Monthly Archives: June, 2026
Vidhi Nawal, ‘Licensing Agreements and Consumer Interests’
ABSTRACT Licensing agreements have become the most prevalent way of controlling access to digital commodities and services. Not anymore do consumers own the items bought; rather, consumers receive licenses from sellers, allowing them to use the products via contract-based relations. While licensing agreements are very helpful and useful for innovations, for protecting intellectual property rights, […]
Richard Pettigrew, ‘Consent and the Formation of Preferences’
ABSTRACT Under ideal conditions, explicit consent and related actions usually change the moral facts in a distinctive way: they make something permissible that was previously impermissible. But they don’t do this if the consent is coerced. And it seems they also don’t do it if the preferences on which the consent is based were formed […]
Bartosz Biskup, ‘Is analytic legal philosophy capitalist?: Hart, Raz, and Shapiro on the (private) nature of law’
ABSTRACT Mainstream analytic legal philosophy is tacitly supporting capital while presenting itself as neutral conceptual analysis. That is the charge of this paper. My charge is not normative, but methodological. Hart (2012), but also Raz (2009) or Shapiro (2011), argued for what I call an ‘enabler theory’. It argues that law is an empty vessel: […]
‘Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google’
Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews. The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other […]
Bruce Wardhaugh, ‘Ticket touting, moral outrage and political opportunism: how not to protect consumers’
ABSTRACT On 31 August 2024, tickets for the Oasis reunion tour went on sale. The outcome was predictable. Prospective purchasers waited online for hours to buy tickets, many were disappointed. Tickets soon appeared on secondary sites at prices which greatly exceeded originally advertised prices. The resulting outcries fed into the new Government’s manifesto promise to […]
Chen Lin and others, ‘Investor Protection in Venture Capital: How Do Legal Systems Shape Contracting?’
ABSTRACT This paper examines how legal systems shape contractual investor protection by using a distinctive feature of China’s venture capital (VC) market, where investments are structured either through offshore entities governed by common law or through onshore entities subject to domestic civil law. This institutional duality generates substantial within-market variation in legal origin under a […]
Augustin Gridel, ‘Registered Shares in Private International Law – A French and European Perspective’
ABSTRACT The private international law rules governing the ownership of shares have long rested on the modalities of their transfer, which afforded considerable significance to the form they take (registered or bearer). This article seeks to demonstrate that this approach, which is of doctrinal origin, does not in reality determine the applicable law, having regard […]
Adam Hirsch, ‘Advances On Inheritances: Policy, Empirical Evidence, And The Quest For Consistency’
ABSTRACT This Article explores the problem of benefactors who make gifts to those who eventually inherit from them, either as heirs under intestacy statutes or as beneficiaries under wills. Are gifts treated as advances on inheritances and deducted from the amount heirs or beneficiaries eventually receive? Or do gifts supplement inheritances as separate and unrelated […]
‘Cash For Compliance, Buying Obedience After Death’
William A Drennan, ‘RIP – A Financial Incentive to Protect Your Cadaver?’, 129 Penn State Law Review 667 (2025). Who wouldn’t want to control things, even after death? The chance that your surviving family will not obey your wishes after you die is exactly why you create a last will and testament. We all long […]
‘Mind the Gap: A Chancery Barrister’s Preliminary Thoughts on the Cohabitation Reform Consultation’
The Ministry of Justice has released its long-anticipated consultation paper on family law and cohabitation reform. As a practitioner whose daily life is spent dealing with the fallout from broken relationships and disputed estates, my immediate reaction is enthusiastic welcome for the broad spirit of the proposed reform but tempered by anxiety driven by some […]