Monthly Archives: June, 2026
Peter Bo Zhang, ‘Constructive Scienter: An Animal-Law Answer to the AI Responsibility Gap’
ABSTRACT This article recovers an overlooked common law doctrine, the scienter action’s heightened liability for the keeper of a dangerous animal, and brings it to bear on the opaque algorithmic systems through which the state now makes consequential decisions about individuals. It argues that the less a public body can explain a coercive decision, the […]
Tahera Anwar, ‘The Accountability Paradox: Operational Accountability Beyond the Violator Model’
ABSTRACT Traditional human rights law operates on a foundational assumption: a rights violation implies an identifiable violator. Torture has a torturer. Arbitrary detention has a detaining authority. Discrimination has a discriminator. Accountability follows the chain of causation. This paper argues that contemporary governance has disrupted this assumption. In fragmented, multi-agency systems – where authority is […]
Kevin Davis, ‘Inequality and the Regulation of Contracting’
ABSTRACT A long line of scholars and jurists have proposed to use laws that regulate contracting to combat economic inequality. This chapter examines the justifications that have been offered in support of these proposals and how they might be implemented in various areas of contract law. The discussion emphasizes that law may influence inequality by […]
David Finnegan, ‘The Numerus Clausus Principle and Land Law in Africa’
ABSTRACT This article employs a traditional comparative law concept, the numerus clausus principle, to assess the state of land law in Africa using Tanzania as a case study. The numerus clausus principle is observed in both civil law and common law systems, either expressly in national legislation or implicitly in patterns of land rights enforcement. […]
Giuseppe Mazziotti, ‘Music Copyright Infrastructure’
ABSTRACT Between July and October 2025, Fair MusE carried out an intensive Task Force exercise under Work Package 5 of its three-year research programme into music repertoire data asymmetries, licensing practices, and creators’ rights to fair remuneration in the European music ecosystem. The Task Force brought together 35 senior external experts drawn from international and […]
Thomas Smith, ‘Persons Real and Feigned: A Metaphysics of the Legal Person’
ABSTRACT This essay asks what a legal person is, and argues that the law’s many nonhuman persons answer to a single account with three terms and no fourth. A legal person is either a rational substance, an individual being whose own nature is rational, which is what a human being is and the person in […]
Çınar and Yahya, ‘Twenty-five Years of Privacy in Advertising: A Bibliometric Analysis and Thematic Review’
ABSTRACT This study provides a comprehensive analysis of 25 years of research on privacy in advertising. Using a hybrid approach, we combined bibliometric analysis with qualitative thematic review to systematically examine 389 articles from the Web of Science and Scopus. Through bibliometric techniques, we mapped key research trends, highly cited authors, and intellectual structures. To […]
Abrams and Baker, ‘Don’t Go Chasing Litigation Funding Waterfalls’
ABSTRACT Proponents of third-party litigation funding argue that it is socially beneficial, helping parties bring meritorious litigation that otherwise would not be possible, due in part to the ability of the plaintiff to share risk with funders. But the reality of how some third-party funding contracts are structured belies this theory. Many such contracts include […]
‘Why so few cases in the Inner House?’
How much business is there in the Inner House of the Court of Session? This can be looked at in more than one way. The official Civil Justice Statistics tend to measure activity by the number of cases initiated or disposed of. This blog, being interested in court decisions as a source of law, has […]
Matthias Weller, ‘Mutual Trust’
ABSTRACT ‘Mutual trust’ has advanced to one of the most fundamental principles of judicial cooperation in civil and commercial matters and as such of both European civil procedural law and European private international law. In a first step after the Treaty of Amsterdam 1999 mutual trust has established itself as an explanatory and interpretative principle […]