Monthly Archives: June, 2025
Pascal Lokiec, ‘Regulating the Employer’s Power: from the Law of Contract to the Law of Power’
ABSTRACT Labour law places power at its core, not only as a factual relationship that disrupts the balance between the parties to the employment contract but also as a legal prerogative granted and regulated by law. Traditional private law mechanisms, particularly contract law, fail to fully capture this dual dimension of power and to establish […]
Ashley Pyle, ‘A Toxic Inheritance: Addressing the Legal Implications of Inheriting Hazardous Waste Land’
ABSTRACT Inheritance law, governing the transfer of assets and rights from generation to generation, is a cornerstone of legal systems worldwide, Inheritance law’s implications extend beyond wealth management and tax strategies. This Article addresses a neglected area of overlap: inheritance law and hazardous waste. Consider Sarah, a Southern California beneficiary whose narrative exemplifies that overlap, […]
Steven Schwarcz, ‘Recharacterizing Contracts: The Sale-versus-Loan Problem of Receivables Financing’
ABSTRACT This Article addresses a complex and critically important issue that lies at the intersection of contract, property, commercial, and bankruptcy law and is crucial to corporate wealth production: what constitutes the sale of intangible rights to payment, or ‘receivables’. Courts often refuse to enforce contracts that purport to sell such rights if, notwithstanding being […]
Filippo Noseda, ‘The contracting universe of equitable ownership in modern trust law – practical considerations’
ABSTRACT In this article, the author considers the trajectory of beneficial ownership from traditional trusts to ‘massively discretionary trusts’ through the prism of modern trust law judgments and his own experience as an English solicitor with a Swiss background. The topic has already been examined by academics with opposing views1 and the author believes that […]
Joseph Schremmer, ‘The Severability of Natural Resources from Land’
ABSTRACT This Article uncovers the common law’s process of recognizing new forms of property in natural resources and how that process has evolved. In our own time, emerging technologies are making ordinary elements of the earth into valuable natural resources. Increasingly, landowners want to transfer property interests in these resources to developers, severing their ownership […]
Mary-Elizabeth Tumelty, ‘“What we do is probably a bastardised form of mediation”: (mis)understanding the role and potential of mediation in resolving medical negligence disputes in Ireland’
ABSTRACT In line with international developments, both the judiciary and the legislature in Ireland have strongly supported the use of mediation in civil matters and have taken steps to encourage litigants to engage in mediation as a means of resolving their dispute(s). In the context of medical negligence claims, mediation has been recognised as particularly […]
Gail Lythgoe, ‘Contracts: reterritorialising the (global) exercise of authority’
ABSTRACT Contemporary practices of authority by states and non-state actors alike are at odds with international law’s orthodox time-spaces, causing disciplinary anxiety. As a result, although there is a sense of the importance of global value chains (GVCs), these are invisible to the disciplinary gaze. This is not limited to international law; neo-formalist contract law […]
Victor Frimpong, ‘Artificial Intelligence on Trial: Who Is Responsible When Systems Fail? Toward a Framework for the Ultimate AI Accountability Owner’
ABSTRACT Identifying the ultimate human actor responsible for the harm caused by AI systems remains one of the most urgent and unresolved challenges in AI governance. While existing literature emphasizes transparency, bias mitigation, and explainability, it often neglects the question of who is ultimately accountable for AI-enabled decisions and their consequences. This article introduces the […]
Simon Franz Ewers, ‘What’s Wrong with Bentham’s Test? Methodological Concerns and Suggestions’
ABSTRACT Matthew Kramer’s theory of right-holding is a major contender in the debate about rights. Kramer proposes a version of the Interest Theory that amends the Basic Idea of the Interest Theory – that rights protect interests – by incorporating Bentham’s Test, an algorithm that identifies the party to whom an existing duty is owed. […]
‘Rethinking Private International Law Through the Lens of Colonialism’
Last week (7 June 2025), I had this extraordinary opportunity to give a presentation at the 138th Annual Conference of the Japanese Association of Private International Law, which took place at Seinan Gakuin Daigaku, Fukuoka – Japan. The theme of my presentation was ‘Private International Law and Colonialism’. In this talk, I shared some preliminary […]