Monthly Archives: January, 2024
Ryan Catterwell, ‘Co-Operation and Prevention in Contract Law’
ABSTRACT Under Australian law, the requirement that parties to a contract must co-operate with each other manifests in at least four distinct duties or standards: (i) each party must co-operate in performing acts reasonably necessary to achieve contractual objectives; (ii) each party must not prevent or delay the other party in performing the contract; (iii) […]
Nicholas McBride, ‘Two Recent Cases on Liability for Omissions in Negligence’
ABSTRACT This short note summarises and criticises two recent English Court of Appeal cases on liability for omissions in negligence: Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police [2022] EWCA Civ 25 and HXA v Surrey CC, YXA v Wolverhampton CC [2022] EWCA Civ 1196. Both cases show how the English Court of Appeal is […]
Evelyn Atkinson, ‘Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage of the Public Service Corporation’
ABSTRACT At the turn of the twentieth century, state courts were roiled by claims against telegraph corporations for mental anguish resulting from the failure to deliver telegrams involving the death or injury of a family member. Although these ‘telegraph cases’ at first may seem a bizarre outlier, they in fact reveal an important and understudied […]
Eleonora Rosati, ‘Copyright reformed: the narrative of flexibility and its pitfalls in policy and legislative initiatives (2011–2021)’
ABSTRACT This article reviews selected copyright policy and legislation at the international, regional and national levels during the period 2011-2021. It identifies a common and consistent narrative that supported reform initiatives in the surveyed jurisdictions: the modernization of copyright requires greater flexibility so that the undertaking of certain acts without authorization is not unduly restricted […]
‘EU copyright law round up – third trimester of 2022’
Welcome to the third trimester of the 2022 round up of EU copyright law! In this series, we update readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. You can read the previous round-ups here … […]
‘That Time I Tried To Reject the Arbitration Clause in a Contract to Buy A Car’
Since there’s absolutely nothing of interest happening in the business world these days, I figure it’s a good time to tell the story of how I tried to reject an arbitration clause when buying a car. It was 2013, and I’d just moved to Durham, North Carolina to become a Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke. […]
Felipe Jiménez, ‘Understanding Private Law’
Theories of private law attempt to understand private law – to render private law intelligible. This is true for descriptive, interpretive, and prescriptive theories. It is true, in other words, whether the theory’s concern is giving an accurate description of private law; offering a rational reconstruction of the values served by private law as it […]
Joseph Schremmer, ‘Subsurface Trespass: Private Remedies and Public Regulation’
ABSTRACT There is a growing literature examining when subsurface invasions from activities like tunneling, horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and waste disposal will constitute actionable subsurface trespasses. Liability for subsurface trespass has become an important question for many reasons, including that a significant climate-change technology, carbon dioxide sequestration, hinges on the ability to inject massive quantities […]
Bryant Walker Smith, ‘DALL-E Does Palsgraf’
ABSTRACT What happens when we ask a leading artificial intelligence (AI) tool for image generation to illustrate the facts of a leading law school case? This article does just that. I first introduce this tool specifically and machine learning generally. I then summarize the seminal case of Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad. For the main […]
Mark Leeming, ‘Penalties in Australia, the United Kingdom and Singapore – Storm-Warnings, Statutes and Style’
ABSTRACT An important aspect of the recent divergence in the law of penalties in decisions of ultimate appellate courts in three ‘common law’ jurisdictions reflects the pervading influence of statutes. ‘Common law and statute are more fully integrated than has traditionally been thought’, and in the area of penalties, the interaction is deep and operates […]