Monthly Archives: May, 2026
NeJaime and Joslin, ‘The Legal Recognition of Multiparent Families: Findings from an Empirical Study’
ABSTRACT Statutes in a growing number of states authorize a court to recognize more than two legal parents of a child. Commentators tend to treat both multiparent legal recognition and the multiparent families they capture as novel and cutting-edge. Through an empirical study, we show that multiparent recognition and multiparent families are neither novel nor […]
Gommers, Leppink and Schneider, ‘Round-up of European enforcement case law 2026’
ABSTRACT In 2025, several noteworthy decisions relating to the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) were handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the national courts of the European Union Member States. These judgments rendered between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2025 are summarized in this contribution. As […]
Faiz Surani and others, ‘AI for scaling legal reform: mapping and redacting racial covenants in Santa Clara County’
ABSTRACT Legal reform can be challenging due to the volume, complexity, and interdependence of laws, codes, and records. One salient example is racially restrictive covenants. In 2021, California mandated that counties identify and redact such covenants, but implementation has proved challenging, with 84 million pages in Santa Clara County (SCC) alone. Through a partnership with […]
Kelly Willis, ‘Moral Rights in America: Mitigating the Economic Impact of the Visual Artists Rights Act’
ABSTRACT Moral rights are virtually nonexistent in the American legal framework with one notable exception: the Visual Artists Rights Act. The little known Act provides visual artists with limited rights regarding authorship and modification of their works, meant to protect their artistic integrity. While litigation involving the Act is relatively sparse, there have been costly […]
Gill and Keil, ‘Teleology Predicts Intuitive Judgments of Liability’
ABSTRACT People possess a teleological stance: we represent artifacts in terms of intended function. Yet, modern tort law is largely agnostic to function in product liability cases: jurors are instructed to permit any foreseeable use or misuse. Here, across three pre-registered studies (N = 742), we examine intuitions on product cases, exploring the downstream consequences […]
Call for submissions: Berkeley/Texas/Toronto/Yale Private Law Junior Faculty Forum, Berkeley Law School, 9-10 April 2027
The Berkeley/Texas/Toronto/Yale Private Law Junior Faculty Forum (BETTY) is a platform dedicated to fostering in-depth exchange of ideas on the conceptual and normative foundations of private law. It aims to build an engaged community of private law scholars, with a particular emphasis on strengthening connections between junior and senior professors. The second session of the […]
James Pfander, ‘Constitutional Torts and the Problem of Government Policy: An Essay for Marshall Shapo’
ABSTRACT This Essay honoring Professor Shapo tackles a growing problem in constitutional litigation: the problem of how to litigate clandestine federal government policies. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Ziglar v Abbasi, denying any right to sue for damages when contesting detention policy, echoed an increasingly prevalent view that the Bivens action does not apply to […]
Greenleaf and Lindsay, ‘Copyright’s Public Domains: The Limits on AI Appropriation’
ABSTRACT The spectacular rise to commercial and intellectual prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) since 2022, and in particular the predominant role of generative AI and its use of large language models (LLMs), has given rise to many legal and policy problems. Four main types of problems for copyright law are sketched, in each of which […]
Krzysztof Chmielarz, ‘Mediator in the Polish Civil trial’
ABSTRACT The article discusses the results of research on the functioning of judicial mediation in civil cases. The effectiveness of mediation is assessed on the basis of the number of concluded settlements or discontinued proceedings as a result of approval of the settlement concluded before the mediator. In the course of the research, the reasons […]
Justine Pila, ‘Creation, Publication, and Moral Rights: An Illocutionary Account’
ABSTRACT The existence and legal recognition of authors’ moral rights are generally ascribed to a Hegelian conception of works as extensions of their creator’s personality. I argue that this conception ignores the dialectical nature of works, as creative and intellectual expressions of a person which nevertheless claim a certain autonomy essential for their recognition and […]