Monthly Archives: March, 2025
Liang Cai, ‘Absence of Talion and Tort Law in Early Imperial China (221BCE-9 CE): How Body Politic Cancelled Corrective Justice’
ABSTRACT From a comparative perspective, this paper argues that early Chinese empires lacked the concept of talion or tort law when malicious violence or intent became factors. Instead, wrongdoers were required to pay fines to the government or received punishment as hard labor for the state. Victims not only could not receive compensation but were […]
Claudio Michelon, ‘How capacious is the Kantian system of rights?’
ABSTRACT This paper discusses ways in which the Kantian account of private law might be more capacious than some of its critics believe it to be and identifies more precisely the reasons that Kant’s system excludes from bearing on private rights. The development of Weinrib’s conception of private law in Reciprocal Freedom clarifies that certain […]
Mark Pawlowski, ‘Resulting trusts and common intention’
ABSTRACT Although the resulting trust has played a lessening role as an appropriate mechanism for determining beneficial ownership of the family home, recent case law has seen a re-emergence of the doctrine in cases involving the purchase of property as a business venture or investment. Significantly, in these cases, the courts have ruled out a […]
Napoli, Romani, Gatteschi and Schifanella, ‘Light and Shadows of Smart Contract Development with LLMs’
ABSTRACT Smart contract development remains almost inaccessible to non-experts developers despite blockchain technology is growing adoption across industries. This paper evaluates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated smart contract generation from legal agreements. The work systematically assesses the capabilities of four leading commercial LLMs – gpt-4-turbo (OpenAI), claude-3.5-sonnet (Anthropic), mistral-large (MistralAI), and […]
The Common Core of European Private Law 30th General Meeting, Stockholm, 15-16 May 2025
We are glad to announce that the 30th General Meeting of the Common Core of European Private Law, Serving Future Generations Through Legal Culture – Thirty Years of Common Core Research, will take place in Stockholm on May 15 and 16 2025 at Östasiatiska Museet … (program, registration)
Elise Bant, ‘Rethinking Public Responsibility: Insights From Systems Intentionality’
ABSTRACT Recent decades have seen a surge of interest in holistic models of corporate responsibility, which reflect and give effect to understandings of organisational blameworthiness. This article asks what insights these developments might offer for the accountability of public juristic persons, including the Commonwealth of Australia. This question is pressing not only in view of […]
Srivastava and Witzleb, ‘What’s the Gig? Tort Liability of Platforms for Physical User-to-User Harm’
ABSTRACT This chapter explores the liability of digital platforms under tort and consumer law in common law jurisdictions for user-to-user harm in circumstances where the platform has facilitated physical interaction between users. Examples of such scenarios include personal injuries arising from an Uber ride, an Airbnb stay, and a Tinder date. The chapter explains the […]
‘The end of digital property’
I’ve been thinking a lot about cyberpunk recently for various reasons. Not only have I been re-reading some old classics such as Neuromancer and Snow Crash, but I am starting to see many worrying trends depicted in dystopian novels in everyday life. But perhaps one of the biggest misses from the genre when describing future […]
Fraser and Suzor, ‘Locating fault for AI harms: a systems theory of foreseeability, reasonable care and causal responsibility in the AI value chain’
ABSTRACT This paper presents an original perspective on fault and responsibility for harms caused by artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Scholarship on liability for AI harms highlights the difficulties that doctrines like negligence may encounter in attributing responsibility across complex AI value chains. Drawing on the theory of ‘system safety’, this paper argues that these difficulties […]
Contreras and Hancock, ‘Consensus Templates’
ABSTRACT Consensus templates – standardized contractual terms used by multiple parties operating within in a single market segment – offer significant efficiency gains for their users and have been utilized for more than a century in some of the world’s largest industries. Yet despite their advantages and market significance, consensus templates are not well understood. […]