Monthly Archives: November, 2026
‘Extending the Brussels Ia Regulation to Third State Defendants: a Gift from the EU to London’s Litigation Market?’
Businesses, lawyers, and courts appreciate simpler rules, especially for cross-border litigation. But a simpler rulebook is not necessarily a better bargain. The European Commission’s current consultation on potentially reforming the Brussels Ia Regulation includes a particularly consequential question: should the European Union (EU) jurisdiction rules extend generally to defendants domiciled outside the EU? As I […]
Thomas Gallanis, ‘Trusts and Donative Freedom: What Can We Learn from Law and Economics?’
ABSTRACT The trusts currently provoking the most controversy in the United States are silent trusts, asset protection trusts, and perpetual or near-perpetual trusts. A silent trust, also known as a quiet trust, is a trust in which the settlor eliminates or heavily restricts the beneficiaries’ access to information about the trust and its administration. An […]
Michael Mehling, ‘The Law of Carbon Markets’
ABSTRACT Although carbon markets have their conceptual origin in economic theory, they are – like other markets – a social construct built on legal rights and obligations. Law becomes relevant on both a theoretical and a more practical level. Economic theory has long posited that enforceable property rights are necessary to address externalities with bargained […]
Bingwan Xiong, ‘How Could Private Law Address Gender Inequality and Sexual Harassment?’
ABSTRACT As opposed to the domain-specific laws against sexual harassment adopted in the US or France, China has adopted a distinct approach by codifying sexual harassment in the Book on Personality Rights. Unlike earlier domain-specific legislation – particularly the Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests (LPWRI) – Art 1010 enshrines protection against […]
Taylor Koles, ‘Solving the Dual Puzzles of Collective Harm’
ABSTRACT Suppose some uncoordinated group of agents causes tremendous harm, but none of the individuals could have meaningfully changed this result by acting differently. These ‘collective harm’ cases have been the subject of extended philosophical discussion, but this paper argues that there are really two different, if connected, puzzles presented by such cases: (1) a […]
Péter Szigeti, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Doppelgängers: The Creation of Rightlessness and the Right to Have (Private) Rights’
ABSTRACT After decades of efforts to expand the protections of human rights to all humanity, the opposite is increasingly taking place today: the creation of rightlessness is back in vogue. The undocumented – illegal immigrants, stateless persons, and refugees – are at the forefront of policies aimed at dispossessing and deporting large numbers of residents; […]
Douglas Brodie, ‘Dual Liability and Risk Allocation’
ABSTRACT The decision of the Court of Appeal in Burger v Risk Solutions raises some interesting questions as to when a temporary employer will be vicariously liable for a borrowed worker. Burger gives rise to cause for concern over the impact of outsourcing on an employer’s responsibilities for those injured through the conduct of the […]
Blyschak and Chan, ‘Non-Binding No More? Entire Agreement Clauses and the Factual Matrix in Commercial Transactions’
ABSTRACT Are entire agreement (EA) clauses among sophisticated commercial parties enforceable under Canadian common law to exclude reliance on preliminary deal documents in a contractual interpretation dispute? Recent decisions, such as that of the Ontario Court of Appeal in Project Freeway, suggest that the answer is ‘no’. We posit that a principal source of confusion […]
Petrus Christiaan Biermannorg, ‘Beyond Ownership: Control, Administration and Benefit in Comparative Trust Law’
ABSTRACT Comparative trust scholarship has long recognised that ‘ownership’ is an unstable comparator across civilian and common law systems, yet it has not supplied an affirmative replacement independent of any one tradition’s doctrinal vocabulary. This article proposes a three-axis framework — control, administration and benefit — as an alternative unit of comparison. The axes distinguish […]