Monthly Archives: January, 2024
‘Should the Federal Government Seek to Attract Litigation to the United States?’
US courts have become significantly more hostile towards transnational litigation over the past two decades. Scholars such as Pam Bookman and Maggie Gardner have argued that a series of Supreme Court decisions – relating to the law of personal jurisdiction, forum non conveniens, international comity abstention, the presumption against extraterritoriality, and service of process, among […]
Marie Hadley, Sarah Hook and Nik Orr, ‘Ideological Vandalism of Public Art Statues: Copyright, the Moral Right of Integrity and Racial Justice’
ABSTRACT This paper considers the regulation of ideological vandalism by the Australian copyright and moral rights regimes in the context of the defacement of public art statues that occurred in Australia and overseas during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Statue vandalism is approached as a form of anti-racist or anti-colonial iconoclasm that contributes […]
Suren Gomtsian, ‘Debtholder Stewardship’
ABSTRACT Debtholder stewardship refers to the involvement of corporate creditors in a firm’s governance framework with the aim of improving corporate decision-making. This article develops the theory of debtholder stewardship by identifying the mechanisms of debtholder influence, assessing their effectiveness in modern capital markets, and outlining the implications of this analysis for investor stewardship and […]
Viktor Mikryukov, ‘Legal Analogy in the Cases of Overcoming a Contract’s Verbal and Numerical Ambiguity’
ABSTRACT The relevance of the research stems from the wider spread of contract conflicts and legal disputes caused by verbal and numerical ambiguity of certain contract terms, given the absence of a special legislative rule to overcome such ambiguities. The work aims to identify and evaluate the most effective law enforcement methods of overcoming the […]
Vicki Huang, ‘Empirical Analysis of Design Litigation in Australia’
ABSTRACT Australia’s design laws have been reviewed multiple times over the last 50 years. Recent calls for reform have focussed on stagnant registration rates and the perception that enforcement is a futile exercise. Although empirical economic researchers have explored these issues, this is the first empirical legal study of court-based enforcement under statutory design law. […]
‘Blooming Lawyers: from Sadgrove v Hole, via Palles CB and Ulysses, to Facebook’
I was reminded (plug alert) of my piece ‘The Aeolus Episode in Ulysses and the Freeman’s Journal: Chief Baron Palles and the law of defamation’, chapter 12 in Oonagh B Breen & Noel McGrath (eds) Palles. The Legal Legacy of the last Lord Chief Baron (Four Courts Press, 2022), when I had the pleasure of […]
Assaf Jacob and Roy Shapira, ‘An Information-Production Theory of Liability Rules’
ABSTRACT The negligence-versus-strict liability debate is over in tort law, and negligence has clearly won. Yet the fact that our accident-compensation system is fault based continues to attract much opposition in popular sentiment and academic circles. Standard economic analysis views strict liability as preferable to negligence because it is easier to administer and leads to […]
Jessica Viven-Wilksch, ‘The importance of being relational: comparative reflections on relational contracts in Australia and the United Kingdom’
ABSTRACT The notion of the relational contract, previously limited to academic circles, is now being articulated by some courts. The consequences are threefold. Firstly, these judicial decisions are challenging the conception of agreements in the common law. Secondly, these decisions acknowledge the particularity of some long-term commercial relationships and shift the spotlight onto the relations […]
Anna Carpenter and others, ‘The Field of State Civil Courts’
ABSTRACT This symposium Issue of the Columbia Law Review marks a moment of convergence and opportunity for an emerging field of legal scholarship focused on America’s state civil trial courts. Historically, legal scholarship has treated state civil courts as, at best, a mere footnote in conversations about civil law and procedure, federalism, and judicial behavior. […]
Andrew Nissensohn, ‘Mass Arbitration 2.0’
ABSTRACT Over the past four decades, corporate interests, in concert with the Supreme Court, have surgically dismantled the American civil litigation system. Enacted nearly a century ago, the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) was once a procedural law mandating that federal courts enforce arbitration agreements between sophisticated parties with equal bargaining power. Through death by a […]