Gift and Danger

Authors

  • Richard Hyland Rutgers Law School

Keywords:

Civil law, Common law, Custom, Danger, Exchange, Gift giving, Gift law, Mauss

Abstract

The intensity of the law’s interaction with gift giving suggests that examining their relationship might produce interesting insights about both gift giving and the law. Yet no social scientist has seriously examined the gift norms included in modern systems of private law. The complexity of gift law is due to the interaction of two competing social ideas: the law’s concern that gift giving represents a danger to society; and the power of customary gift obligations to engender and maintain social relationships. The law gets involved in gift giving when it feels that the parties need some protection, and this involvement varies considerably among legal systems. Some systems are suspicious of inter vivos transfers, while others tend to view gifts as they view exchange. Since the law’s formal requirements do not displace customary obligations this field provides an opportunity to examine how the law is shaped by the customary obligations Mauss elaborated.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Richard Hyland, Rutgers Law School

Distinguished Professor at the Rutgers Law School in Camden, New Jersey, is an internationally recognized scholar of commercial and comparative law. He has taught as a visiting professor at universities in Austin, Barcelona, Berlin, Graz, Hanoi, Lisbon, and Paris, and as a Fulbright Lecturer in Beijing and Tokyo.

References

BOAS F (1966) Kwakiutl Ethnography, ed. Codere H. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CAILLE A (2007) Anthropologie du don: Le tiers paradigme. Paris: Découverte.

CARPENTER CH (1981) Sacred, precious things: Repatriation of potlatch art. artmagazine 12: 64–70.

HYLAND R (2009) Gifts: A Study in Comparative Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MAUSS M (1990 [1925]) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Halls WD. New York: Norton.

MCGOWAN CA (1996) Special delivery: Does the postman have to ring at all – The current state of the delivery requirement for valid gifts. Real Property, Probate and Trust Journal 31: 357–391.

Downloads

Published

2016-12-29

How to Cite

HYLAND, Richard. Gift and Danger. civilistica.com: revista eletrônica de direito civil, Rio de Janeiro, v. 5, n. 2, p. 1–11, 2016. Disponível em: https://civilistica.emnuvens.com.br/redc/article/view/621. Acesso em: 15 dec. 2024.

Issue

Section

Foreign doctrine