Monthly Archives: April, 2025
‘Federal Court Issues Worldwide Anti-Enforcement Injunction’
Last month, Judge Edward Davila (Northern District of California) granted a motion by Google for a rare type of equitable relief: a worldwide anti-enforcement injunction. In Google v Nao Tsargrad Media, a Russian media company obtained a judgment against Google in Russia and then began proceedings to enforce it in nine different countries. Arguing that […]
Abigail Faust, ‘A Theory Of Consumer Transactions’
ABSTRACT Even while developing proposals to reform consumer contract law, consumer contracts scholars rarely dispute the categorization of consumer transactions as ‘contracts.’ Yet consumer transactions – where sellers unilaterally draft terms that consumers rarely read or understand – clearly defy the traditional imagery of contracts as bilateral interactions between autonomous, roughly-equal parties. Indeed, it is […]
Luppi, Parisi, Pietro Matina and Santese, ‘Promisee’s Duty of Cooperation’
ABSTRACT This paper explores the optimal default configuration of the promisee’s duty of cooperation in situations where the promisee’s role in the performance of a contract is not merely passive but can actively affect the probability of performance. This paper contributes to the law and economics literature (Cooter & Porat, 2004; Porat, 2009) by analyzing […]
Andrew Verstein, ‘The Corporate Census’
ABSTRACT I present the first database of all entity formations in the United States, going back to the founding. All previous studies were based on tiny subsets of corporations, such as only large public corporations. Looking at the broader sample destabilizes core empirical assumptions in the field. For example, while Delaware is commonly thought to […]
Hui Jing, ‘Settlor Control in Family Trusts’
ABSTRACT This article analyses the Singapore High Court’s ruling in La Dolce Vita Fine Dining v Zhang Lan [2022] SGHC 278, exploring the legal challenges posed by settlor-controlled family trusts in offshore wealth management. The analysis highlights how excessive settlor control can undermine the validity of a trust, rendering its assets vulnerable to claims from […]
Symeon Symeonides, ‘The Public Policy Exception in Choice of Law: The American Version’
ABSTRACT To the surprise of many foreign readers, the American version of the public policy reservation (ordre public) is phrased exclusively in terms of jurisdiction and access to courts rather than as an exception to choice of law. At least in its ‘official’ iteration in the First and Second Restatements, the exception allows courts to […]
Nicholas McBride, ‘Contextual Categories in Private Nuisance and Private Law’
ABSTRACT The UK Supreme Court’s decision in Fearn v Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery helps us to see that private law is better understood in terms of conceptual, rather than contextual, categories. This is because the Court made a mistake in Fearn by thinking of the tort of private nuisance as operating within […]
Felix Chang, ‘Economic Analysis of Trust Law’
ABSTRACT This chapter analyzes trusts from a law and economics perspective. It begins with John Langbein’s work on contractarian foundations and Robert Sitkoff’s agency costs theory – two frameworks that highlight the relational nature of trusts. The chapter then explores Henry Hansmann and Ugo Mattei’s thesis that the trust’s major contribution has been its ability […]
Christoph Busch, ‘Consumer Law for AI Agents’
ABSTRACT Since the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the AI landscape is undergoing a rapid transformation. Currently, the use of AI chatbots by consumers has largely been limited to image generation or question-answering language models. The next generation of AI systems, AI agents that can plan and execute complex tasks with only limited […]
Mark Glover, ‘Nominal Bequests’
ABSTRACT De minimis non curat lex. This maxim provides that the law does not concern itself with trifles. Regardless of whether the law generally abides by this principle, the law of wills does not not. For centuries, case after case has delved into the consequences of de minimis bequests of one shilling or of one […]