Monthly Archives: May, 2024
Ted Sichelman, ‘The Mathematical Structure of the Law’
ABSTRACT Scientific ‘law’ and human-made law (‘social law’) are both ‘laws’ in a very general sense – scientific laws ‘govern’ the workings of the material world and social laws govern the behavior of people. Beyond this superficial resemblance, do social laws partake of the same sorts of mathematical structures as scientific laws? Many theorists have […]
Barry and Sokol, ‘Data Valuation and Law’
ABSTRACT Data has become an increasingly valuable asset. Numerous areas of law – including contracts, corporate law, IP, antitrust, tax, privacy, and bankruptcy – require parties and courts to determine the value of assets, including data. Unfortunately, data valuation has been hindered by a lack of clarity over what data is and why it is […]
Haque, Rose and DeSetto, ‘The Non-obvious Razor and Generative AI’
ABSTRACT This article examines the challenges and prospects of crowd-sourcing generative AI systems (‘GenAI’) in patent law as human and machine creativity become seamless. As GenAI technology like ChatGPT-4 become ubiquitous, AI-generated solutions will be less innovative and will complicate tenets about patentability. An evolution of patent law’s non-obviousness standard provides an elegant solution – […]
Chien and Kim, ‘Generative AI and Legal Aid: Results from a Field Study and 100 Use Cases to Bridge the Access to Justice Gap’
ABSTRACT How can AI tools be used to address the access to justice gap — the millions of low-income Americans that lack adequate legal assistance for 90% of their civil legal problems? We conducted the first field study of lawyers using generative AI of which we are aware and a companion survey of 202 legal […]
Lianne Wijntjens, ‘The (Non-Existent) Legal Risks of Apologising: Courts Do Not See Apologies as a Way to Accept Civil Liability’
ABSTRACT Psychological research shows that apologies can have many positive effects. However, in a legal context, the positive potential of apologies could be complicated when legal proceedings raise barriers to apologising. Ideally, legal proceedings should encourage wrongdoers to apologise rather than discourage them. There is still much debate about the legal consequences of apologising. According […]
Young, Nagdee and Pieterse, ‘The dose-effect relationship in PTSD: the South African Constitutional Court Case of AK v Minister of Police (2022)’
ABSTRACT The decision of the South African Constitutional Court in AK v Minister of Police has implications for law enforcement agencies that fail the victims of crime. In this matter, the plaintiff sued the Minister and others for damages after officers had failed to rescue her from the perpetrator(s) of a protracted sexual assault and […]
Efimova, Sizemova and Chub, ‘Digital Financial Assets: Concept and Legal Nature’
ABSTRACT Tokens and other digital technologies, in essence, can be considered neither property nor objects of civil law, nor are they inherently a part of civil rights per se. These technical solutions acquire a corresponding legal status only when they become an object of such legal relations. When this occurs, they are considered digital assets […]
Sayid Bnefsi, ‘Compensatory Preliminary Damages: Access to Justice as Corrective Justice’
ABSTRACT The access to justice movement broadly concerns people’s ability to resolve legally actionable problems. To the extent that individuals seek resolution through civil litigation, they can be disadvantaged by their unmet need for legal services, particularly in high-stakes cases and complicated areas of law. In part, this is because legal services and litigation are […]
‘Not So Free to Contract: The Law, Philosophy, and Economics of Unequal Workplace Power’ – special issue of Journal of Law and Political Economy (2022)
Preface to Special Issue: Not So Free to Contract: How Unequal Workplace Power Undercuts the ‘Freedom of Contract’ Framework (Elizabeth Anderson) Introduction – The Goliath in the Room: How the False Assumption of Equal Worker–Employer Power Undercuts Workplace Protections (Lawrence Mishel) Talking About Private Government: A Review of the Economic Claims Made to Rebut Anderson’s […]
Arvind and McMahon, ‘Commodification, Control and the Contractualisation of the Human Body’
ABSTRACT This chapter puts the philosophical debate on commodification in the context of the legal concept of commodities. In law, commodification is intrinsically connected with contractualisation, through which contract acquires a central role in structuring social relations. This link between contractualisation and commodification has two consequences. Firstly, it gives its objects a legal value, turning […]