Monthly Archives: April, 2025
Nicholas McBride, ‘The Real Gist of Negligence’
ABSTRACT This chapter was written in honour of Jane Stapleton and explores an idea that she helped popularise: that ‘damage is the gist of negligence’. This chapter distinguishes between two different senses of that phrase: (1) that a claimant has to show that they have suffered damage in order to claim that the tort of […]
Eric Kades, ‘The Prima Facie Case Against Negligence Law’s Prima Facie Case’
ABSTRACT The law of negligence is rife with doctrinal confusion. When addressing negligence claims, courts and scholars frequently analyze and decide the same issue (for instance whether the harm was foreseeable) under more-than-one of negligence’s allegedly independent elements. This article dubs this phenomenon ‘doctrinal bleed’. Although occasional judges and scholars have referred in passing to […]
Layne Keele, ‘Only Mostly Dead: How the Irreparable Injury Rule Can Protect the Jury Trial Right for Claims in Restitution’
INTRODCUTION Historically, the irreparable injury rule has policed the jurisdictional boundary between law and equity. This rule, formulated as the doctrine that equity will not intervene where the legal remedies are adequate, is routinely maligned by scholars and famously eulogized by Professor Laycock, but courts continue to recite it. This Article suggests that the rule, […]
Callahan and Mankin, ‘Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability’
ABSTRACT Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate? Twenty years after this question was first posed, we argue that the scientific case for climate liability is closed. Here we detail the scientific and legal implications of an ‘end-to-end’ attribution that links fossil fuel producers to specific damages from warming. Using […]
‘The Return of Private Law’
Yotam Kaplan, Adi Libson, and Gideon Parchomovsky, ‘The Renaissance of Private Law’, 19 Northwestern University Law Review 1427 (2025). Recent events offer a grim picture of the future of public law. In particular, President Trump’s assault on the administrative state seems destined to hamper the ability of agencies to protect the public in familiar areas […]
Monika Mayrhofer, ‘The concept of vulnerability and its relation to the concepts of inequality and discrimination – a review article’
ABSTRACT The concept of vulnerability is – often implicitly – assumed to enhance the protection of human rights, particularly concerning the rights to equality and non-discrimination. This article analyses the relationship between vulnerability, equality, and non-discrimination by reviewing the academic literature on this subject. Four strands of argument can be identified: The first line of […]
Elizabeth Murphree, ‘Let the Sellers Beware: The Death of Caveat Emptor Could be Trending’
ABSTRACT The doctrine of caveat emptor is a remnant of Ancient Roman practices that still lingers in the practice of modern real estate law. However, a series of cases in the 1980s revealed the antiquated nature of such a doctrine by demonstrating that the doctrine no longer reflects societal needs. Specifically, caveat emptor does not […]
Holzenberger and Maxwell, ‘A Quantitative Approach to the GDPR’s Anonymization and Pseudonymization Tests’
ABSTRACT This article examines two tests from the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): (1) the test for full anonymisation (the ‘anonymisation test’), and (2) the test for applying ‘appropriate technical measures’ to protect personal data when full anonymisation is not achieved (the ‘pseudonymisation test’). Both tests depend on vague legal standards and have given […]
‘Products Liability as the Pragmatic First Step to AI Regulation’
Catherine Sharkey, ‘A Products Liability Framework for AI’, 25 Columbia Science and Technology Law Review 240 (2024). With her recent article, ‘A Products Liability Framework for AI’, Professor Catherine Sharkey may have silenced at least some critics of artificial intelligence (AI) regulation. At the very least, the article stands as a sharp retort to anti-regulation […]
Raul Madden, ‘Equity in Kantian Morality: Unmuting the “Divinity Who Cannot Be Heard”’
ABSTRACT The concept of equity is indispensable to Kantian morality. This claim is controversial given Kant’s labelling of equity as an unenforceable right and his reputed moral absolutism. A need for equity, however, can be elicited from within his writing. For Kant, human dignity constitutes the basis of duty. Conscience demands conformity with duty. Our […]