Monthly Archives: June, 2026
Zachary Price, ‘Jack Daniel’s Unintended Consequences for Expressive Works: A Sober Assessment of the Aftermath’
ABSTRACT The Supreme Court’s decision in Jack Daniel’s muddied the boundary between trademark law and the First Amendment. By redefining source identification as the threshold to the test established in Rogers v Grimaldi, the Court recentered First Amendment protection in line with the core tenets of trademark law, those based on limiting consumer confusion as […]
Liubomir Nikiforov, ‘EU Collective Redress for Inferred Groups: Standing and Compensation under the GDPR, the Representative Actions Directive and the AI Act’
ABSTRACT EU laws remain structurally misaligned with how algorithmic systems generate harms. This paper identifies an ‘EU collective redress gap’ for harms to algorithmic ‘groups of persons’. It uses doctrinal comparison of the GDPR, the Representative Actions Directive (RAD) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), complemented by case studies of TPC v Oracle/Salesforce and […]
‘Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia: A profound shift in how Canadian tort law recognises and redresses intimate partner violence – but what will the material impacts be for survivors?’
In Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia 2026 SCC 16, the Supreme Court of Canada recognised (6-3) a new tort of intimate partner violence, based on coercive and controlling behaviour, overturning the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision that the character of intimate partner violence could be captured by the existing torts of battery, assault and intention to inflict […]
Evans, Jones, O’Kane, Steer and Birch, ‘Professional liability, regulatory and coverage update: what happened in 2025 and what’s next in 2026?’
1.1 CAUSING DAMAGE BY UNLAWFUL MEANS In recent years there have been increased attempts to frame claims against solicitors in innovative ways stemming from economic torts, such as unlawful means conspiracies. 2025 saw one noteworthy such decision in Vanquis v TMS Legal Ltd demonstrating that these still comparatively unusual causes of action can be deployed […]
David Rouch, ‘Fiduciaries’ duties in flux: directors’ and pension trustees’ action on systemic climate threats in the face of a commons dilemma’
INTRODUCTION Speaking extra-judicially in 2019, Lord Sales, a Justice of the United Kingdom (UK) Supreme Court, expressed the opinion that, ‘there is much force in the view that directors may and increasingly must … accord significant weight to climate change in their decision-making … the old dichotomy between a company’s financial success and its environmental […]
English and Winzer, ‘The interpretation of oral contracts’
INTRODUCTION ‘[O]ne of the most fundamental principles’ of English contract law is that the parties’ rights and obligations are determined objectively (the objectivity principle). Whether the parties have formed an agreement, what the terms of that agreement are, and whether they intended for it to be legally binding ‘depends not upon their subjective state of […]
Andrew Tettenborn, ‘Stating facts and promising their truth: warranties, representations and the law of contract’
INTRODUCTION An awkward problem has recently arisen over misrepresentation in contract. It is hornbook law that a contractor can state a fact in the course of contractual negotiation without going so far as to promise that it is true. This is the intuitive idea underlying the long line of ‘mere misrepresentation vs warranty’ decisions familiar […]
Call for Papers: Obligations XII: King’s College London, 13-16 July 2027
The Twelfth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations will be held at King’s College London from 13-16 July 2027. The Conference will be jointly organised by James Lee of King’s College London and Andrew Robertson of the University of Melbourne. The theme of the conference will be ‘Reforming the Law of Obligations’. This theme […]
Abraham and Sharkey, ‘Insurance and the Law of Artificial Intelligence’
ABSTRACT This Essay predicts that concerns about the insurability and insurance of AI liability will prove to be either exaggerated or unwarranted as the future unfolds. AI liability is already covered by a number of existing forms of ‘silent’ liability insurance. We also predict the growth of ‘affirmative’ AI insurance that expressly covers specified AI […]
Douglas Richmond, ‘The Liability Insurer’s Duty to Defend “Suits”’
INTRODUCTION Insurance policies are contracts. Standard liability insurance policies state that the insurer ‘will pay those sums that the insured becomes legally obligated to pay as damages because of “bodily injury” or “property damage” to which [the policy] applies’ and that the insurer ‘will have the right and duty to defend the insured against any […]