Monthly Archives: March, 2025
Schwarcz, Cude, Logue and Marquez Alcala, ‘Read But Not Understood? An Empirical Analysis Of Consumer Comprehension In Homeowners Insurance’
ABSTRACT Modern contract law assumes that consumers meaningfully assent to the standard forms that govern their daily lives. However, this assumption is widely regarded as a legal fiction for two key reasons: first, most consumers do not read standard forms, and second, even those who do often struggle to fully comprehend their terms and implications. […]
Vitantonio Leuzzi, ‘Automated Copyright Enforcement Online: How Platforms Stifle Creativity by Reducing Technological Cost’
ABSTRACT This article examines the interplay between copyright law and emerging digital technologies, focusing on several key components: the constitutional basis of copyright law, the doctrine of fair use, secondary liability, the DMCA safe harbor provisions, and automated copyright enforcement technologies, particularly YouTube’s ContentID system. In Part I, the paper outlines these foundational elements. Part […]
Sagi Peari, ‘Academics and Legal Change: Birks, Savigny and the Law of Unjust Enrichment’
ABSTRACT This chapter focuses on the legal academics who evidently played a decisive role in the creation of the two formulas: Professors Friedrich Carl von Savigny in Germany and Peter Birks in the UK. It places the contribution of these academics in the broader context of the role of legal academics in society and their […]
‘Remedies to Digital Vulnerability in European Private Law’: University of Trieste, 10-11 April 2025
The Trieste conference follows two previous conferences held within the same project in Ferrara (2023) and in Rome Tor Vergata (2024), which examined the legal status of digital vulnerability in European private law and its interaction with artificial intelligence, respectively. Building on the previous findings and starting from the assumption that many, if not all, […]
‘Design and copyright law must not be confused: the CJEU referral in C-323/24’
The Committee for Design Law (‘GRUR Committee’) of the German Association for Intellectual Property Law (GRUR) has recently submitted its comments on the request for a preliminary ruling made by the Juzgado de lo Mercantil Número 1 de Alicante, Spain (‘referring Court’), concerning the interpretation of Articles 6 and 14 of Regulation 6/2002 (‘CDR’) … […]
Zahn and Kullmann, ‘Discovering the Contributions of Academic Wives to the Development of Labour Law: Liesel Kahn-Freund’
ABSTRACT This article’s starting point is a strand of historical and sociological studies literature on ‘academic wives’ which reveals the social and, above all, unpaid labour that facilitated an academic career up until the mid-twentieth century. The article then draws on primary and secondary sources in order to trace the life of Otto Kahn-Freund’s wife, […]
Sjef van Erp, ‘Triangles of Property Law’
ABSTRACT From a comparative viewpoint, property law has a double triangular shape. The first triangle is subject, object and right; the second triangle is numerus clausus, transparency and hierarchy. These two triangles are so strong that any attempt to fit in a new object of property law, such as digital assets, is met with resistance. […]
Timothy Liau, ‘Punitive Disentitlement Within Private Law?’
ABSTRACT Does private law punish? Should it? I question whether private law punishes in a form other than through a court order of punitive damages, by exploring a less obvious form of punishment to which less attention has been paid – ‘punitive disentitlement’ – wherein a person is disentitled from a legal right, defence, or […]
‘Is Pastiche an Autonomous Concept of EU Copyright Law? Hearing of Pelham II in the CJEU’
On 14 January 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) heard oral arguments in the much-anticipated case C-590/23 Pelham II, where the German Federal Court submitted a request for preliminary ruling on the interpretation of ‘pastiche’. The purpose was to ascertain whether a two-second sample from a phonogram could fall under the […]
‘No assumption of responsibility after release from police custody: Dobson v Leicestershire Police’
In the tragic case of Dobson v Chief Constable of Leicestershire Police [2025] EWHC 272 (KB), HHJ Bird examined whether the police had assumed responsibility for the wellbeing of a person released from custody. The court held that there was no assumption of responsibility, and the claim failed. Alexander Cornelius, pupil barrister at 12KBW, analyses […]