Monthly Archives: July, 2026
Juan Carlos Ibarra, ‘Racial Legal Entitlements and Heirs’ Property’
ABSTRACT Heirs’ property – land inherited by multiple family members, most commonly by intestate succession – produces disproportionate land loss for Black families and other families of color when outsiders force the sale of commonly owned land. Existing scholarship has documented heirs’ property’s racialized consequences and generated significant legal and policy reforms. Yet these efforts […]
Marco Pasqua, ‘Adapting Private International Law to Anti-SLAPP Litigation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’
ABSTRACT Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are legal actions – most commonly based on defamation, privacy or related claims – brought not to genuinely assert or protect a right, but to prevent, restrict or penalise public participation. They are typically characterised by an imbalance of power between the parties, the use of procedural tactics […]
Menell, Lemley, Merges and Balganesh, ‘Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age: 2026 Supplement’
ABSTRACT This Supplement updates Intellectual Property in the New Technological: 2025 to reflect significant changes in the PTO’s inter partes review process, the Supreme Court’s patent active inducement liability decision in Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc v Amarin Pharma, Inc, 146 S Ct 1391 (2026), and the Supreme Court’s indirect copyright liability decision in Cox Communications, […]
Howard Erichson, ‘The Continuing Challenge of Mass Tort Litigation Against the Gun Industry’
ABSTRACT Why hasn’t full-blown mass tort litigation developed concerning harms from firearms? Gun litigation contrasts with numerous examples of litigation over widespread harms, where mass tort litigation has come to follow a rather familiar pattern of growth from initial lawsuits into aggregate litigation with leadership counsel structures and a global-resolution endgame. Some commentators predict that […]
Josef Drexl, ‘EU Copyright reform: Between promoting AI-based innovation and safeguarding the livelihood of authors and democracy’
ABSTRACT The advent of generative AI, which enables the production of high-quality content comparable to copyright- protected works at significantly lower cost, poses a significant threat to the livelihoods of many creative professionals. If these professionals were driven out of the market, this could also have serious implications for democracy. In response to this situation, […]
Mark Geistfeld, ‘Recovering Strict Products Liability for the Age of AI’
ABSTRACT The rule of strict products liability in section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts is widely assumed to have been formulated to address manufacturing defects. Relying on this assumption, the Restatement (Third) of Torts defines manufacturing defects as departures from the product’s design and therefore from the manufacturer’s manifest intent. Because virtually all […]
Benjamin Landry, ‘Towards a Better Use of Real Property Rules in Copyright Coownership’
ABSTRACT The rules of copyright coownership in American law are broken. Because the Copyright Act is silent, courts treat copyright coowners as tenants in common-a set of rules borrowed from the law of real property. These rules work well in many respects, but much less so in others because real property and copyrights are fundamentally […]
Luís de Lima Pinheiro, ‘Law Applicable to International AI Torts, A Note on a Forthcoming Contribution’
ABSTRACT This note summarizes the analysis, key insights and proposals advanced in the contribution ‘Law Applicable to International AI Torts: An Introduction’, forthcoming in Memorial Publication in Honour of Prof Dr Dr hc mult Erik Jayme, ed by Martin Gebauer and Heinz-Peter Mansel, Verlag Gieseking, Bielefeld, to be published in May 2027. The choice of […]
Dinelli, Carne and Archibald, ‘Letting Bird Fly: Vicarious Liability and the Question of Statutory Intervention’
ABSTRACT In Bird v DP, the High Court clarified the law of vicarious liability. It insisted that a relationship of employment was a ‘necessary precursor’ for vicarious liability to attach. This Australian divergence from the jurisprudential approach of the United Kingdom and Canada has meant that, for many survivors of historic sexual abuse, the quest […]
Ward and Croucher, ‘A Mark of Contempt: Spitting, Dignity, and the Misclassification of Harm in Law’
ABSTRACT Spitting is commonly treated in legal contexts as a minor physical or public health offence; however, this classification reflects a broader doctrinal tendency to prioritise contact-based and biohazard models of harm. This paper argues that contemporary assault doctrine often privileges visible and measurable injury, resulting in the under-recognition of symbolic and dignity-based harms. Using […]