Monthly Archives: January, 2024
‘Lindt’s chocolate bunny trademark win shows shape matters to consumers’
In a move sure to upset chocoholics everywhere, discount supermarket Lidl was recently told to destroy its stocks of chocolate bunnies. The cull was ordered by a Swiss court that decided Lidl’s bunny was too close to confectioner Lindt’s iconic chocolate rabbit. Lidl was sued by Swiss confectioner Lindt & Sprüngli for selling a golden […]
Hanoch Dagan, ‘The Jurisprudence of Liberal Property’
ABSTRACT Property enhances autonomy for most people, but not for all. Because it both empowers and disables, property requires constant vigilance. In ‘A Liberal Theory of Property’ I’ve addressed key questions: how can property be justified? What core values should property law advance, and how do those values interrelate? How is a liberal state obligated […]
Simon Geiregat, ‘The Data Act: Start of a New Era for Data Ownership?’
ABSTRACT Building on the finding that data should not be subject to ownership, the Data Act Proposal intends to create two new data control rights. Chapter II establishes a right to access data created by IoT products, enforceable upon data holders (Articles 4-7). The delineation of this right is open for improvement: its scope is […]
Halefom Abraha, ‘A Pragmatic Compromise? The Role of Article 88 GDPR in Upholding Privacy in the Workplace’
ABSTRACT The distinct challenges of data processing at work have led to long-standing calls for sector-specific regulation. This leaves the European legislature with a dilemma. While the distinct features of employee data processing give rise to novel issues that cannot adequately be addressed by an omnibus data protection regime, a combination of legal, political, and […]
Stephen Makau, ‘Enforcement and Construction of International Trade Contracts’
ABSTRACT We develop a simple model of trade with imperfect contract enforcement. Courts force the execution of defaulted contracts with parametric probability. In political economic equilibrium, the enforcement of contracts between agents of sovereign nations must be at a level mutually agreed between nations. The enforcement probability may be low, with the reluctant nation being […]
Lisa Spagnolo, ‘A Conceptual Framework: What the Forgotten History of Victorian Torrens Legislation Tells Us about Priority Disputes involving Paramount Interests’
ABSTRACT The history of the Transfer of Land Act 1958 (Vic) can tell us much about exceptions to indefeasibility known as ‘paramount interests’. Current case law suggests these interests do not enjoy automatic priority in Victoria. Instead, once a paramount interest is established, the registered interest is effectively stripped of indefeasibility and a priority dispute […]
Ioannis Kampourakis, Sanne Taekema and Alessandra Arcuri, ‘Reappropriating the rule of law: between constituting and limiting private power’
ABSTRACT Starting from a teleological understanding of the rule of law, this article argues that private power is a rule of law concern as much as public power. One way of applying the rule of law to private power would be to limit instances of ‘lawlessness’ and arbitrariness through formal requirements and procedural guarantees. However, […]
Nuwan Dias, ‘Re-Examining the Relationship between Mutual Promises in Contract Law’
ABSTRACT The question as to whether contractual promises are dependent, interdependent or independent, and their role in determining a promisee’s right to withhold performance in response to a non-performing promisor, has received remarkably limited treatment in the Australian and English contract law corpus. Commentators typically provide little by way of an overarching framework for reconciling […]
Robert Anderson, ‘Limited Specific Performance in the Musk-Twitter Case and Beyond’
ABSTRACT Twitter’s suit against Elon Musk is one of the most closely watched corporate law cases in a generation. From even before Musk agreed to acquire Twitter through his purported termination of the agreement and the subsequent litigation, the case has drawn unprecedented attention in part because of the high visibility of the target, as […]
Martijn Hesselink, ‘EU private law injustices’
ABSTRACT This article offers a critique of injustices in European private law. It explains why the EU should be held morally responsible for the injustices created or supported by its private law. In particular, it demonstrates for several core elements of EU private law that they are unjust, because they cannot be justified with non-rejectable […]