Common law | EPFL Graph Search

In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions. The defining characteristic of common law is that it arises as precedent. Common law courts look to the past decisions of courts to synthesize the legal principles of past cases. Stare decisis, the principle that cases should be decided according to consistent principled rules so that similar facts will yield similar results, lies at the heart of all common law systems. If a court finds that a similar dispute to the present one has been resolved in the past, the court is generally bound to follow the reasoning used in the prior decision. If, however, the court finds that the current dispute is fundamentally distinct from all previous cases (a "matter of first impression"), and legislative statutes are either silent or ambiguous on the question, judges have the authority and duty to re

Verso un'oggettività della bellezza. L'insegnamento dei Grigioni.

Luca Conti, Marco Svimbersky, Stefano Zerbi

Contemporary society is based on a perpetual evolution of personal opinions and likings. The transmission of knowledge is questioned, but if the education and teaching about a critical vision is considered an essential instrument, so the schools and the masters still have the possibility to contribute to it. So it is necessary to give a common cultural value to the term venustas in order to make beauty a collective project and the logical answer to a need, to a requirement. The example used to illustrate this hypothesis is the case of the Swiss canton Graubünden. Its recent architecture is not based on the formal result, but on the processes generating forms, which are beautiful because of their adequacy and aptness.

2010

A Third Way Alternative; Critical Assessments from the Model of the Yugoslav City

Jana Konstantinova

This dissertation aims to demonstrate the development, meaning and significance of cultural infrastructure in the cities of Skopje, Belgrade and Sarajevo (1945-1991). In the historic context, culture became the fundamental critical tool with which to yield a vivid cultural scene, and it coincides with the emergence of remarkable cultural artefacts - including 'the right architecture'. The thesis recognizes a common (Yugoslav) Creative Model behind this âmovementâ, which stimulated and anticipated the emergence of the elements that eventually form the cultural artefacts. For the purpose of studying the strengths and weaknesses of the model, the exercise investigates the extensive body of cultural creations which emerged through the model. As such, the thesis highlights the flow of creativity, and the particular understanding of creativity as a âlife qualityâ in support of the theoretical concept of balance which emerged in the local context - striving for equilibrium between the man-made, the human (civic) and the natural environment. The aims of the research are threefold. Firstly, to understand the objectives on which the model is created; secondly, to reposition the object â cultural artefact â as a departure point of analysis of the model; and thirdly, to analyze the evolution of the cultural infrastructure in the environments to trace the transformations of the model. To that end an analysis of the entire cultural creation of the epoch has been carried out in relation with the specific interest of the thesis. The exercises are conducted by drawing from the primary data sets (the press: both architectural and cultural magazines) and the secondary sets of data (original documents and testimonials with the protagonists: wider cultural milieu). Bridging the epistemological gap in the academic discourse, exemplifying the selected cities not as isolated case studies but in comparative synthesis, the thesis positions these rich cultural, spatial and social qualities (collected in the form of a critical archive) and their common Creative Model as the possibility to depart from the neo-liberal paradigm still affecting regions globally and to re-imagine our own current models for human settlements in ways more open to people, nature and culture.

EPFL2021

Introducing the architectural values of the Common

Valentin Daniel Maurice Bourdon

The recent development of the “Common” as an interdisciplinary field of reflection seems to show some restraint with respect to the architectural culture that precedes it. This proposal invites to explore the intensities and the reasons for such a resistance. Over the last decades, the Common is not only brandished by a growing number of intellectuals engaged in the exploration, the observation and the possible recognition of sustainable alternatives to current economic models. It is also more and more recurrent in scientific circles, particularly in the social sciences, but also in political language. Becoming unavoidable in the contemporary public debate, the Common asserts today as a reality to study, embodying breaks and continuities. In parallel with this dynamic, several disciplines have already produced remarkable contributions defining a certain number of theoretical positions on the subject. Although architecture field, like most humanities, has expressed a growing interest for the notion of “Common(s)”, even more in recent years, it still struggles to identify its own entries. Stakes are often limited to the "areas of influence" of the discipline, related to the architectural culture in a very distant way. No without legitimacy, the debate focuses on governance, resources and popular appropriation, and generally relates to limited design issues. As contagious it is, the “spread” of the common seems to had contoured the central question of the form. Where economics, politics, philosophy or sociology tend to give it a favorable place to enrich their own fields of discipline, architecture seems less inclined to seize the stake of the Common with its own constructions theoretical and its own analytical tools. It is particularly striking to observe how the architectural culture and its semantic heritage are kept at a certain distance from a reflection on the Common(s). Such a disconnection is even more crucial when considering history as accumulated experiences and gradually amended principles. The optimization of resources, organization of communities of life or spatialization of political decisions have always been an integral part of the discipline. Despite this, the long tradition of architectural theory, as well as the figure of the architect are very often absent in the recent literature, or directly pointed as contrary forces to the principles lead by the Common. The proposal thus intends to evaluate the controversial gap between architectural values and the renewed paradigm of the Commons, considered as a bundle of alternatives, but also as a source of fundamental continuities. By crossing the values of the common to those of the architecture, the proposal aims a double will. First, such a correspondence could bring to a hypothetical semantic renewal in architectural language, by confronting concepts and words. It also could constitute a useful stage to develop critical looks about the Common and lucid readings of its propagation in humanities, by clarifying several appropriations. Faced with the vitality of the theme, identifying attitudes of research within the current architectural debate appears as a prerequisite for the development of an architectural thought about the Common, by taking into account its multidirectional nature, sometimes ambiguous or even contradictory.

University of Huddersfield2019