Monthly Archives: September, 2025
Call for papers and posters: Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Annual Conference 2026
The SLSA Annual Conference will take place between Monday 30 March and Wednesday 1 April 2026 at the University of Sussex campus in Falmer, Brighton. The conference has been running since the association was founded in 1990 and is an opportunity for those in the field of socio-legal studies to share knowledge and network with […]
Guinea, Pandya, Sharma and Zilli, ‘The Impact of Increased Mass Litigation in the UK’
SUMMARY Over the past decade, the United Kingdom has seen a marked rise in collective litigation, transforming what was once a niche legal, rarely employed, tool into a fast-growing business model with wide-ranging economic implications. At a time when the country seeks to boost investment, support innovation and attract global business, the proliferation of mass […]
Moreno-Cervera de la Cuesta and Aránguez Díaz, ‘Forging the Corporate Duty to Mitigate Climate Change: Milieudefensie v Shell’
ABSTRACT The appellate judgment in Milieudefensie v ShelL reaffirms the corporate duty to mitigate climate change under Dutch tort law. However, the Court of Appeal overturned the lower court’s imposition of an absolute 45% emissions reduction target by 2030, deeming it inappropriate. This decision provides two key lessons for future litigation. First, while the court […]
Hannah Carrese, ‘Mr Locke’s enclosure: the uncommon law of property in the Second Treatise’
ABSTRACT John Locke, famously, told a property origin story. This article tells a property theory origin story, asking how Locke’s property theory, which omits common rights, emerged from a common law of property that centred them – and showing how this omission influenced the colonial American law that Locke drafted. Locke was silent on or […]
Hongbin Xiao and others, ‘PEAT-LLM4LCR:Chinese Legal Contract Automatic Review Tool Integrating Prompt Engineering and Agent Technology’
ABSTRACT Legal contract review faces critical automation challenges due to complex unstructured contract texts and sophisticated legal reasoning requirements, particularly in Chinese legal contexts where traditional manual methods suffer from low efficiency and error-prone outcomes. PEAT-LLM4LCR addresses these challenges by introducing a comprehensive automated contract review solution specifically optimized for Chinese legal documents, integrating prompt […]
Richard Warner, ‘Adequate Privacy: The Place and Importance of Individual Control’
ABSTRACT The long-established individual control conception of informational privacy is that informational privacy requires individual control over what others do with information about one. Leading privacy law scholars have recently inveighed against this conception. They urge us to see informational privacy as a matter of the degree to which information about one is neither known […]
‘Freeing the Nonfreehold Estate: Climate Change and Tenant Protections’
Clara Potter and Lauren Godshall, ‘Renting at the Edge of the World: Climate Change Protections Failing Renters’, 74 Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 117 (2024). When teaching property law, professors often reference the historical distinction between the freehold estate and the nonfreehold estate. The nobles held the freehold estates; the peasants held the […]
‘The Anthropic Settlement: What It Means for Authors, AI Firms, and Copyright’
Over the summer of 2025, the much-watched case Bartz v Anthropic took an unexpected turn: the parties reached a proposed settlement for US$1.5 billion. This development raises a number of legal, practical, and doctrinal questions — especially for authors, publishers, and institutions grappling with generative AI. But first, some background information on the litigation. The […]
Yuvaraj and Giblin, ‘Copyright Reversion: Reclaiming Lost Culture and Getting Creators Paid’
ABSTRACT Copyright is meant to promote access to knowledge and culture and reward creators. But around the world, publishers, record labels and other investors continue to hoover up the rights and rewards due to creators and leave masses of creativity locked away from the public. This book shows why this bargain is broken, and how […]
Yuchen Zhao, ‘Defending family justice: a new approach against enforcing premarital agreements’
ABSTRACT Premarital agreements have become enforceable in the USA over the past few decades. Traditionally unenforceable due to public policy concerns, these agreements gained acceptance amid the advancement of gender equality. Yet, critics argue that the enforcement of premarital agreements may actually perpetuate economic vulnerabilities among women. These gender injustice-based critiques, however, are not entirely […]