Monthly Archives: January, 2024
John MacLeod, ‘Why are the Wrongs Wrong? Scots Lawyers’ Approaches to Justifying Liability in Delict’
ABSTRACT This article explores the development of Scots lawyers’ approaches to justifying delictual liability. It suggests that these reflect the taxonomical relationship between delict and the rest of the law. Four models are posited and discussed: the residual model (delict is the category for wrongful conduct without another taxonomical home); the crime/delict model (criminal law […]
Chantal Mak, ‘Giving voice: a public sphere theory of European private law adjudication’
ABSTRACT This Article addresses the question of how to explain and justify the allocation of politically sensitive legal questions to civil courts in the European Union. It proposes a pluralist theoretical view on interactions of private law adjudication with legislative initiatives in the process of building a European political community. This is elaborated on the […]
Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili and Jeremy McClane, ‘The Lost Promise of Private Ordering’
ABSTRACT The agency problem is corporate law’s most enduring challenge: when corporate managers spend investors’ money, how does the law protect investors from reckless management? Scholars of law, finance, and accounting have suggested that in one corner of corporate law – corporate debt – a powerful tool exists to mitigate the agency problem. Specifically, through […]
Fabrizio Cafaggi and Paola Iamiceli, ‘Covid-19 Litigation: The Drivers of Institutional Responses to the Pandemic and the Role of Courts’
ABSTRACT The chapter concludes a book whose contributions are based on around 2400 decisions selected and available in an openly accessible Database and News Page (available at https://www.covid19litigation.org/). It provides a comparative analysis about the drivers of institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of courts in times of global health crisis. The […]
Jim Harper, ‘Personal Information is Property’
ABSTRACT Over the recent half-decade of privacy concern, the dominant intellectual and scholarly approach to privacy in the United States has been in the civil law tradition, assuming that statute law and regulation would provide the rules. When legal thinkers of an economic bent pondered ‘propertizing’ information at the dawn of the Internet era, they […]
Gabriel Weil, ‘Tort Law as a Tool for Mitigating Catastrophic Risk from Artificial Intelligence’
ABSTRACT The capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems have improved markedly over the past decade. This rapid progress has brought greater attention to longstanding concerns that advanced AI systems could cause catastrophic harm, up to and including human extinction. In principle, the prospect of tort liability could encourage AI developers to proceed with caution. But […]
Daniel Loewe, ‘Compensation and Overcoming of Historical Injustice’
ABSTRACT On the basis of Waldron’s supersession thesis, this article discusses the historical injustice argument and contends that in order to evaluate moral claims for restitution of territorial titles it is important to consider the legitimate expectations of citizens that have been formed historically and have been sanctioned by the state through institutional mechanisms of […]
Ian Murray, ‘The Duty of Care as a Prism for Highlighting Material Considerations for Charity Directors’
ABSTRACT Corporate law scholarship is witnessing a resurgence of interest in corporate purpose, emphasising the potential role of purpose in governance. This is all the more so for incorporated charities, which are for-purpose entities. However, while purpose-based governance promises many benefits, it also generates difficulties for director decisions relating to change of purpose or to […]
Daniele Bertolini, ‘On the Past and Future of Law and Economics: Civilian Pedigree, Methodological Challenges, and the Future Relevance of Michael Trebilcock’s Contribution’
ABSTRACT Michael Trebilcock’s article in this issue discusses the past and the future of law and economics (L&E) in Canada. In this article, I attempt to engage with and expand on Michael’s analysis. I start by discussing the transatlantic differences in the past academic and judicial reception of L&E. I contend that no methodological impediment […]
Guido Noto La Diega, ‘The Internet of Things (You Don’t Own) under Bourgeois Law: An Integrated Tactic to Rebalance Intellectual Property’
ABSTRACT This chapter will present the main intellectual property (IP) issues in the Internet of Things (IoT) and concentrate on one of them, that has been framed as ‘death of ownership’ by Joshua Fairfield in Owned, a seminal book that will provide an initial framework to understand this issue. Ownership of smart devices (called ‘Things’ […]