Monthly Archives: December, 2025
Hao Chen, ‘Crypto as Things in Action: A Normative and Doctrinal Analysis’
ABSTRACT This article presents a normative and doctrinal case for recognising cryptocurrencies as property. It proposes a test grounded in the normative ends of property, use and exchange, and argues that cryptocurrencies which fulfil this test deserve legal protection. From a utilitarian perspective, this recognition enhances social utility by encouraging legitimate use and exchange. From […]
Dorkina Myrick, ‘Assessment of Copyright Infringement in DNA Copies of Literary Works’
ABSTRACT Millennia after the emergence of ancestral human collective memory and storytelling, scientists are revisiting the human body as a viable means of data storage and retrieval. The human brain alone contains the capacity to store large volumes of information – an estimated one million gigabytes – that may be retrieved at a moment’s notice. […]
Elena Izyumenko, ‘Music Metadata as a Fundamental-Rights Question, or EU’s Positive Obligations to Secure Cultural Visibility and Equality Online’
ABSTRACT Music metadata – credits, identifiers, language labels, territorial tags, and genre descriptors – functions as the operative infrastructure of streaming. It shapes what becomes searchable, recommendable, charted, and remunerated. This chapter argues that metadata is therefore not a neutral technical resource but a constitutional site where structural inequality is produced or mitigated. When metadata […]
Fernandez, Gómez-Canaval and Blasco Alís, ‘How much does your car know about you? A Study on the Security and Data Privacy of Connected Car Apps’
ABSTRACT The use of mobile apps (iOS/Android) has become commonplace in standard and high-end vehicle series across various brands. This connectivity is now essential for delivering a new suite of connected services to vehicle owners such as remote control and monitoring. However, as with any advanced technology, the use of mobile apps in vehicles can […]
Filippo Noseda, ‘Trusts without patrimony’
ABSTRACT In a world awash with academic articles on the compatibility of trusts with civil law systems, the author lends his experience as an English solicitor with a Swiss background to shed some light on the interaction between the civil law concept of patrimony and the trust mechanism, focusing on the practical implications for trustees. […]
Kong and Wang, ‘Towards a Unified Commercial Legal System in China’s Greater Bay Area’
ABSTRACT China’s mainland and its two special administrative regions (SARs) – namely, Hong Kong and Macao – practise their own legal systems separately, which harbours legal conflicts associated with inter-regional commercial transactions in the context of closer economic ties between the three jurisdictions. While the conventional ‘conflict-of-law’ rules plus judicial assistance arrangement’ approach may help, […]
Allen and Krever, ‘Who is an Employee? The Unfortunate Tax and Superannuation Legacy of a Transplanted Category’
ABSTRACT In the absence of statutory definitions of terms used in modern statutes, common law judges will rely on longstanding meanings imported from long-established areas of common law, a phenomenon known as transplanted categories. A notable example in Commonwealth income tax and superannuation legislation is the transplantation of the common law definition of an employee […]
Houba and Motchenkova, ‘Personalized pricing and consumer privacy’
ABSTRACT Advances in data collection enable firms to use consumer information for personalized pricing. In Clavorà Braulin’s (2023) symmetric two-dimensional model, this reduces prices and profits, while partial privacy yields the highest profits. Extending the model to asymmetric firms and vertically differentiated products, we show that these results are not robust under sizable asymmetries. Partial […]
Miranda Mourby, ‘Private by default: reasonable expectations in secondary uses of patient data’
ABSTRACT The ‘reasonable expectations of privacy’ test has become central to English information law. The fact-specificity of this test has obfuscated the scope of patients’ privacy rights. In both R (W, X, Y and Z) v Secretary of State for Health and Prismall v Google, the claimants were found to lack a circumstantially reasonable expectation […]
McTigue and Slawe, ‘Private Power, Public Harm: The Coercive Dynamics of Mass Arbitration’
Arbitration plays a vital role in offering consumers and employees an efficient forum for resolving disputes, especially as courts face growing constraints. However, the rise of abusive mass arbitrations aimed at extracting settlements – regardless of whether the claims asserted have any merit—distorts this system, harming businesses, consumers, and employees alike … (more, download) Michael […]