Monthly Archives: June, 2025
‘A Costly Drafting Mistake’
When I teach Conflict of Laws, I spend a lot of time showing my class how to draft a good choice-of-law clause. It’s not hard. Everything you need to know is laid out in the Primer on Choice-of-Law Clauses. Unfortunately, these instructions are not always followed. In one recent case, Pool Scouts Franchising LLC v […]
Francesco Parisi, ‘Bargaining for Remedies: An Efficiency-Revelation Mechanism’
ABSTRACT This paper presents an incentivized experiment investigating whether parties place different intrinsic values on the two primary forms of contractual protection-damages and specific performance. In the first part of the experiment, participants are offered two contract options that are identical except for the remedy available in the event of breach. We elicit their valuations-specifically, […]
Call for Abstracts – ‘Emerging Voices in Private International Law’ (Asser Institute)
As part of its 60th anniversary celebrations, the TMC Asser Institute invites abstracts for the panel ‘Emerging Voices in Private International Law’, to be held on 24 October 2025 in The Hague, at the conference Adapting Private International Law in an Era of Uncertainty. The panel will feature two early-career scholars (PhD candidates or postdoctoral […]
Elissa Philip Gentry, ‘Disrupting the Risk Ratchets’
ABSTRACT The ‘ratchet’ effect – a phenomenon in which stopping or reversing course becomes impossible – has been largely ignored by the doctrine of informed consent. Health contexts like fertility treatment are particularly vulnerable to such effects: patients may temporarily be willing to accept increasing risks and costs when focusing on the risks and costs […]
John Tehranian, ‘The Secret Life of Copyright: Intellectual Property and Inequality in the Age of AI (book introduction)’
ABSTRACT In The Secret Life of Copyright: Intellectual Property and Inequality in the Age of AI (Cambridge University Press, 2025), copyright meets Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in a provocative reassessment of our laws governing creativity. Drawing on a wide array of case studies – Harvard’s exploitation of slave daguerreotypes, the unlawful distribution of an […]
Meier, Wylie and Laham, ‘Who’s to Blame? Blame Attribution in Autonomous Human-Machine Interactions’
ABSTRACT As artificial intelligence (AI) systems gain autonomy, they increasingly operate alongside humans in high-stakes domains such as transportation, healthcare, and military operations. This raises critical questions about how people assign blame when both human and machine agents independently contribute to harmful outcomes. While prior research has examined blame attribution in single-agent scenarios or in […]
Peter Lee, ‘Relational Contracting and International Technology Transfer’
ABSTRACT In standard accounts of international technology transfer, strong patent protection induces innovative firms to license their technology to foreign entities. Such technology transfer is particularly important to developing countries, which rely on foreign innovations to build domestic innovative capacity. Patents and licenses, however, frequently do not convey all of the technical knowledge needed to […]
Mezei and Härkönen, ‘A Primer to Intellectual Property Law and Upcycling’
ABSTRACT Upcycling, viewed from the perspective of intellectual property (IP) law, might be defined as transformative – recontextualized or repurposed – recycling and redistribution of tangible copies of works or goods that are protected by some form of IP law. By its very nature, upcycling is becoming the next conflict zone for IP rights holders […]
Marc Hoag, ‘Why AI Training Should Fall Outside Copyright’s Domain: A Legal Analysis’
ABSTRACT Courts and commentators commonly assume that scraping copyrighted works to train large language models (LLMs) constitutes ‘copying’ under U.S. copyright law. This Article argues that the premise is wrong. Training creates no fixed, human-readable embodiment of the source material; models retain only non-expressive statistical weightings. Without fixation, there is no ‘copy’, and because developers […]
‘UK tort law on human rights abuses in supply chains: The Dyson Litigation’
This blog considers the extent to which UK courts are willing to adjudicate upon harms committed overseas in connection with UK company supply chains … Recent years have seen a steady stream of litigation brought against UK parent companies for the environmental harm and human rights abuses caused by their overseas subsidiaries. This blog considers […]