Monthly Archives: May, 2024
Douglas Brodie, ‘Disavowing an Implied Term of Fairness’
ABSTRACT In the Court of Appeal decision in Burn v Alder Hey (Burn), there are obiter suggestions that the employment contract contains an implied term that would require the employer to act fairly during a disciplinary process. In a recent article in this journal, Collins and Golding (the authors) endorse this direction of travel and […]
Beardmore and others, ‘The positive impact of legal advice and services on the mental wellbeing of UK veterans’
ABSTRACT Law has been recognised as a significant social determinant of health, however, micro-level legal advice interventions are underexplored. The dearth of research concerning the experience of British veterans highlights the need for uniquely tailored support services. This need is emphasised by the pervasiveness of mental health issues amongst this population. We investigate the feasibility […]
Brian Sites, ‘Machine Speech: Towards a Unified Doctrine of Attribution and Control’
ABSTRACT Like many courts across the country in 2023, courts in the Eleventh Circuit were met with novel claims challenging ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools. These cases raise common questions: How should courts treat the speech of machines? When a machine generates allegedly defamatory material, who is the speaker – mortal or machine? When […]
Mark Hanna, ‘SLAPPs: What are they? And how should defamation law be reformed to address them?’
ABSTRACT This article examines the need for legislative reform to address the problem of strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPPs), with a focus on defamation law as the most common action for such claims. It draws upon legislative and judicial approaches from a range of different jurisdictions to define the problem of SLAPPs and examines […]
Schillig, Kletzer and Balcau, ‘Smart Restructuring Tokens’
ABSTRACT Statutory restructuring frameworks in many jurisdictions seem to be in almost constant reform mode. Despite notable successes for large corporates with significant resources, the utility these new restructuring frameworks can offer to small and medium sized entities is usually very limited. In this paper, we offer a restructuring solution for any firm that issues […]
Benjamin Sobel, ‘A Real Account of Deep Fakes’
ABSTRACT Laws regulating deepfakes are often characterized as protecting privacy or preventing defamation. But examining anti-deepfakes statutes reveals that their breadth exceeds what modern privacy or defamation doctrines can justify: the typical law proscribes material that neither discloses true facts nor asserts false ones. Anti-deepfakes laws encompass harms not cognizable as invasion of privacy or […]
Meera Sossamon, ‘Private Policy: The Role of Private Remedies in Protecting Public Interest in Civil Law Jurisdictions’
ABSTRACT For civil law jurisdictions – those that base their tradition on Roman law – the distinction between private law and public law is a foundational principle. Meanwhile, those legal systems based on the Anglo-American common law tradition are not so anathema to the mixing of public and private remedies – see, eg, the proliferation […]
Caruso and Cox, ‘Silence as Consumer Consent: Global Regulation of Negative Option Contracts’
ABSTRACT Worldwide, the ‘subscription economy’ has exploded in recent years, especially among online sellers of consumer goods and services. These subscriptions use various contract forms – but many have one common feature: the negative option. With a negative option contract, once a consumer has signed up, the contract will continue until the consumer actively reaches […]
Stan Liebowitz, ‘Have We Misunderstood Copyright’s Consequences?’
ABSTRACT This paper uses an unusually rich 21st century data set to compare two sets of vintage bestsellers from the early 20th century that, by a circuitous path of copyright law alterations, came to have different copyright treatments. The most striking result is that, on average, copyrighted vintage bestsellers sell almost four times as many […]
MacLeod and Hall, ‘Foundations of the Right of Charitable Uses’
ABSTRACT In recent years, municipalities around the United States have enacted ordinances that prohibit or restrict food-sharing in public places. These ordinances make it difficult for charitable souls to share food with those most in need. In one case, a town in Arizona arrested a woman under an ordinance that prohibits sharing food in public […]