able to make the decision. 3. Weigh up the information available to make the decision. 4. Communicate their decision. Discussion. As an aspect of the social contract between a state and its citizens, the state adopts a role of protector to the weaker and more vulnerable members of society. In public policy terms, this is the policy of parens patriae. Similarly, the state has a direct social and economic interest in promoting trade, so it will define the forms of business enterprise that may operate within its territory, and lay down rules that will allow both the businesses and those that wish to contract with them a fair opportunity to gain value. This system worked well until social and commercial mobility increased. Now persons routinely trade and travel across state boundaries (both physically and electronically), so the need is to provide stability across state lines given that laws differ from one state to the next. Thus, once defined by the personal law, persons take their capacity with them like a passport whether or however they may travel. In this way, a person will not gain or lose capacity depending on the accident of the local laws, for example, if A does not have capacity to marry her cousin under her personal law (a rule of consanguinity), she cannot evade that law by travelling to a state that does permit such a marriage. In Saskatchewan Canada, an exception to this law allows married persons to become the common law spouse of others prior to divorcing the first spouse. This law is not honored amongst other Canadian provinces.

Trespass to goods. Trespass to chattels, also known as trespass to goods or trespass to personal property, is defined as "an intentional interference with the possession of personal property...proximately cause injury". While originally a remedy for the asportation of personal property, the tort grew to incorporate any interference with the personal property of another. In some jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom trespass to chattels has been codified to clearly define the scope of the remedy; in most jurisdictions, trespass to chattel remains a purely common law remedy, the scope of which varies by jurisdiction. Generally, trespass to chattels possesses three elements: 1. Lack of consent. The interference with the property must be non-consensual. A claim does not lie if, in acquiring the property, the purchaser consents contractually to certain access by the seller. "Any use exceeding the consent" authorized by the contract, should it cause harm, gives rise to a cause for action. 2. Actual harm. The interference with the property must result in actual harm. The threshold for actual harm varies by jurisdiction. In California, for instance, an electronic message may constitute a trespass if the message interferes with the functioning of the computer hardware, but the plaintiff must prove that this interference caused actual hardware damage or actual impaired functioning. 3. Intentionality. The interference must be intentional. What constitutes intention varies by jurisdiction, however, the Restatement (Second) of Torts indicates that "intention is present when an act is done for the purpose of using or otherwise intermeddling with a chattel or with knowledge that such an intermeddling will, to a substantial certainty, result from the act", and continues: "t is not necessary that the actor should know or have reason to know that such intermeddling is a violation of the possessory rights of another". Remedies for trespass to chattel include damages, liability for conversion, and injunction, depending on the nature of the interference.

Google LLC v Oracle America, Inc. was a legal case within the United States related to the nature of computer code and copyright law. The dispute centered on the use of parts of the Java programming language's application programming interfaces (APIs) and about 11,000 lines of source code, which are owned by Oracle (through subsidiary, Oracle America, Inc., originating from Sun Microsystems), within early versions of the Android operating system by Google. Google has since transitioned Android to a copyright-unburdened engine without the source code, and has admitted to using the APIs but claimed this was within fair use. Oracle initiated the suit arguing that the APIs were copyrightable, seeking US$8.8 billion in damages from Google's sales and licensing of the earlier infringing versions of Android. While two District Court-level jury trials found in favor of Google, the Federal Circuit court reversed both decisions, asserting APIs are copyrightable and Google's use does not fall under fair use. Google successfully petitioned to the Supreme Court to hear the case in the 2019 term, focusing on the copyrightability of APIs and subsequent fair use; the case was delayed to the 2020 term due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–2 decision that Google's use of the Java APIs fell within the four factors of fair use, bypassing the question on the copyrightability of the APIs. The decision reversed the Federal Circuit ruling and remanded the case for further review. The case has been of significant interest within the tech and software industries, as numerous computer programs and software libraries, particularly in open source, are developed by recreating the functionality of APIs from commercial or competing products to aid developers in interoperability between different systems or platforms. Florida v Georgia, (2018), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in an original jurisdiction case. It involves a long-running dispute over waters within the ACF River Basin, running from the north Georgia mountains through metro Atlanta to the Florida panhandle, which is managed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Waters in the area have been stressed by the population growth of Atlanta over previous decades. The immediate case stemmed from droughts in 2011 and 2012 that caused economic damage to Florida due to lower water flows from the ACF River Basin into the panhandle, impacting its seafood production; Florida sought relief to have more water allocated towards them from the ACF by placing a water allocation cap on Georgia. The Supreme Court assigned a special master to review Florida's complaint, but ultimately found in 2016 that Florida had not fully demonstrated the need for more allocation. Florida challenged this determination to the Supreme Court. On June 27, 2018, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the special master had not properly considered Florida's argument and remanded the case to be reheard and reviewed. Subsequently, the court replaced the special master, who later ruled against Florida in the dispute. Florida challenged the conclusions of the special master's report, but the Supreme Court overruled Florida's exceptions and unanimously dismissed the case in Florida v Georgia, (2021).

Unowned property refers to tangible, physical things which are capable of being reduced to being property owned by an individual but are not owned by anyone. Bona vacantia (Latin for "ownerless goods") is a legal concept associated with the unowned property, which exists in various jurisdictions, with a consequently varying application, but with origins mostly in English law. Nearly every piece of land on the Earth is a property and has a maintainer (owner). The class of objects, "unowned things", are objects which are not yet property; either because it has been agreed by sovereign nations that no one can own them, or because no person, or other entity, has made a claim of ownership. The most common unowned things are asteroids. The UN's Outer Space Treaty does not address the issue of private ownership of natural objects in space. All asteroids remain unowned things until some person or entity makes a claim of property right to one of them. In an experimental legal case of first impression, a lawsuit for a declaratory judgment was filed in a United States Federal Court to determine the lawful owner of Asteroid 433 Eros. 433 Eros was claimed as property by Gregory W Nemitz of Orbital Development. According to the homestead principle, Nemitz argued that he had the right to claim ownership of any celestial body that he made use of; he claimed he had designated Eros a spacecraft parking facility and wished to charge NASA a parking and storage fee of twenty cents per year for its NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft that is permanently stored there. Nemitz's case was dismissed due to lack of standing and an appeal denied. A gift, in the law of property, is the voluntary and immediate transfer of property from one person (the donor or grantor) to another (the donee or grantee) without consideration. There are several types of gifts in property law, most notably inter vivos gifts which are made in the donor's lifetime and causa mortis (deathbed) gifts which are made in expectation of the donor's imminent death. Both types of gifts share three elements which must be met in order for the gift to be legally effective: donative intent (the intention of the donor to give the gift to the donee), the delivery of the gift to the donee, and the acceptance of the gift. In addition to those elements, causa mortis gifts require that the donor must die of the impending peril that he or she had contemplated when making the gift.

Causation is the "causal relationship between the defendant's conduct and end result". In other words, causation provides a means of connecting conduct with a resulting effect, typically an injury. In criminal law, it is defined as the actus reus (an action) from which the specific injury or other effect arose and is combined with mens rea (a state of mind) to comprise the elements of guilt. Causation only applies where a result has been achieved and therefore is immaterial with regard to inchoate offenses. Background concepts. Legal systems more or less try to uphold the notions of fairness and justice. If a state is going to penalize a person or require that person pay compensation to another for losses incurred, liability is imposed according to the idea that those who injure others should take responsibility for their actions. Although some parts of any legal system will have qualities of strict liability, in which the mens rea is immaterial to the result and subsequent liability of the actor, most look to establish liability by showing that the defendant was the cause of the particular injury or loss. Even the youngest children quickly learn that, with varying degrees of probability, consequences flow from physical acts and omissions. The more predictable the outcome, the greater the likelihood that the actor caused the injury or loss intentionally. There are many ways in which the law might capture this simple rule of practical experience: that there is a natural flow to events, that a reasonable man in the same situation would have foreseen this consequence as likely to occur, that the loss flowed naturally from the breach of contractual duties or tortuous actions, etc. However it is phrased, the essence of the degree of fault attributed will lie in the fact that reasonable people try to avoid injuring others, so if harm was foreseeable, there should be liability to the extent that the extent of the harm actually resulting was foreseeable.

An implied-in-fact contract is a form of an implied contract formed by non-verbal conduct, rather than by explicit words. The United States Supreme Court has defined "an agreement 'implied in fact'" as "founded upon a meeting of minds, which, although not embodied in an express contract, is inferred, as a fact, from conduct of the parties showing, in the light of the surrounding circumstances, their tacit understanding." Although the parties may not have exchanged words of agreement, their conduct may indicate that an agreement existed. For example, if a patient goes to a doctor's appointment, the patient's actions indicate that they intend to receive treatment in exchange for paying reasonable/fair doctor's fees. Likewise, by seeing the patient, the doctor's actions indicate that they intend to treat the patient in exchange for payment of the bill. Therefore, it seems that a contract actually existed between the doctor and the patient, even though nobody spoke any words of agreement. (They both agreed to the same essential terms, and acted in accordance with that agreement. There was mutuality of consideration.) In such a case, the court will probably find that (as a matter of fact) the parties had an implied contract. If the patient refuses to pay after being examined, they will have breached the implied contract. Another example of an implied contract is the payment method known as a letter of credit. Generally, an implied contract has the same legal force as an express contract. However, it may be more difficult to prove the existence and terms of an implied contract should a dispute arise. In some jurisdictions, contracts involving real estate may not be created on an implied-in-fact basis, requiring the transaction to be in writing. Unilateral contracts are often the subject matter of these types of contracts where acceptance is being made by beginning a specified task. A collateral contract is usually a single term contract, made in consideration of the party for whose benefit the contract operates agreeing to enter into the principal or main contract, which sets out additional terms relating to the same subject matter as the main contract. For example, a collateral contract is formed when one party pays the other party a certain sum for entry into another contract. A collateral contract may be between one of the parties and a third party. It can also be epitomized as follows: a collateral contract is one that induces a person to enter into a separate "primary" contract. For example, if X agrees to buy goods from Y that will, accordingly, be manufactured by Z, and does so on the strength of Z's assurance as to the high quality of the goods, X and Z may be held to have made a collateral contract consisting of Z's promise of quality given in consideration of X's promise to enter into the main contract with Y. Elements of a valid collateral contract. A party to an existing contract may attempt to show that a collateral contract exists if their claim for a breach of contract fails because the statement they relied upon was not held to be a term of the main contract. It has been held that for this to be successful, the statement must have been promissory in nature. Remedies may be awarded for breach of a collateral contract.

Trespass is an area of criminal law or tort law broadly divided into three groups: trespass to the person, trespass to chattels, and trespass to land. Trespass to the person historically involved six separate trespasses: threats, assault, battery, wounding, mayhem (or maiming), and false imprisonment. Through the evolution of the common law in various jurisdictions, and the codification of common law torts, most jurisdictions now broadly recognize three trespasses to the person: assault, which is "any act of such a nature as to excite an apprehension of battery"; battery, "any intentional and unpermitted contact with the plaintiff's person or anything attached to it and practically identified with it"; and false imprisonment, the "unlaw obstruct or deprive of freedom from restraint of movement". One can retrieve wounded or expired game from neighboring properties and boundaries even if the neighboring landowner does not give permission as long as there are no weapons in possession while retrieving game causes injury". Trespass to chattel does not require a showing of damages. Simply the "intermeddling with or use of … the personal property" of another gives cause of action for trespass. Since CompuServe Incorporated v Cyber Promotions, Inc., various courts have applied the principles of trespass to chattel to resolve cases involving unsolicited bulk e-mail and unauthorized server usage. Trespass to land is today the tort most commonly associated with the term trespass; it takes the form of "wrongful interference with one's possessory rights in  property". Generally, it is not necessary to prove harm to a possessor's legally protected interest; liability for unintentional trespass varies by jurisdiction. "in common law, every unauthorized entry upon the soil of another was a trespasser"; however, under the tort scheme established by the Restatement of Torts, liability for unintentional intrusions arises only under circumstances evincing negligence or where the intrusion involved a highly dangerous activity. Trespass has also been treated as a common law offense in some countries.

Tax credits. Corporations, like other businesses, may be eligible for various tax credits which reduce federal, state or local income tax. The largest of these by dollar volume is the federal foreign tax credit. This credit is allowed to all taxpayers for income taxes paid to foreign countries. The credit is limited to that part of federal income tax before other credits generated by foreign source taxable income. The credit is intended to mitigate taxation of the same income to the same taxpayer by two or more countries and has been a feature of the U.S. system since 1918. Other credits include credits for certain wage payments, credits for investments in certain types of assets including certain motor vehicles, credits for use of alternative fuels and off-highway vehicle use, natural resource related credits, and others.  Tax deferral. Deferral is one of the main features of the worldwide tax system that allows U.S. multinational companies to delay paying taxes on foreign profits. Under U.S. tax law, companies are not required to pay U.S. tax on their foreign subsidiaries’ profits for many years, even indefinitely until the earnings are returned to U.S. Therefore, it was one of the main reasons that U.S. corporations paid low taxes, even though the corporate tax rate in the U.S. was one of the highest rates (35%) in the world. Although, since January 1, 2018 the corporate tax rate has been changed to a flat 21%. Deferral is beneficial for U.S. companies to raise the cost of capital relatively to their foreign-based competitors. Their foreign subsidiaries can reinvest their earnings without incurring additional tax that allows them to grow faster. It is also valuable to U.S. corporations with global operations, especially for corporations with income in low-tax countries. Some of the largest and most profitable U.S. corporations pay exceedingly low tax rates through their use of subsidiaries in so-called tax haven countries. Eighty-three of the United states’ 100 biggest public companies have subsidiaries in countries that are listed as tax havens or financial privacy jurisdictions, according to the Government Accountability Office. However, tax deferral encourages U.S. companies to make job-creating investments offshore even if similar investments in the United States can be more profitable, absent tax considerations. Furthermore, companies try to use accounting techniques to record profits offshore by any way, even if they keep actual investment and jobs in the United States. This explains why U.S. corporations report their largest profits in low-tax countries like the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Bermuda, though clearly that is not where most real economic activity occurs.