Monthly Archives: March, 2025
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 […]
Chen and Hua, ‘Product Safety in the Age of AI: Autonomy, R&D, and AI Liability’
ABSTRACT We study optimal liability for AI-powered products with semi-autonomous capabilities (eg, self-driving vehicles). Like human users, AI can inadvertently cause product failures that harm third parties. Additionally, AI may introduce an extreme risk of large-scale social harm that renders full liability impractical. Raising AI liability for ordinary loss above the actual harm level can […]
Stewart Schwab, ‘Monopsony, Sticky Workers, and Bargaining Power’
ABSTRACT This chapter describes the new monopsony and its implications for employment law. A monopsonistic labour market inefficiently employs too few workers and pays them below their marginal product. Traditionally, monopsony is a single isolated employer, but this does not describe modern, urban labour markets. Labour economists have recently shown that many employers face upward-sloping […]
Ari Waldman, ‘Civil Society and the Crisis of Privacy Law’
ABSTRACT Based on interviews with key players, public reports, and previously undisclosed primary sources, this Article tells the inside story of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) and the role of privacy nonprofit organizations in crafting it. It uses ADPPA’s drafting as a case study about larger questions of expertise, the lawmaking process, […]
Sagi Peari, ‘Conflict of Laws Rules Applicable to Negotiable Instruments’
ABSTRACT Sadly, the contemporary conflict of laws rules within negotiable instruments law have originated from flawed premises about the nature of the subject. Further, contemporary rules have left behind the modern development of conflict of laws doctrine. Relying on the foundation of negotiable instruments’ law within the traditional ordinary doctrines of contract and movable property […]
Gopal Sreenisavan, ‘Rights in Rem and the Multital Ménagerie’
ABSTRACT Unlike rights in personam, which are held against a limited number of people (paradigmatically, one), rights in rem are held against everyone else in the world. Among other things, ‘everyone’ denotes a dynamic collection of persons. However, in Wesley Hohfeld’s analysis of rights, every right is a relation between exactly two people. For Hohfeld, […]
Michael Pratt, ‘Waiving Conditions Precedent’
ABSTRACT Conditions precedent present a variety of challenges for the law of contract, but one has proved especially vexing for Canadian courts. This is the question of when such a condition can be waived or extinguished unilaterally. The problem arises when a contract makes a transaction conditional on some event, but one of the parties […]
Leung and Leung, ‘Backwards tracing as an exception and beyond’
ABSTRACT After the Privy Council decision Federal Republic of Brazil v Durant International Corp [2015] UKPC 35, the question of how the doctrine of backwards tracing should be understood deserves careful consideration. This article seeks to explain that such a doctrine should be understood and categorised as an exception to the traditional tracing principles. Further, […]