Monthly Archives: August, 2024
‘Climate Conscious Advocacy and Perpetual Burdens’
Carla Spivack, ‘Estate Planning for the Apocalypse’, 49 ACTEC Law Journal 85 (2023). A billionaire invests in human cryopreservation so that his head may be preserved in hopes of his entire person being revived later. His head, and his favorite dog, will be preserved at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit in a cylindrical tank filled with […]
Mala Chatterjee, ‘The Fruits of Authorship: A Theory of Copyright’
ABSTRACT Although philosophers have theorized for centuries on the foundations of tangible property, we largely have been absent from the legal scholarship on the foundations of intellectual property, much of which endeavors to apply theories of property to legal rights like copyrights and patents. But the fundamental differences between physical and intellectual objects – the […]
‘Better late than never – the Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024 is finally here’
INTRODUCTION The origins of the aphorism ‘better late than never’ may lie in Livy’s History of Rome (c 27-29 BCE). Its first recorded use in English seems to be in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c 1387-1400); in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, the Yeoman (pictured right, from the Ellesmere Chaucer) says … (more) [Eoin O’Dell, Cearta, 2 […]
Michael Doherty, ‘Domino Dancing: Mutuality of Obligation and Determining Employment Status in Ireland’
ABSTRACT It has taken a while, but what has been described as the first ‘gig economy’ case has been decided by the Irish Supreme Court. Although the case did not involve the use of a platform to organise work, it did require the Supreme Court to rule on the question of the employment status of […]
Kaplan and Lifshitz, ‘Energising Private Law, Introduction to Symposium’
ABSTRACT The world faces an unprecedented challenge: a comprehensive and swift energy transition is necessary to achieve crucial policy goals and protect our societies from the impending climate crisis. Given the enormity of this task, we must utilise all available legal tools. This volume underscores the significance of bringing private law to bear on issues […]
Aditya Krishnan, ‘Product Liability for Autonomous Vehicles With Respect to the Product Liability Directive, 1985: A Need for Revision?’
ABSTRACT The Product Liability Directive (PLD) controls the present risk appropriation associated with the operation of motor vehicles in the European Union. However, after more than three decades, technological advancements have rendered the Directive obsolete and incapable of addressing the basic issues that may come from software implanted in independently operating AVs in the public […]
Mala Chatterjee, ‘Property, Speech, and Authorship: A Dilemma for Personhood Theories of Copyright’
ABSTRACT In the theoretical literature on the normative foundations of copyright law, a substantial body of work has endeavored to justify the legal institution by grounding it in the allegedly ‘special’ relationship that authors have with their expressive works. Often drawing from cultural or philosophical views about authorship, art, and expression, much of this scholarship […]
Leiter and Dogot, ‘Augmented Law-Formalism in Blockchain’
ABSTRACT The relationship between law and code has been widely debated and scholarship exploring the regulatory capacities of code itself is wrestling with the conceptual questions posed by the increased relevance of digital governance. Blockchain technology, with its decentralised automated rule application and enforcement, is discussed as particularly potent techno-legal infrastructure. Automation and the idea […]
Mammen and Richey, ‘AI and IP: Are Creativity and Inventorship Inherently Human Activities?’
ABSTRACT As artificial intelligence algorithms (AIs) become ever more powerful and sophisticated, they are becoming capable of generating audio and visual works that human audiences might typically regard as ‘music’ or ‘art’. This begs the question, can these AI-created works be granted copyright protection in the US? Should they be granted the same copyright protections […]
Alexander Zhang, ‘Externalist Statutory Interpretation’
ABSTRACT The dominant paradigm of statutory-interpretation scholarship is an ‘internalist’ one. It treats statutory interpretation as a self-contained set of tools primarily deployed by lawyers and judges within the closed universe of courts. But as judges increasingly justify textualism by invoking a populist fidelity to ‘the people’, the internalist paradigm has proven too narrow to […]