Monthly Archives: July, 2025
Gilboa and Kricheli-Katz, ‘Biased Evaluation of Pain and Suffering Damages’
ABSTRACT Studies have documented racial and gender-based disparities in civil jury awards. Legal scholars have raised concerns that biases might be especially prevalent in awarding pain and suffering damages, which are particularly open-ended and difficult to estimate. We contribute to this body of literature by providing experimental evidence of a causal relationship between the perceived […]
Haward Soper, ‘Long leasehold “management packs” – use and abuse’
ABSTRACT In almost every case a long leaseholder selling their leasehold interest will have to provide the buyer with what is known in the industry as a ‘management pack’. These packs contain information about the property and about property management and the relationship between the parties to the lease. Of around 1,500,000 property sales each […]
C Haward Soper, ‘Service Charge Budget – To Consult or Not to Consult?’
ABSTRACT This article examines whether freeholders should be legally required to consult long-leaseholders on service charge budgets before imposing and collecting charges. Using empirical survey data – both qualitative and quantitative – alongside doctrinal analysis and theoretical insights from management studies, I argue in favour of such a requirement. Additionally, I draw upon my experience […]
‘Beware of Shelter’
Betsy J Grey, ‘Removing Torts’, 62 Harvard Journal on Legislation 135 (2024). Writers who study torts tend to engage with liability as a force or vector that imposes consequences on parties accused of injuring others. For most of us in this field, liability means accountability or reckoning. This occupational interest in what tort does in […]
Kenneth Khoo, ‘Reflecting on Reflective Loss’
ABSTRACT In Commonwealth jurisdictions, the reflective loss doctrine bars shareholders from recovering damages that overlap with the company’s own losses. In this article, I locate the doctrine’s theoretical foundations in liquidation protection – the rules that shield corporate assets from unilateral withdrawals, thereby facilitating capital lock-in and long-term investment. Although these rules offer clear benefits, […]
Allen and Piazza, ‘The Common Law is a Complex Adaptive System’
ABSTRACT Traditional accounts of the common law from Blackstone to Dworkin focus on the role of precedent in judicial decision-making, the metaphysical nature of law, and the heroic judge. As important as these perspectives are, they miss the essence of the common law, which is that it is a complex adaptive system with the capacity […]
Viva Moffat, ‘Copyright and the University’
ABSTRACT Who owns the copyright in this Article? It turns out that this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. I am the author – I wrote the words, I did the research, I collected and analyzed the data – but it is not clear that I am the ‘author’ for copyright purposes and therefore […]
Muhammad Motasim, ‘The Illusion of Consent: A Philosophical and Legal Inquiry into Duress, Mistake, and Free Will in Standard Form Contracts’
ABSTRACT Consent has traditionally been regarded as the foundation of contract law, fundamental to both ancient barter exchanges and modern commercial agreements. Classical doctrine holds that if consent is undermined by factors like misrepresentation, mistake, or duress, the contract gets vitiated. However, in the age of standard form contracts, this notion of mutual consent increasingly […]
Gagnon and Nosenzo, ‘Discrimination Preferences’
ABSTRACT We reconsider discrimination preferences through moral lenses and conduct experiments to systematically investigate these preferences using representative UK samples. Specifically, we evaluate the distribution of individual preferences for and against taste-and statistical-based discrimination across three domains – ethnicity, gender, and LGBTQ+ status. Using over 60,000 anonymous decisions affecting how workers are paid from more […]
Guernsey, Serfling and Yan, ‘When Speaking Freely Pays: Anti-SLAPP Laws and Firms’ Cost of Equity’
ABSTRACT A fundamental question in corporate finance is whether a firm’s cost of equity (COE) is influenced more by the amount of information disclosed or by the direction and tone of that information. While greater transparency can reduce information asymmetry and lower financing costs, negative disclosures may increase perceived risk and, consequently, firms’ COE. We […]