Monthly Archives: October, 2024
‘Consumer responsibility to remedy structural injustice: European consumer law’s capitalistic strategy’
Capitalist global processes of production and consumption are unjust. Social movements have been claiming this for decades. Production for private consumption requires an extensive use of natural and finite resources, which we are depleting. Many goods we consume in the European Union are primarily produced outside of the Member States in a manner few would […]
‘Doing Justice to Justice in EU Data Law’
Data-driven technology has become a mainstay in our societies. Feeding AI systems and the IoT, large-scale datasets have the potential to radically reshape our understanding of things and basic social practices. It should thus come as no surprise that regulating data has become a central concern of regulation across the world. The European Union’s (‘EU’) […]
‘Social injustices between inclusive and transformative private law’
Two decades on, much of the scenario against which the Manifesto was written has changed. The substantive problems it highlighted, however, have not diminished – if anything, they have intensified. The tension between socially oriented and market-driven law remains. So too does the difficulty of thinking about social justice in a post-national context, as a […]
‘Re-Coding Capital: Can a New EU Code of Private Law make Global Finance more Socially Just?’
A few years ago, Katharina Pistor published a book that presented a powerful illustration of the profound political, economic and social consequences that have resulted from a depoliticised and market-centric approach to private law. In The Code of Capital: How Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Pistor shone a spotlight on the role of lawyers in […]
‘Insuring global social justice: After success with legal claims, transnational remedial institutions are needed in a global value chain economy’
As a child in the 1980s, the clothes I wore were manufactured in the country where I lived, Finland. As an adult in the 2020s, when I buy clothes to my own children, they are ‘designed’ in Finland but manufactured in places such as Bangladesh, China and Vietnam. What happened, and what does this entail […]
‘Vindicating Open Access to Research Outputs’
Happy international open access week! Prof Bernt Hugenholtz wrote on the Kluwer Copyright Blog yesterday about the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) statements in support of secondary publication rights for scholarly articles. I am a principal investigator on a research group that has recently proposed some draft legislation to achieve this […]
Laura Carlson, ‘Access to Justice’
ABSTRACT This is an overview of access to justice as a concept, both historically, substantively and internationally. Access to justice as a concept is both new and ancient. New in that a greater focus and recognition of access to justice as a principle in itself has been evolving in recent decades, finding identifying access to […]
Recently published: Apostolos Chronopoulos, Judicially Crafted Property Rights in Valuable Intangibles
In the INS case, the Supreme Court held that a news agency may enjoin third parties from copying its news stories while these are still ‘fresh’. Chronopoulos seeks to clarify the heavily debated doctrinal issues that have since arisen as to: the exact legal nature of the recognized entitlement; whether the Supreme Court sought to […]
‘The multifaceted aspects of the “new consent”’
Today, consent seems an important occurrence of our daily life. Traditionally, consent was the staple of classical contract law but consent is nowadays relevant not only for making contracts, but also in sexual relationships, in surrogate motherhood relationship, or in the use of our image. The new world, the digital world, is lives of: regulation […]
‘Consumer Law, Social and Ecological Justice: Charting the Crossroads’
In 2004, a group of scholars signed a collective work with the evocative title ‘Social Justice in European Contract Law: A Manifesto’. Starting from the idea that private contract law had the potential to shape the future of the European Union, the document aimed to achieve two main objectives: 1. The construction of a European […]