Monthly Archives: August, 2024
Muys, Ng and Ghaly, ‘Bath and a cautionary fable – when trade mark, consumer and tort law collide’
ABSTRACT Bed Bath N’ Table Pty Ltd v Global Retail Brands Australia Pty Ltd is a decision of Rofe J of the Federal Court, handed down on 14 December 2023. The decision relates to a dispute between two well-known homewares retailers, Bed Bath N’ Table Pty Ltd (BBNT) and Global Retail Brands Australia Pty Ltd […]
Katy Barnett, ‘Reflections on the Principles of Remoteness in Contract in Comparative Law’
ABSTRACT This paper traces the history of remoteness in contract law, namely the legal formants (in Rodolfo Sacco’s terms) constraining the availability of contract damages in various legal systems. Our journey takes us through different times, continents and cultures, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, across the law of France, United States, England […]
Lauren Roth, ‘The Fiduciary Game’
ABSTRACT Fiduciary duties are supposed to bridge the gap between public and private law. Private actors who engage in ‘public or quasi-public’ functions (eg, corporate directors and pension administrators) are often subject to fiduciary constraints to protect vulnerable parties who lack power in relationships with these actors. Recently, scholars have argued that both courts and […]
‘Strict duties under the Defective Premises Act 1972’
Vainker v Marbank Construction Ltd & Others [2024] EWHC 667 (TCC). It was probably inevitable that the retrospective extension of time to 30 years for bringing claims under the Defective Premises Act 1972 (the ‘DPA’), introduced by the Building Safety Act 2022, would lead to increased scrutiny of the DPA. Until then, with some honourable […]
Hannah van Kolfschooten, ‘A health-conformant reading of the GDPR’s right not to be subject to automated decision-making’
ABSTRACT As the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in healthcare is expanding, patients in the European Union (EU) are increasingly subjected to automated medical decision-making. This development poses challenges to the protection of patients’ rights. A specific patients’ right not to be subject to automated medical decision-making is not considered part of the traditional […]
Hayden and Bodie, ‘The Problem of Purpose in Corporate Law’
ABSTRACT For the last half century, shareholder primacy has reigned as the dominant definition of corporate purpose, as to both the purpose of individual companies and corporate law more generally. Recently, however, the Business Roundtable, the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law: Corporate Governance, and many business and legal academics have developed new answers […]
‘Bennett v Gentile: Maryland Supreme Court Recent Decision’
Pauline Bennett, the settlor of a revocable living trust, engaged attorney Thomas Gentile to draft her estate planning documents. Initially, the trust instrument provided for the distribution of her properties, including a specific property, Wissahican, to her daughter Audrey upon her death. Later, due to concerns about Audrey’s financial mismanagement, Pauline amended the trust to […]
‘Disney, Contracts of Adhesion, and Arbitration-Clause Bootstrapping’
Disney is in the news this week, and not in a good way. For the truly awful facts of the case, you can’t do better than Emily Crane’s and Alexandra Steigrad’s reporting in the New York Post here and here. In short, Dr Kanokporn Tangsuan had severe allergies. She ate in a Disney restaurant. She […]
Edith Beerdsen, ‘Strategy for Strategy’s Sake’
ABSTRACT Litigation is a strategic enterprise, by design. Not only is it impossible to design rules of procedure that account for every circumstance; our adversarial system gives litigants strategic maneuvering room that could be eliminated but has not been. Although procedural rules regulate many aspects of civil litigation and have significantly reduced opportunities for strategy […]
Newman and Smith, ‘Capturing Intangibles in a Property Restatement’
ABSTRACT The field of property law is often viewed as a ‘grab bag’ of loosely related topics, whose doctrines are treated as a heap of rules, and whose subject matter is in turn conceptualized as a ‘bundle of sticks’ having more or less arbitrary contents. One of the goals of the Restatement (Fourth) of Property […]