Monthly Archives: January, 2024
Brook Baker, ‘TRIPS-Compliant Alternatives for Overcoming Intellectual Property Barriers to COVID-19 Countermeasures’
ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the recent WTO Ministerial Decision on the TRIPS Agreement (adopted June 17, 2022), there may be some confusion about the many options that countries have for overcoming intellectual property barriers to allow alternative production, distribution, and use of COVID-19 countermeasures. Of course, visibility into the patent landscape for particular products […]
Omri Rachum-Twaig and Ohad Somech, ‘Robots in a Civilized Society: Should Robots Be Taught to Adhere to Social Norms?’
ABSTRACT Social norms, often described as the ‘cement’ or ‘grammar’ of society, guide human behavior and infuse it with social meaning. In this Chapter, we offer a legal perspective on whether robots should be required to adhere to social norms in the context of human-robot interactions (HRIs). To do so, we examine how the mass […]
Shelly Simana, ‘Genetic Property Governance’
ABSTRACT The law governing an ‘individual genome’ (the genetic material and information extracted from a single person) in the United States has two key shortcomings. First, it adopts an absolute conception of ownership, permitting only one entity to claim ownership over an individual genome – either the person from whom it was extracted or someone […]
Robert Rhee, ‘The Irrelevance of Delaware Corporate Law’
ABSTRACT Delaware corporation law is dominant in America. If the effects of efficient rules are incorporated as information by an efficient capital market, the preferred choice of Delaware could evince the deliberate selection of better laws. Superior law as a product of state competition is the central argument for corporate law federalism. Despite the spirited […]
Nuria Boot, Jo Seldeslachts and Albert Banal-Estañol, ‘Common Ownership: Europe vs the US’
ABSTRACT Common ownership – when an investor holds shares in two or more companies – has recently attracted significant attention from policy-makers and researchers, studying mainly US firms. European firms, however, are different as top investors with large stakes, like governments, founding families and foundations are much more prevalent. This paper takes a well-known common […]
Martijn Hesselink, ‘Progress in EU Contract Law’
ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to the elucidation of the philosophical foundations of EU contract law through a critical discussion of different understandings of progress and their respective implications. Claims about progress and regress invariably refer to a normative or evaluative standard. Such standards, it is usually understood, allow us – backward-looking – to […]
Ronen Avraham and Ariel Porat, ‘The Dark Side of Insurance’
ABSTRACT When insurance works properly it provides insureds with optimal incentives to prevent losses, alongside coverage for losses that could not be prevented efficiently. But insurance has an overlooked dark side to it as well. Insurers employ various tactics to shift losses to their insureds or to their victims in order to minimize their own […]
Jonathan Hardman, ‘The Nexus of Contracts Revisited: Delineating the Business, the Firm, and the Legal Entity’
ABSTRACT This article explores the economic concept of the ‘firm’ and the legal concept of the ‘company’. Having identified that the two do not entirely overlap, it detects an ambiguity in existing legal literature, and argues that the former is a better fit for corporate law’s ‘nexus for contracts’. It introduces the ‘business’ to describe […]
Song, ‘Scrutinizing the Expanding Scope of Geographical Indication Protection: A Critical Analysis of the Justifications for the Anti-Evocation Measures’
ABSTRACT The global trend towards heightened protection for geographical indications (GIs) has been bolstered by the incorporation of anti-evocation provisions in various bilateral and regional trade agreements, primarily led by the European Union (EU). While these anti-evocation measures have raised GI protection to an unprecedented level, they also place limitations on the freedom of expression […]
‘No, the Data Protection Complaint is Not a Petition’
On 7 December 2023, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued two landmark rulings against the German credit scoring agency SCHUFA. Both decisions significantly strengthen the rights of a data subject under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in several substantive and procedural dimensions. First, from the substantive point of view, in C-634/21, the Court […]