Monthly Archives: December, 2024
Jane Calderwood Norton and Matthew Harding, ‘Charities and politics: where did we go wrong?’
ABSTRACT This paper examines a long-standing doctrine in charities law – that if an organisation’s main purpose is political then it cannot be charitable. This doctrine is not without controversy because it has the potential to exclude many worthwhile organisations from charitable status, and fetter worthwhile advocacy by those that do have status. While no […]
Staffan Lundén, ‘Distorting history in the restitution debate. Dan Hicks’s The Brutish Museums and fact and fiction in Benin historiography’
ABSTRACT The debates on the ownership of contested cultural objects bring forth questions regarding the representation of history. But might these debates also lead to the fabrication of history? Previous research has analyzed how the British Museum’s anti-restitution position contributes to its distortion of British (Museum) history. Instead, this article considers if – and, if […]
Martin Flores, ‘New, Derivative: Third-Party Litigation Finance and Derivatives Regulation’
ABSTRACT Litigation finance is globally abundant and largely unregulated in the United States. The mechanics behind third-party litigation finance are simple: The funder fronts litigation costs in exchange for a promised share of the proceeds if the litigant succeeds. While the normative debate about the value of these contracts in society endures, the litigation finance […]
James Toomey, ‘Introduction – Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law’
ABSTRACT Adolf Reinach (1883-1917) was a philosopher. Before his battlefield death at the age of 33, his philosophical career was brief; the corpus he left slim. Today, he is best known for developing a theory of social acts thought to be an independent precursor to the speech act theories of John Austin and others later […]
Jay Feinman, ‘Recapturing Relational Contract Theory’
ABSTRACT Relational contract theory is central to our understanding of contract law. One of the principal innovations in contracts scholarship in the twentieth century, relational contract theory has developed diverse approaches in the literature of law, business, sociology, and other academic fields and in the courts. Robert Scott’s observation in 2000 is even more true […]
Andrew Keane Woods, ‘The New Social Contracts’
ABSTRACT Contracts rule our digital world. Platform terms of service determine speech rights, privacy rights, and much more. This is no accident – from the very beginning, the US model of internet governance was explicitly built around private ordering. In this context, it is worth asking what contract law and contract scholarship have to say […]
Anna Wong, ‘Duty of Honest Performance: A Tort Dressed in Contract Clothing’
ABSTRACT In CM Callow Inc v Zollinger, the latest installment from the Supreme Court of Canada on the duty of honest performance, the Court insisted that it is a contractual duty rather than a tortious one. This article contends that the duty to act honestly, a welcome addition as it is to the realm of […]
Jing and Lin, ‘Knowing Receipt in Chinese Trust Law’
ABSTRACT Article 22 of the Trust Law of the People’s Republic of China (Chinese Trust Law) implements the knowing receipt rule, aiming to balance the interests between beneficiaries and third parties transacting with trustees. However, the knowledge requirement necessary to give rise to liability for the knowing receipt has never been thoroughly examined by scholars […]
Nicholas Nugent, ‘The Unpropertied Internet’
ABSTRACT It has often been said that the internet lacks public property. Unlike the offline world, denizens of cyberspace cannot gather in the digital equivalent of public parks, cannot shame websites by picketing on adjacent cyber-sidewalks, and cannot loiter in online streets and alleys if they lack a cyber-place of their own. Yet scant attention […]
Lilian Edwards, ‘Private Ordering and Generative AI: What Can We Learn from Model Terms and Conditions?’
ABSTRACT Large or ‘foundation’ models, sometimes also described as General Purpose Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), are now being widely used to generate not just text and images but also video, games, music and code from prompts or other inputs. Although this ‘generative AI’ revolution is clearly driving new opportunities for innovation and creativity, it is also […]