Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:56:09.424Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Public Policy and Monetary Nominalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2016

Get access

Extract

The study of monetary law is neglected almost everywhere, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. It is treated as an obscure and special branch of commercial law of specific interest to bankers and their advisers. In fact, however, changes in the value of money are and have been a fact of life all over the world in the last fifty-five years. Monetary law is the legal dimension of monetary problems, intended to regulate the legal relationships affected by change in the value of money. Monetary law is thus in our time a branch of general jurisprudence and indeed it is one of the foundations of law. But the law is conservative and legal science has yet to discover the study of monetary law. Up to the present time very few people (including judges, lawyers and private parties) have any clear notion of how to deal with legal relationships affected by monetary changes and catastrophes. One of the abiding fallacies is that a cardinal public interest requires strict adherence to the nominalistic solution of private money disputes in disregard of the monetary changes that occur almost daily.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1973

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Egerton v. Earl Brownlow (1853) 4 H.L.C. 1. Jonson v. Driefontein Mines Ltd. [1902] A.C. 484; Fender v. St. John Mildmay [1938] A.C. 1.

2 (1853) 4 H.L.C. 1.

3 At p. 123.

4 [1938] A.C. 1.

5 Jonson v. Driefontein Mines Ltd. [1902] A.C. 484, per Lord Halsbury.

6 [1938] A.C. 1 at p. 11.

7 Winfield, Percy H., “Public Policy and the English Common Law42 Harv. L.R. 76 at p. 92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 (1953) 4 H.L.C. 1.

9 [1894] A.C. 535.

10 [1956] 2 Q.B. 127.

11 Loc. cit.

12 See Hirschberg, E., “Gold Value Clauses and Public Policy in the U.S.A.” (1972), 89 Banking Law Journal, 99.Google Scholar