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38647 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1457 of 1933

  • 11 - The development and role of the contract

  • from Part two
  • Phil Harris, Sheffield Hallam University
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    26 October 2015, pp 390-430

  • Summary

    The contract is the legal cornerstone of all transactions in business and consumer life. It is the legal device which facilitates exchange of goods or services between individuals and groups (such as businesses) in our society, and may be defined as a legally binding agreement between two parties whereby each party undertakes specific obligations or enjoys specific rights, conferred by virtue of that agreement. The expression ‘breach of contract’ refers to the fact that the agreement is legally binding: if one party fails to honour his or her part of the bargain, then the other can sue, and obtain a remedy through the courts for that breach.

    Of course, not every agreement is a legally binding contract. Purely social or domestic agreements, mere requests by one party for information, a series of negotiations between two parties and collective agreements between trade unions and employers have been held by the judges not to constitute contracts, and the judges have also refused to regard lotteries or football pools transactions as legally enforceable contractual relationships. Regarding social and domestic arrangements, the courts have asserted that the parties to the agreements did not intend to enter into a legal relationship, and this ‘intention to create legal relations’ is often said to be one of the legal conditions for the formation of a contract. However, as one leading textbook on the law of contract states, ‘in commercial agreements it will be presumed that the parties intended to create legal relations and make a contract’. Whether such a presumption is realistic under modern business conditions will be discussed presently, but for the moment it is important to deal with one or two common misconceptions about the legal notion of the contract.

    First, it is often supposed that only a written agreement can constitute a contract in law. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every time we buy a newspaper, a postage stamp or a packet of washing powder, we make a legally binding contract, which has just as much legal significance as a complex written contract such as an agreement to buy a house or a car, or a hire-purchase transaction.

  • 7 - The legal profession

  • from Part one
  • Phil Harris, Sheffield Hallam University
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    26 October 2015, pp 206-246

  • Summary

    The law is one of the most powerful carriers of dominant social definitions of acceptable and unacceptable conduct. It is perhaps the most significant social institution for the settlement of disputes, and it contains within its rules and procedures means whereby infringements of the law, from the trivial to the most serious, can be dealt with. Lawyers form an important group of the various personnel involved in these procedures, and it is important to understand the kinds of services which lawyers provide, as well as the occupational, social and educational background of this body of experts whose work is so closely tied up with the maintenance of social norms embodied in the law and the legal system.

    Lawyers, it is often said, are a response to a social need. Disputes crop up in all corners of society, among every social class, and such disputes and problems can involve anything from marriage breakdown to criminal charges, contested wills to commercial transactions. The trouble is that in many cases the solution to the dispute is not something which can be determined like a mathematical equation. Most cases involve questions of social values, the most fundamental of which is probably ‘justice’, and judgments about those cases are based on evaluation rather than issues of hard fact. Law embodies dominant social norms and values, and lawyers are engaged in their everyday work in maintaining those values through their function of implementing the law.

    Over the past fifty years, however, the legal profession and its work have attracted substantial criticism. During the 1970s, critical discussion focused on the alleged failure to respond to the problems created for the ordinary citizen in areas such as housing, social security, consumer advice and employment protection; and the general failure by many lawyers, to put it simply, to ‘get through to the community’. In 1976, a Royal Commission on Legal Services (the Benson Commission) was set up to inquire into the profession and its work, although little emerged from that exercise by way of substantial change. Virtually nothing was recommended in the Benson Commission Report in terms of changes to the way in which the profession is organised (that is, the two separate branches of solicitors and barristers) and most of the positive proposals in the report seemed to be directed towards increasing lawyers’ work (and hence their income) and maintaining their status.

  • Preface

  • Phil Harris, Sheffield Hallam University
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Law
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    26 October 2015, pp xii-xiii

  • Summary

    This book is written for students who are studying law on courses ranging from A-level through to a wide range of undergraduate degree courses, including law degree courses and courses in business studies and social science. Students studying for law degrees, in particular, will find material which introduces them to most of the foundation subjects, as well as familiarising them with legal method, legal concepts, the English legal system and some of the theories, analyses and critical perspectives through which we may better understand law and the workings of the legal system.

    Apart from students enrolled on academic courses, this book will be of interest to anyone who is fascinated by law and the legal system. We live in a society in which everyday life is touched by legal regulation of one kind or another, more than at any other period in our history. Legal rules are themselves the result of intricate historical processes, socio-economic forces, and contemporary policies; those processes, forces and policies are often controversial, and are themselves interesting and rewarding areas of study, helping us understand why the law takes the form that it does.

    For if we are to have law at all (and every known social group has had codes approximating to what we would recognise as law), then it must be responsive to the needs of society, and of the multiple communities who make up that society. If the law, or any part of the legal system, fails to respond to those needs, then it clearly becomes open to criticism. I see neither use nor virtue in presenting or studying law as if it were merely a package of rules, independent of and somehow unconnected with society; or in a way which suggests that there is nothing wrong with it. And if criticisms of the law lead to criticisms of the society whose law it is, then so be it. If the critical comments in this book stimulate further thought and discussion, then one objective, at least, will have been achieved. This, indeed, is one of the approaches taken in this book, the other being that the law cannot properly be understood, and certainly ought not to be studied, in a way which fails to take account of the social, economic and political contexts from which the law emerges and in which it operates.

  • 12 - Agricultural and chemical minerals

  • Stephen E. Kesler, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Adam C. Simon, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Mineral Resources, Economics and the Environment
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    26 October 2015, pp 288-313

  • Summary

    Agricultural and chemical minerals are the most important of the numerous industrial minerals, a term that includes almost any commercial Earth material that is not a metal or fuel (Harben and Bates, 1984). The spectrum of industrial minerals extends from stone used for driveways to fluorine for your teeth and includes all of the minerals used for fertilizers, glass, and most chemical products. In the following two chapters, we have divided the industrial minerals into those used in agricultural and chemical markets, which are discussed in this chapter, and those used in the construction and manufacturing markets, which are discussed in the next chapter. Although some minerals, such as gypsum, have uses related to both groups, almost all of them have dominant markets on which this grouping is based.

    The value of world agricultural and chemical minerals, almost $200 billion, is dominated by nitrogen, lime, and the fertilizer minerals potash and phosphate (Figure 12.1). In order of declining value of world production, the other minerals include salt, sulfur, fluorite, sodium sulfate, iodine, and bromine. The production history since 1960 for these commodities can be divided between nitrogen, iodine, and bromine, which have grown very rapidly, and all the rest that have not (Figure 12.1d, e). Within the laggard group, phosphate, potash, sulfur, salt, and sodium carbonate have not even kept pace with our bellwether, steel. Prices of phosphate, potash, and iodine have greatly exceeded the CPI, but all of the others have fallen behind significantly (Figure 12.1b, c). Production and reserve data for these commodities are given in Table 12.1.

    With the exception of nitrogen and fluorite, deposits of the major agricultural and chemical minerals are formed during the normal evolution of a marine sedimentary basin, that is, a basin filled with sediment and seawater or freshwater. The distribution of these mineral resources reflects the location of ancient oceans, particularly shallow areas that extended onto the continents (Reading, 1986). Some of the less important minerals in this group formed by evaporation of non-marine lakes.

  • Preface

  • Jaan Kiusalaas, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Numerical Methods in Engineering with MATLAB®
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    20 October 2015, pp ix-x

  • Summary

    This book is targeted primarily toward engineers and engineering students of advanced standing (sophomores, seniors, and graduate students). Familiarity with a computer language is required; knowledge of engineering mechanics (statics, dynamics, and mechanics of materials) is useful but not essential.

    The text places emphasis on numerical methods, not programming. Most engineers are not programmers but rather problem solvers. They want to know what methods can be applied to a given problem, their strengths and pitfalls, and how to implement them. Engineers are not expected to write computer code for basic tasks from scratch; they are more likely to utilize functions and subroutines that have already been written and tested. Thus programming by engineers is largely confined to assembling existing bits of code into a coherent package that solves the problem at hand.

    The “bit” of code is usually a function that implements a specific task. For the user, the details of the code are of secondary importance. What matters is the interface (what goes in and what comes out) and an understanding of the method on which the algorithm is based. Because no numerical algorithm is infallible, the importance of understanding the underlying method cannot be overemphasized; it is, in fact, the rationale behind learning numerical methods.

    This book attempts to conform to these views. Each numerical method is explained in detail, and its shortcomings are pointed out. The examples that follow individual topics fall into two categories: hand computations thatillustrate the inner workings of the method and small programs that show how the computer code is utilized in solving a problem. Problems that require programming are marked with ▄.

    The material consists of the usual topics covered in an engineering course on numerical methods: solution of equations, interpolation and data fitting, numerical differentiation and integration, solution of ordinary differential equations, and eigenvalue problems. The choice of methods within each topic is tilted toward relevance to engineering problems. For example, there is an extensive discussion of symmetric, sparsely populated coefficient matrices in the solution of simultaneous equations. In the same vein, the solution of eigenvalue problems concentrates on methods that efficiently extract specific eigenvalues from banded matrices.

    An important criterion used in the selection of methods was clarity. Algorithms requiring overly complex bookkeeping were rejected regardless of their efficiency and robustness.

  • 1 - Introduction to MATLAB

  • Jaan Kiusalaas, Pennsylvania State University
  • Book:
    Numerical Methods in Engineering with MATLAB®
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    20 October 2015, pp 1-26

  • Summary

    Quick Overview

    This chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive manual of MATLAB®. Our sole aim is to provide sufficient information to give you a good start. If you are familiar with another computer language, and we assume that you are, it is not difficult to pick up the rest as you go.

    MATLAB is a high-level computer language for scientific computing and data visualization built around an interactive programming environment. It is becoming the premiere platform for scientific computing at educational institutions and research establishments. The great advantage of an interactive system is that programs can be tested and debugged quickly, allowing the user to concentrate more on the principles behind the program and less on programming itself. Because there is no need to compile, link, and execute after each correction, MATLAB programs can be developed in a much shorter time than equivalent FORTRAN or C programs. On the negative side, MATLAB does not produce stand-alone applications – the programs can be run only on computers that have MATLAB installed.

    MATLAB has other advantages over mainstream languages that contribute to rapid program development:

  • • MATLAB contains a large number of functions that access proven numerical libraries, such as LINPACK and EISPACK. This means that many common tasks (e.g., solution of simultaneous equations) can be accomplished with a single function call.

  • • Extensive graphics support allows the results of computations to be plotted with a few statements.

  • • All numerical objects are treated as double-precision arrays. Thus there is no need to declare data types and carry out type conversions.

  • • MATLAB programs are clean and easy to read; they lack the syntactic clutter of some mainstream languages (e.g., C).

    • The syntax of MATLAB resembles that of FORTRAN. To get an idea of the similarities between these programming languages, let us compare the codes written in the two languages for solution of simultaneous equations Ax = b by Gauss elimination (do not worry about understanding the inner workings of the programs).

Page 1457 of 1933