Monthly Archives: August, 2025
Zachary Henderson, ‘Rethinking Robot Liability’
ABSTRACT Today a growing chorus of voices in the tort-law literature sings a siren song. AI harms must be redressed through across-the-board strict liability, they croon – the same standard we apply to dynamite users, lion tamers, and faulty-chainsaw makers. Their rationale is understandable: at first blush, many AI harms appear impervious to other traditional […]
Davis and Shaffer, ‘The Fiduciary Code of Capital and Climate Change’
ABSTRACT Fiduciary law is part of the ‘code’ for the management of capital, as Katharina Pistor has conceptualized law. Climate activists, attorneys, investors, and international organisations have turned to fiduciary law for legal solutions to the ongoing problem of inadequate corporate and state action in response to climate change. Our thesis is that the turn […]
Daniel Solove, ‘Notable Privacy Books: A Journey Through History’
ABSTRACT In this essay, I discuss notable privacy books from the 1960s to 2020s – seven decades and more than 500 books. This revised edition of the essay adds another 100 books to the previous version. I briefly explain why each book is noteworthy. Examining the books chronologically also opens a window into history, as […]
Nathan Willems, ‘A Comparative Analysis of the Homeward Trend’
ABSTRACT To ensure legal certainty, predictability, comity among nations and party autonomy, judges are faced with the application of foreign law. This poses specific problems such as a (perceived) reduced quality of justice due to the judge’s unfamiliarity with the foreign law. There are, however, certain techniques that allow the judge and parties to resort […]
Antonia Sommerfeld, ‘Claiming the EU Right to Repair from Manufacturers in Cross-Border Contexts’
ABSTRACT Starting in August 2026, consumers purchasing goods within the EU will gain new rights of repair for a number of electronic household products specified in the EU Repair Directive (RD). This development will help support a sustainability transition towards a Circular Economy. The Directive’s two-pronged approach vests the consumer with a right to repair […]
Kelly Cahill Timmons, ‘Dominion Voting Systems v Fox News Network: Defamation Actions as a Tool for the Rule of Law in Turbulent Times’
ABSTRACT When we think about areas of law that are most essential to advancing the Rule of Law in turbulent times, constitutional law and its limits on the power of government might be the first thing that comes to mind. Injury or tort law is probably not at the top of the list. Yet the […]
Bogna Kaczorowska, ‘Articulating Contractual Good Faith: The Evolving Civil and Common Law Dimension’
ABSTRACT While the operation of contract law tends to be appreciated through its inherent twofold rationale, informed by autonomy and institutional standards, recurring concerns arise around the ratio of certainty to fairness in contractual transactions. In critically weighing the contract-law commitments to both autonomy- and policy-oriented normative values, a particular regard is given to the […]
Sepehr Shahshahani, ‘Against the Abstract-Ideas Exclusion’
ABSTRACT Can someone patent the mathematical formulae that lie at the root of advances in artificial intelligence? What about the discovery of biological mechanisms that make certain drugs work? These questions are governed by the doctrine of patentable subject matter, which excludes ‘laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas’ from patents. In a watershed […]
Peter Watts, ‘Trustees with Absolute Discretions – a Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the New Zealand Courts’
ABSTRACT A trend has been developing in New Zealand involving disputes between trustees and beneficiaries for judges to apply the same tests for reviewing the exercise of trust discretions whether or not the trust deed confers an absolute discretion on the trustees. Amongst those tests has been a putative requirement that trustees not overlook a […]
Agnieszka Paulina Smoleńska, ‘The Constitutive Role of Law in Sustainable Finance’
ABSTRACT The sustainability transition requires a fundamental change in the way economies function to align socioeconomic systems with planetary boundaries. From a legal perspective, such a shift should entail a transformation of the prevailing legal coding of economic relations to enable consistent integration of social and environmental considerations. Within the emerging sustainable finance trend, shoots […]