Monthly Archives: August, 2026
‘The risk of unclear contract terms and evidentiary deficiencies to entitlement claims’
Contracts play a critical role in clarifying the ownership and transfer of IP, but frequently define the IP with reference to broad and non-specific terms. A recent Australian Patent Office decision in ThermoChem Recovery International Inc v FULC JV LLC [2026] APO 14 highlights how inadequate evidence of the specifics of the contract provisions and […]
Northon Salomão De Oliveira, ‘Artificial Intelligence Liability and Tort Law: Causation, Foreseeability, and Legal Responsibility for Autonomous AI Harm’
ABSTRACT Tort doctrine allocates liability for machine-caused harm by asking what a reasonable manufacturer could have foreseen at the moment a product left its hands. That question assumes a product whose risk profile is fixed at the point of sale. Autonomous artificial intelligence systems violate this assumption: their decision-making capacities change after deployment through continued […]
Adrian McCullagh, ‘Australian Directors’ Duties and the Deployment of Artificial Intelligence’
ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (‘AI’) is no longer a peripheral tool in Australian boardrooms. It is being deployed across credit decisioning, fraud and scam detection, customer service, financial advice, cybersecurity monitoring, and increasingly board and management decision-support itself. This uptake proceeds against a regulatory backdrop in which Australia has, to date, chosen not to enact AI-specific […]
Rebecca Nocella, ‘Holding onto status: why the Employment Rights Act 2025 leaves digital workers behind’
INTRODUCTION In a society where technology mediates nearly every aspect of daily life – from banking and paying bills to maintaining personal connections – the gig or platform economy has emerged as a seemingly convenient opportunity. Its promise of flexible, on-demand work, often at the click of a mouse, has proven to be particularly appealing […]
‘Harmonisation of Tort Law Revisited’ (special issue of Journal of European Tort Law)
Harmonisation of Tort Law Revisited: Where We Stand and Where We are Headed (Barbara C Steininger) Court Practice and Harmonisation – Status and Challenges in the Face of Modern Tort Law (Bjarte Askeland) Tort Reform over a Quarter-Century – Are European Statutory Tort Laws Converging? (Marta Infantino) EU Law as a Force for Harmonisation of […]
Myriam Gilles, ‘Procedural Individuation’
ABSTRACT From climate change to platform monopolies to systemic discrimination, the defining injuries of modern life are collective in nature. Yet American procedural law increasingly insists on individualized harm, individualized proof, and individualized adjudication. Across doctrines once understood as distinct – standing, class certification, arbitration, pleading, remedies, and preclusion – federal courts are converging around […]
Northon Salomão De Oliveira, ‘Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Systems and the Future of Legal Responsibility’
ABSTRACT Fault-based and even strict-liability doctrines share an assumption that is quietly failing in the age of autonomous systems: that harm can be traced to a discrete, identifiable decision. Reinforcement-learned and continuously updated systems now generate outcomes that no designer selected, no operator approved, and no single dataset predicted. This article examines the resulting ’emergent-behavior […]
Carter, Deakin, McCormack and Pourkermani, ‘On the Economic Consequences (and Causes) of Labour Laws: Estimating the Impact of the Employment Rights Act 2025’
ABSTRACT This article examines the legal and economic effects of the Employment Rights Act 2025. It applies the Cambridge Centre for Business Research Labour Regulation Index (CBR-LRI), together with newly developed subindices, to measure the Act’s effect on the strength of labour law protections in the UK, and to benchmark those changes against OECD countries. […]
Bashayer Almajed, ‘Why English Tort Law and Imported Civil Law Models Have No Place in Modern Africa: Time to Break Free’
ABSTRACT It is perhaps unsurprising that recent years have witnessed a forceful movement towards what is often termed ‘decolonisation’ – a conscious rejection of structures, narratives, and institutions rooted in colonial dominance. Yet, while symbolic and cultural remnants of colonialism have been actively challenged, its most enduring legacy – the law – remains comparatively insulated from meaningful reform. Nowhere is this […]
Arafat Rahman Akram, ‘Tort Liability and Remedial Fragmentation in Bangladesh: A Comparative European Perspective: Private Law, Statutory Compensation and Constitutional Remedies’
ABSTRACT Bangladesh is often described as a jurisdiction in which tort law is absent or seriously underdeveloped. That description captures the rarity of reported tort litigation but obscures a more complicated remedial structure. Ordinary courts recognise negligence and vicarious liability; sector-specific statutes provide compensation for death, workplace injury, road crashes and custodial abuse; and the […]