Monthly Archives: July, 2025
Michael Risch, ‘The Double Patenting Puzzle’
ABSTRACT It’s a simple rule: one patent per invention. This is easy to enforce when patent claims in two patents are identical, but what if the second patent claims something close but not quite the same? For more than 150 years, courts have held that obvious improvements over the prior art cannot be patented. But […]
Mark Wen-Hu Hsiao, ‘Directors’ Duty to Creditors: A Contractual Approach to Coherent Theory’
ABSTRACT The case of BTI v Sequana, highlights how an unclear undertaking theory of fiduciary duty can create inconsistencies between the codified duty of directors to promote the company’s success and existing fiduciary case law. This paper argues that shareholders and the company have agreed, through a statutory contract, to prioritise creditors’ rights, which does […]
Emmanuelle Lemaire, ‘Compensation schemes and the tort system in the context of occupational and public health’
ABSTRACT Compensation schemes are certainly not a new phenomenon in England and Wales, and they are increasingly being used, and called for, to compensate victims in the field of occupational and public health. Despite their long existence, compensation schemes have always been thought to develop on ad hoc basis, without any real discernible logic behind […]
Francis Cardell-Oliver, ‘Counterfactuals In Unjust Enrichment’
ABSTRACT This article is concerned with the question whether a defendant in an unjust enrichment action can reduce or eliminate its liability by establishing that it could have obtained the enrichment (or part of it) from the claimant in a way that would not have given rise to liability. The answer in principle ought to […]
Matthew Shapiro, ‘Civil Procedure’s Partial Rule of Law’
ABSTRACT With the rule of law widely thought to be experiencing a ‘crisis’, the institution of civil litigation has come under renewed scrutiny. Recent developments have led some commentators to portray litigation as not just a victim, but an agent, of the rule-of-law crisis. At the same time, even as some notable instances of litigation […]
‘Should Property Law Evolve to Recognize Personal Property Servitudes?’
Daniel M Klerman and Stefan Bechtold, ‘Personal Property Servitudes Revisited’, 99 Tulane Law Review 345 (2024). A new work by Professors Daniel Klerman and Stefan Bechtold, ‘Personal Property Servitudes Revisited’, is an excellent case study in when and how property rules should and can evolve. Professors Klerman and Bechtold inquire whether those buying and selling […]
Call for Papers: ‘The Ascension of Contract’: Conference on Contract, Consumer, and Commercial Law (C³), University of British Columbia, 5-6 November 2025
The conference aims to bring together scholars, as well as practitioners, regulators, and policymakers whose work has a nexus to contracts, including those working in contract law, consumer law, commercial law, property and private law. Sponsored by Allard’s Centre for Business Law, the theme of the 2025 conference is ‘The Ascension of Contract: Understanding the […]
‘An End to Arbitration Exceptionalism?’
Myriam Gilles, ‘Arbitration Exceptionalism’, available at SSRN (27 February 2025). Privatization of traditionally public government functions is all the rage in the second Trump administration. The news is rife with suggestions of privatizing everything from delivering the mail to keeping airplanes aloft to tracking the weather. These developments seem consistent with the Supreme Court’s longtime […]
Schwartz, Reinert and Pfander, ‘Empiricism and Constitutional Torts’
ABSTRACT The Supreme Court has deliberately framed the law of constitutional torts as a balance between assuring redress for victims, deterring misconduct, and maintaining effective government services. Yet as the Supreme Court has shaped the contours of litigation against state and local actors (under 42 USC § 1983) and federal actors (under the Bivens doctrine), […]
Camilla Hrdy, ‘Trade Secrets and Artificial Intelligence’
ABSTRACT Companies create, collect, and manage significant amounts of economically valuable information. Some of this information is deliberately kept secret and can be protected under trade secret law. Trade secret laws protect certain forms of secret and economically valuable information against improper use or disclosure by others. Artificial intelligence (AI) raises many challenging issues for […]