Monthly Archives: July, 2025
William Organek, ‘Purdue’s Side Effects: Using Due Process to Realign Mass Tort Bankruptcies’
ABSTRACT In Harrington v Purdue Pharma, the United States Supreme Court held that victims of the opioid crisis could not be forced to release their independent claims against the Sacklers, who owned and controlled Purdue, without the victims’ consent. Such releases had become a controversial mainstay of mass tort bankruptcy filings. Yet Purdue was decided […]
‘The Defamation (Amendment) Bill fails to protect public interest speech by providing inadequate protections against SLAPPs’
Irish Legal News reports that the current Irish bill on SLAPPs will be ‘impotent in practice’. SLAPPs are strategic lawsuits against public participation that suppress free speech, and the Irish Legal News report goes on to explain that the government’s current inadequate plans to tackle them ‘could see Ireland hauled before the EU courts’. It […]
Hiroyuki Seshimo, ‘Mandatory Residual Tort Liability Insurance and Compensation Reserves: A Proposal for Solving the Judgment-Proof Problem’
ABSTRACT This research considers compensation reserves and mandatory residual tort liability insurance to solve the judgment-proof problem. This insurance policy covers only the remaining tort liability after company liquidation. This research examines a situation in which companies can raise funds through equity financing to increase their compensation reserves instead of enhancing this mandatory insurance coverage. […]
West and Gulati, ‘The Time-Is-Of-The-Essence Clause In M&A Agreements’
ABSTRACT Delaware courts take pride in their ‘contractarianism’. Words matter, and Delaware courts enforce both good and bad contracts. However, in a recent decision, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that an express condition precedent for triggering a seller’s indemnity obligation-that the buyer provide a compliant notice of claims before a specific date-could potentially be excused […]
William Eves, ‘Development and Experimentation in the Early Common Law Forms of Action: The Procedural Rules of Mort d’Ancestor and their Effect on Litigation in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries’
ABSTRACT This article considers the procedural design of the early common law action mort d’ancestor, introduced in 1176. It first considers how the action was developed to provide swift justice while also allowing the defendant (or ‘tenant’) adequate opportunities to appear in court. It then examines the impact of this design on litigation at the […]
Jennifer Gant, ‘Vulnerability Theory in Insolvency Law’
ABSTRACT The following chapter will introduce a new way of considering stakeholders in a collective procedure (insolvency or restructuring) that seeks to internalise the ‘values network’ by considering the vulnerability and resilience of the various stakeholders insofar is it affects their power within such procedures. It will reach beyond entities possessing pre-contractual entitlements to provide […]
Mariana Valente, ‘Terms of Service as a Case of Legal Pluralism’
ABSTRACT While discussions involving free speech often revolve around individual rights against the government, recent developments in technologies related to the Internet raise questions regarding new forms of censorship practiced by private Internet service providers. Past experiences, such as the movie pictures private regulation by the Production Code, illustrate how private agreements and practices can […]
Hamza Aslam, ‘Computer Generated Works and the Authorship Dilemma: Does Granting Artificial Intelligence with Legal Personality in the Fourth Industrial Age Optimize the UK Copyright Law?’
ABSTRACT The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in creative fields challenges traditional copyright doctrines built upon human authorship. Under section 9(3) of the UK Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988, ‘computer-generated works’ may be protected but authorship is attributed to the person ‘by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are […]
Sharma and Sharma, ‘Contracts, Consent and Control: How Arbitration is being used in the Changing World’
ABSTRACT In today’s dynamic and fast-changing legal and business world, arbitration is no longer just a standard part of contracts rather it is now being used as a real tool to deal with disputes in much smarter, faster, and more flexible ways. The assignment of an arbitration clause is a complicated legal issue that balances […]
‘How “Total Concept and Feel” Became Copyright Doctrine’
Bruce E Boyden, ‘The Grapes of Roth’, 99 Washington Law Review 1093 (2024). In Sedlik v von Drachenberg, the jury had to decide whether a tattoo featuring Miles Davis was substantially similar to the photograph on which the tattoo was based. To do so, the court instructed the jury to exclude from consideration either work’s […]