Monthly Archives: September, 2026
Paula Giliker, ‘Solving the “parent company problem”: should parent companies be held directly or vicariously liable for the torts of their subsidiaries?’
INTRODUCTION In Okpabi v Royal Dutch Shell plc, the UK Supreme Court examined a claim in the law of tort against the parent company of an overseas subsidiary. The case involved allegations of serious environmental pollution and damage caused by oil leaks in the Niger Delta from pipelines and associated infrastructure operated by the defendant’s […]
Mingdong He, ‘The Responsibility Anchor – Why AI Law Needs a Bearer before it needs a Person’
ABSTRACT The Article’s starting point is a structural omission in the literature on AI responsibility. The three standard answers to the question of AI wrongdoing — the responsibility-gap literature (who is responsible when human control is too thin for blame to attach?), the legal-personhood debate (should an AI system be granted legal personality?), and the […]
Keith Hylton, ‘Patents and Incentives to Assign, License, or Litigate’
ABSTRACT This paper presents a model of the activity of patent intermediaries and potential infringers in a system of costly patent litigation. Because the intermediary, in comparison to the inventor, has a more credible threat to sue, both the revenue from infringement litigation and the intrinsic value of the patent are greater in the intermediary’s […]
Marco Cappelletti, ‘Rylands v Fletcher Redux: Rubis Bahamas Ltd v Russell’
ABSTRACT The decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Rubis Bahamas Ltd v Russell is the most significant development in the law of Rylands v Fletcher for decades. Rejecting the view that the rule is merely a sub-species of private nuisance, the Committee reconstructed it as an independent rule of strict liability […]
David Horton, ‘Probate Codes as Procedural Codes’
ABSTRACT In every state, a collection of statutes called the Probate Code is the main source of substantive inheritance law. However, Probate Codes also serve another purpose: if litigation arises in probate court, they operate as codes of civil procedure. And although probate procedures are arguably more important than ever – over the next two […]
‘What AI Chatbots Can Teach Us About Unmet Legal Needs’
Despite growing public discussion about its potential role in the justice system, we still know remarkably little about how ordinary people are already using generally available tools like ChatGPT when they encounter legal problems. In turn, we are overlooking what those interactions can tell us about our justice system itself. To understand this shift, researchers […]
Lazcano and Jaime, ‘Damage To Social Life as an Autonomous Loss in Contemporary Civil Liability’
ABSTRACT This article analyzes, from both a doctrinal and jurisprudential perspective, the category of harm to social life within contemporary civil liability. In contrast to the old, purely patrimonial paradigm, this research addresses the evolution of non-material damages, highlighting the autonomy of relational harm from traditional moral damages. While the latter compensates for internal affliction […]
Rachel Landy, ‘Deal Killers’
ABSTRACT Up to 40% of M&A deals are believed to die during diligence, but there is scant literature examining why – until now. Using original interviews with practitioners, this Article examines what causes buyers of private companies to abandon deals after entering into a nonbinding (but ‘sticky’) preliminary agreement and describes what the lawyer can […]
Jay Feinman, ‘The Purposes of Insurance Law Revisited’
ABSTRACT This paper was presented at a symposium celebrating the illustrious career of Professor Kenneth S Abraham, using as a marker the fortieth anniversary of the publication of his book, Distributing Risk: Insurance, Legal Theory, and Public Policy. The book was a landmark in the study of insurance and insurance law in the United States. […]
Enrico Baffi, ‘To Provide for Damages Is Not to Authorize: Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Tort Law in Italy’
ABSTRACT This paper examines whether Italian tort law can properly be described through the liability rule model developed by Calabresi and Melamed. It argues that the conventional law-and-economics view of tort liability as a system that permits harmful conduct subject to the payment of damages does not accurately describe the structure of Italian law. The […]