Monthly Archives: October, 2025
Paulo Barrozo, ‘Capitalism and Jurisprudence’
ABSTRACT In our time, an amorphous and undertheorized notion of capitalism is the target of jurisprudential antipathy. Capitalism is indicted as the creator of ills and as the inhibitor of equality, freedom, truth, justice, democracy, human flourishing, planetary life, peace, and more. Among natural law and critical legal theorists in the United States, only liberalism […]
Jonathan Barnett, ‘The Free Content Illusion’
ABSTRACT Peer-to-peer file sharing in the early 2000s destabilized traditional content markets and associated business models that rely on preserving control over the use of creative assets. Academics and other commentators widely argued that robust forms of intellectual property rights had been rendered largely obsolete in a digital environment of low production and distribution costs. […]
Dagan and Heller, ‘Genuinely Liberal Contract Law’
ABSTRACT Prepared for the Bocconi Conference on Contract Theory, this brief Essay distills highlights and takeaways from our book-in-progress Freedom of Contract. In the book, we first crystallize the guiding principles of a genuinely liberal contract theory, then demonstrate how this theory shapes contract law and where law falls short, and finally show how freedom […]
Liu and Lin, ‘Commercialise or Sleep? Capturing Value from Patenting’
ABSTRACT We develop a sequential model to examine patent litigation, acquisition, and commercialization decisions in innovative industries. The model focuses on potential intellectual property disputes among two patent-holding firms with overlapping technologies and a non-patent-owning producer. We highlight the role of the belief gap, defined as the difference between the patent owner’s and other market […]
Gabriel Klapholz, ‘Transitory Torts: The International Roots of American Interstate Liability’
ABSTRACT This paper argues that the so-called ‘transitory-tort doctrine’ is a background principle underlying much of American state tort law. I contend that calling the transitory-tort doctrine a ‘doctrine’ is a misnomer. The principle that state courts can exercise jurisdiction over tortious conduct that transpired outside their borders is an organic, bedrock feature of American […]
Lora, Benítez-Rueda and Rueda-Sanz, ‘Property Informality and Its Effect on Rural Land Prices in Colombia’
ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of property informality on rural land prices in Colombia. It utilizes data for 16 land size categories for a fifth of Colombia’s municipalities. It employs the Gaussian copula approach to overcome endogeneity issues. The main finding is that an exogenous variation of property informality significantly reduces rural land prices […]
Michael Bridge, ‘Market Damages or Compensation?’
ABSTRACT This paper deals with the tension between the compensatory role of damages and an approach to damages (the market approach) that calculates damages pragmatically with an eye to ease of assessment. The market damages approach, as it applies, for example, to a buyer’s damages for non-delivery, closes out the contract according to the difference […]
Steven Schaus, ‘Harms, Relationships, and the Contours of Liability for Emotional Distress’
ABSTRACT In Reasonableness and Risk, Greg Keating argues that the law of torts is ‘preoccupied’ with harm – with safeguarding conditions of effective agency. In this comment, I ask whether Keating’s picture can make sense of the tort claims, like loss of consortium, that provide some measure of protection to relationships – and to marriage-like […]
Glynn Lunney, ‘Copyright, Incentives, and Popular Music Composition’
ABSTRACT The rise of file sharing and the subsequent collapse in sales of recorded music offer a rare glimpse into a counterfactual world where copyright, for a time, was weakened. Comparing creative output before and after this exogenous shock allows us to test empirically whether incentives to copyright owners were correlated with creative output. In […]
‘The Case for NIL as Property’
Mitchell F Crusto, ‘What is Property?: A Libertarian Perspective of Name, Image, and Likeness’, 16 Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law 1 (2025). In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in NCAA v Alston rocked college athletics by dismantling the NCAA’s amateurism model. In the wake of Alston, the ability of student-athletes to profit from […]