Monthly Archives: August, 2025
‘Does an estate inherit a claim for diminution in value of lost services? Keating (administrator of the estate of Stephen Birtles) v Abdisalan (1) and Aviva Insurance Ltd (2) [2025] EWHC 1926 (KB)’
INTRODUCTION Keating (Birtles) v Abdisalan and Aviva [2025] EWHC 1926 (KB) was a decision of HHJ Bird (sitting as a judge of the High Court) in a strikeout application involving novel issues in the context of a fatal RTA. The application considered the limits of the principle in Haxton v Phillips Electronics [2014] EWCA Civ […]
Jan Felix Hoffmann, ‘Property Rights in Money (and Cryptocurrencies)’
ABSTRACT There is a common core of principles that governs all property rights, whether they relate to tangible or intangible goods. The classical principles of property law are applicable to the property law of intangibles. However, classical property law is also specifically designed to deal with physical objects, which raises the question of the extent […]
Jan Felix Hoffmann, ‘Property Law Theory and Building Encroachments from a Comparative Perspective’
ABSTRACT Conceptualism has a difficult standing in contemporary private law theory. This also affects discussions in property law, where the research agenda often seems primarily interested in deconceptualization. From a comparative perspective, this complicates the discourse, as many national codifications of property law still adhere to strong concepts. This anti-conceptualist bias also leads to the […]
Dorcas Quek Anderson, ‘A Settlement by “Any Other Name”: Evaluating the Sustainability of Settlement Mechanisms’
ABSTRACT Private settlements have been consistently encouraged by the Singapore civil justice system. Depending on the context, the settlement may take on many forms, including consent orders and settlement agreements. This begs the question of whether the exact form of settlement matters, or whether a settlement ‘by any other name’ suffices. This article proposes the […]
Michael Murray, ‘AI Training is Fair Use: The Beginning of the End of the Copyright Assault on Gen AI’
ABSTRACT Two federal courts overseeing claims against the developers of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) have pointed the way to resolving these infringement actions by finding that the training of GenAI models is a transformative fair use under copyright law. While the two opinions differed in tone and scope, this article takes these rulings as the […]
Talya Deibel, ‘Private Law and the Inner Self: Comparative Perspectives on the Governance of Neurotechnology’
ABSTRACT The main focus of this article is to demonstrate that the legal governance of disruptive technologies requires a nuanced, historically informed, and comparative approach to law. The article takes neurotechnology as its central case study and investigates how private law can reposition itself with respect to potential harm caused by the usage of neurotechnologies. […]
Legg, McNamara and Alimardani, ‘The Promise and the Peril of the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Litigation’
ABSTRACT Generative Artificial Intelligence (‘GenAI’) has been employed by lawyers and parties to litigation in courts and tribunals around the world. While GenAI holds out the promise of more accessible legal services, GenAI also creates risks, such as the production of non-existent or inaccurate case citations and statements of law. Both lawyers and self-represented litigants […]
Prince Saprai, ‘Contract Law and the Common Good’
ABSTRACT According to the standard picture, contractual or market-based relations seem to be in tension with the pursuit of the common good. The pursuit of the common good in public life requires an ethic of mutual concern directed at the pursuit of shared ends. However, on the surface, contract which is the basic building block […]
Seidmann and Frones, ‘Why Have Apology Laws Failed?’
ABSTRACT Apology laws, which exclude evidence of an apology from trial, were widely introduced to reduce litigation. The evidence shows, rather, that these laws have been counterproductive: increasing litigation, primarily by discouraging plaintiffs from dropping their claims. We explain this evidence by extending settlement negotiation models to allow the plaintiff to quit at any stage […]
Eger and Schaefer, ‘A Halfhearted and Indecisive Reform of Collective Redress in Germany’
ABSTRACT We demonstrate that the 2018 German Model Declaratory Action and the 2020 EU Representative Actions Directive do not provide sufficient incentives for owners of diesel cars equipped with ‘defeat devices’ and their representatives to sue Volkswagen AG. Eger, Thomas and Schaefer, Hans-Bernd, A Halfhearted and Indecisive Reform of Collective Redress in Germany (November 26, […]