Monthly Archives: February, 2025
‘Reflections on the Evolution of Software Copyright Law since the 1980s’: Pamela Samuelson, London School of Economics and Online, 13 May 2025
Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She is recognized as a pioneer in digital copyright law, intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. Since 1996, she has held a joint appointment at Berkeley Law School and UC Berkeley’s School of Information … (registration)
‘Recovering Personality in Copyright’s Originality Inquiry’
Copyright has become the battleground à la mode for AI-related litigation. Referring to the technology as ‘nothing more than a plagiarism machine’ developed by ‘greedy and craven companies who want to take human talent out of entertainment’, artists and creators have increasingly called for copyright-driven crackdowns on the generative AI industry. In the courts, parties […]
Wayne Barnes, ‘Defending Form Contract Consent’
ABSTRACT The issue of standard form contracts has bedeviled Contracts scholars for a century. The basic problem has long been known. Contract is supposed to be a quintessentially consensual activity, whereby both parties are operating with full knowledge and comprehension of the array of terms and conditions being negotiated and agreed to. But by employing […]
Franklin Gevurtz, ‘Do Courts Get It Right When Piercing The Corporate Veil? An Empirical Study’
ABSTRACT This article presents the results of a unique empirical study addressing whether courts achieve rational outcomes when piercing the corporate veil. The study examined a set of over 300 court decisions upholding piercing claims in the last almost four years. It asked whether the courts in these cases could rationally have found either deception […]
Bar-Gill, Ben-Shahar and Marotta-Wurgler, ‘A Companion Guide to the Restatement of Consumer Contracts’
ABSTRACT This short Essay, written by the Reporters of the recently published Restatement of Consumer Contracts, is intended as a companion to the Restatement. It highlights three areas, where the Reporters’ ambition was only partially reflected in the final version of the Restatement. The first was to ground the restated rules and principles in a […]
Jonathan Chu, ‘The place of deemed fulfilment of condition’
EXTRACT Where, on the face of a contract, the existence of a debt is conditional on the occurrence of a particular fact, and that fact has not occurred, because the person who promised payment has prevented it from occurring, does the debt arise nevertheless on the notion that the condition is then to be deemed […]
Eleanor Rowan, ‘Economic abuse, the bank, and the devil in the detail: One Savings Bank plc v Catherine Waller-Edwards [2024] EWCA Civ 302′
EXTRACT In One Savings Bank plc v Catherine Waller-Edwards, the Court of Appeal considered – for the first time – whether banks are put on constructive notice to potential undue influence in joint benefit remortgage/suretyship hybrid transactions. At a time where there is an increasing awareness of economic abuse as a form of domestic abuse, […]
Aryan Mohseni, ‘Trustees’ Indemnities and Fiduciary Duties: the High Court Appeal in Naaman v Jaken Properties Australia Pty Ltd’
ABSTRACT The High Court of Australia appeal in Naaman v Jaken Properties raises the question whether a successor trustee owes a ‘fiduciary duty’ to the former trustee to not destroy, jeopardise or diminish the former trustee’s right of indemnity over trust assets. That question arises to determine whether third parties are liable to account in […]
David Tilt, ‘A Ritual Approach to Patent Law’
ABSTRACT This article applies van Gennep’s structure of the ritual to the patent application process, arguing that information undergoes several ontological transformations on the way to patentability. The second half of the article applies Turner’s focus on the liminal space. From this perspective, the ‘pure possibility’ of the liminal space is essential to patent law, […]
Call for Papers: ‘Celebrating 100 Years of the 1925 Property Legislation’ (Selwyn College Cambridge, 8-9 September 2025)
In the period 1922 to 1925, a series of groundbreaking legislative enactments reframed English property law in terms favourable to alienation and a market in land, providing the basis on which much of the relevant modern law rests. The Law of Property Act, Trustee Act, Settled Land Act, Administration of Estates Act, Land Registration Act, […]