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Under U.S. law, in order to rise to an actionable level of negligence (an actual breach of a legal duty of care), the injured party must show that the attorney's acts were not merely the result of poor strategy, but that they were the result of errors that no reasonably prudent attorney would make. While the elements of a cause of action for ...
Thus, they are most appropriate when (a) the parties can agree in advance on reasonable compensation for breach, but (b) the court would have a difficult time determining fair compensation at the time of breach. Under the common law, liquidated damages may not be set so high that they are penalty clauses rather than fair compensation.
At common law, this was the name of a mixed action (springing from the earlier personal action of ejectione firmae) which lay for the recovery of the possession of land, and for damages for the unlawful detention of its possession. The action was highly fictitious, being in theory only for the recovery of a term for years, and brought by a ...
Inducing a breach of contract was a tort of accessory liability, and an intention to cause a breach of contract was a necessary and sufficient requirement for liability; a person had to know that he was inducing a breach of contract and to intend to do so; that a conscious decision not to inquire into the existence of a fact could be treated as ...
The test is that set out for repudiatory breach, above. The concept of fundamental breach as a free standing legal concept no longer has any legal force [26] but is now simply another possible term of a contract that needs to be construed like any other term of a contract. A fundamental breach is usually read as a reference to a repudiatory ...
Illegality in English law is a potential ground in English contract law, tort, trusts or UK company law for a court to refuse to enforce an obligation. The illegality of a transaction, either because of public policy under the common law, or because of legislation, potentially means no action directly concerning the deal will be heard by the courts.
In the criminal law, an omission will constitute an actus reus and give rise to liability only when the law imposes a duty to act and the defendant is in breach of that duty. In tort law, similarly, liability will be imposed for an omission only exceptionally, when it can be established that the defendant was under a duty to act or duty of care.
In this respect English law differs from civil law systems, for it has always drawn a sharp distinction between negligence, however gross, on the one hand and fraud, bad faith and wilful misconduct on the other. The doctrine of the common law is that: "Gross negligence may be evidence of mala fides, but is not the same thing": see Goodman