Category Archives: General
A Symposium on Martijn Hesselink’s ‘Reconstituting the Code of Capital’: European Law Open (June 2022)
Reconstituting the Code of Capital: could a progressive European code of private law help us reduce inequality and regain democratic control? (Martijn W Hesselink) Legal coding beyond capital? (Katharina Pistor) Select Coding for the 99 per cent? Principles and the preconditions of capital minting (Candida Leone) Progress towards what? On the need for an intersectional […]
Elena Napolitano, ‘The New Frontiers of Trust: Bitcoins and Cryptocurrencies’
ABSTRACT The opportunity offered by digital innovation to create new categories of goods or, at least, to transform what was previously represented by objects into something virtual has inevitably raised the issue of the legal qualification of digital assets, particularly cryptocurrencies. This classification requires a careful delimitation of the phenomenon. First, because not all ‘digital […]
Cayetana Santaolalla, ‘Bitcoin versus Central Bank Digital Cryptocurrencies: Last Call for Freedom’
ABSTRACT On 12 January 2023, the Bitcoin protocol celebrated 14 years since its launch. Bitcoin’s founding document (the Whitepaper) was released to the world on 31 October 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, who disappeared forever on 10 December 2010. In each of its stages over more than 40 years of evolution, the financial freedom of the […]
Taisu Zhang, ‘The Private Law Influence of the Great Qing Code’
ABSTRACT This chapter considers the socioeconomic functionality of legal codes and codification through the lens of late imperial Chinese legal history. Specifically, it asks whether formal legal codes can wield significant influence over private socioeconomic behavior despite being poorly enforced – or even unenforced – and whether such influence derives, in part, from the symbolic […]
Asaf Raz, ‘Taking Personhood Seriously’
ABSTRACT This Article takes the recent Twitter merger litigation, along with other high-profile legal developments, as an opportunity to re-examine one of the most important, and misunderstood, concepts in the modern social landscape: legal personhood. The Article makes three main contributions to the literature: first, it originally connects several key stages in personhood’s historical development, […]
Kip Hustace, ‘Counting Is Hard! A Theory of Doctrinal Expansion’
ABSTRACT We conventionally see pleading as liberalized, with leeway for inconsistent claims and expansive choice among theories of relief, or counts. Yet procedure scholars have shown how heightened pleading post-Twiqbal constricts liberality, turning us back toward 19th Century fact-intensive code pleading. This Article theorizes a further constriction: proliferating and ossifying counts. While affording pleading latitude, […]
Kuntz and Miller, ‘Introduction to Methodology in Private Law Theory: Between New Private Law and Rechtsdogmatik’
ABSTRACT This introduction to Methodology in Private Law Theory: Between New Private Law and Rechtsdogmatik (Thilo Kuntz and Paul B Miller, eds, Oxford University Press, forthcoming) provides a thematic overview methodological questions and positions taken in contemporary American and German private law theory, as well as a discussion of the contributions to the volume. The […]
Kaplan and Paldor, ‘Choosing Sides: On the Manipulation of Civil Litigation’
ABSTRACT Our litigation system is broken. Scholars have long warned that professional litigants such as debt-collecting firms, insurance companies, and commercial landlords enjoy immense and unfair advantages over private individuals. What has gone unnoticed is professional litigants’ ability to manipulate their litigatory position, ie, to choose whether they will litigate as plaintiffs or defendants. Extant […]
Keren and Donyets-Kedar, ‘Market Citizenship, Resilience Drainage, and the Role of Private Law’
ABSTRACT The state’s role in the sphere of public law is relentlessly discussed and debated. By contrast, the state’s impact and duties in the domain of private law are presumed minimalist, normatively ordering it to keep interventions to exceptional situations. This Chapter uses the vulnerability theory to critique and replace this conventional, bifurcated approach of […]
Andrew Gold, ‘The Elegance of Private Law’
ABSTRACT This chapter is a contribution to a festschrift volume in honor of the late Stephen A Smith. It will assess Smith’s deservedly canonical interpretive methodology, with a focus on his coherence criterion. Under this approach, we should seek an account of a private law field – tort, contract, fiduciary law, property – that shows […]