Monthly Archives: January, 2024
Alford, ‘HeLa Cells and Unjust Enrichment in the Human Body’
ABSTRACT Henrietta Lacks is buried Clover, Virginia. She achieved fame and immortality in the world of science. In 1951, Johns Hopkins Hospital harvested the tissue of Ms Lacks, a 31-year-old African American woman diagnosed with cervical cancer to mass produce ‘HeLa cells’. The money derived from her cell line produced wonders and scientific breakthroughs in […]
Chang, ‘Introduction to Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses’
ABSTRACT The first book of its kind, Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses, uses a unique hand-coded data set on nearly 300 dimensions on the substance of property law in 156 jurisdictions to describe the convergence and divergence of key property doctrines around the world. This book quantitatively analyzes property institutions and uses machine […]
Linford and Perzanowski, ‘Calculating the Harms of Political Use of Popular Music’
ABSTRACT When Donald Trump descended the escalator of Trump Tower to announce his 2016 presidential bid, Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ blared from the loudspeakers. Almost immediately, Young’s management made clear that the campaign’s use of the song was unauthorized. Neil Young was not alone. Trump drew similar objections from dozens of artists […]
Bławat, ‘The Court’s Interference with Contracts by Supplying and Converting the Contractual Terms’
ABSTRACT Most modern legal systems have been searching for a legal measure that would help to imply omitted terms as well as rescue the validity of unsuccessfully concluded agreements, and they found such a solution in the concept of supplementary interpretation of contract, an example of which is conversio actus iuridici. The tendencies visible in […]
‘Google’s defamation liability: Google LLC v Defteros’
Is a search engine a publisher for defamation purposes when an organic search result returns a hyperlink to materials that are defamatory? According to a divided High Court of Australia in Google LLC v Defteros [2022] HCA 27, it is not. However, search engines may still be liable for defamation if search results encourage or […]
‘Promissory Estoppel Looms Large’
Students fall in love with promissory estoppel during their first year, just as they do with unilateral contracts. I try to nip it in the bud. Promissory estoppel is rarely going to work in a commercial context, I tell them. You are going to put it in your complaint as a cause of action if […]
He and Ma, ‘Common Ownership, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Their Value Implications’
ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of common ownership, where an institutional investor simultaneously blockholds two or more competing firms in the same industry, on portfolio firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance and its value implications. We propose that common ownership improves CSR performance in portfolio firms. By exploring quasi-natural experiments of corporate environmental and […]
Foong, ‘Immaterial Copying in the Age of Access’
ABSTRACT Access models for dissemination of content are increasingly prevalent, yet Australian copyright law does not adequately distinguish background copying from public access to expression. The scope of the reproduction right must be reformulated, as the communication right (which includes ‘making available’) ought to take centre stage in this age of access. In particular, copying […]
Mills, ‘Corporate trustees of charities’
ABSTRACT The trustees of unincorporated charities face greater personal exposure and more administrative burdens than the trustees of incorporated charities. Trustees of unincorporated charities have three main options to reduce these risks: (a) they can ‘incorporate’ the charity; (b) they can replace the board of trustees with a corporate trustee; or (c) they can incorporate […]
Feys, ‘Is Canada’s Proposed Consumer Privacy Protection Act Too High Risk Compared to EU Data Protection Law?’
ABSTRACT The Canadian approach to de-identification outlined in Canada’s proposed Consumer Privacy Protection Act Bill C-27 (‘Bill C-27’) fails to satisfy the heightened GDPR requirements of pseudonymisation and is likely insufficient to meet the requirements of data protection by design and by default under EU law. Embracing a low de-identification standard, rather than heightened obligations […]