Monthly Archives: May, 2025
Maziar Peihani, ‘Empty Voting and Hidden Ownership in Canadian Jurisprudence’
ABSTRACT The classic understanding of equity encompasses a suite of economic and governance rights, which typically includes the rights to vote, receive dividends, and participate in the distribution of assets upon dissolution. This conventional view, outlined in corporate legislations, is supported by Canadian jurisprudence and corporate law scholarship. However, financial innovations have facilitated the separation […]
Cathay Smith, ‘Copyrighting Nature’
ABSTRACT This Article introduces a ‘work of nature’ doctrine for copyright law. In 1903, the US Supreme Court established the principle that while anyone can copy the original, they cannot copy the copy. A century later, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit hinted at a ‘work of nature’ exception, suggesting that even […]
Cathay Smith, ‘Should Copyright Protect Racist Works?’
ABSTRACT This Essay reviews Ned Snow’s provocative book, Intellectual Property and Immorality: Against Protecting Harmful Creations of the Mind, and critically examines the intersection of copyright law and morality. It explores the ethical dimensions of copyright protection and examines whether works which fail to advance societal progress, as defined by Snow, should be ineligible for […]
Eylül Erva Akın, ‘3D Printing and Copyright: A Critical Analysis of Authorship and Control’
ABSTRACT An analysis of current copyright laws in relation to 3D printing reveals a comprehensive legal framework, but also highlights unresolved issues. Challenges include designing ownership, controlling distribution and distinguishing derivative works from inspiration. Discussions on the adequacy of the law lead to the exploration of alternative licensing models and open-source solutions. Ambiguity remains in […]
Anirban Mukherjee, ‘The AI Ouroboros and Copyright Laundering: Why Copyright Needs a “Fruit of the Poisonous Tree” Doctrine for Generative AI’
ABSTRACT Copyright enforcement rests on an evidentiary bargain: a plaintiff must show both the defendant’s access to the work and substantial similarity in the challenged output. That bargain comes under strain when generative AI systems are built through multi-stage pipelines with recursive synthetic data. As each successive model is tuned on the outputs of its […]
Nicholas Caputo, ‘“Quiet” Enjoyment: Uncovering the Hidden History of the Right to Attention in Private and Public’
ABSTRACT Legal scholars have largely neglected attention as a subject of legal rights, even as attention has become one of the most valuable economic resources of the modern era. This Article argues that a right to attention has existed implicitly in American law since the early twentieth century, emerging in response to technological, social, and […]
Julia Englebert, ‘Manufacturing Good Faith’
ABSTRACT In 2022, the Delaware Supreme Court decided Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, LP v Bandera Master Fund LP, 288 A 3d 1083 (Delaware 2022), allowing a limited partnership entity to conclusively establish good faith by relying on a legal opinion that merely stated it would be reasonable to rely on another firm’s opinion – one that […]
Francois du Bois, ‘Constitutional Transplantation Into Private Law: From Liberal To Republican Legal Ordering’
ABSTRACT Treating the horizontal application of constitutional rights that has developed globally in the aftermath of the Second World War as not merely having a ‘radiating effect’, influencing private law from the outside, but as transplanting constitutional thought into private law, this chapter shows that horizontality converts a liberal constitutional order into a civic republican […]
‘Tales of the unexpected’
A colleague told me about a conference at UCL on contract law and the unexpected saying, ‘Looks like a nice day out Jason’. When I was emailed 12 hefty draft papers by way of pre-reading, I realised it was a rather different conference to the sort I am used to. Each draft paper was an […]
‘European Rules, American Enforcement’
Luca Enriques, Matteo Gatti and Roy Shapira, ‘How the EU Sustainability Due Diligence Directive Could Reshape Corporate America’, available at SSRN (27 April 2025). Corporate America may face an unusual pairing in the fight over corporate responsibility for human rights and the environment: EU rules and US enforcement. The potential for this (unintentional) partnership is […]