Author Archives:
Kerry Sun, ‘Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia 2026 SCC 16: a new tort of intimate partner violence’
INTRODUCTION In Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia, the Supreme Court of Canada took the unprecedented step of inaugurating a novel ‘tort of intimate partner violence’ targeting coercive control. In giving benediction to this new nominate tort, the judgment charts a creative path for the law of torts in Canada, which will be of interest to Anglo-Commonwealth scholars […]
Kelsey, Chakravarty, Kim and Melkonyan, ‘Investment Incentives under Contractual Unawareness’
ABSTRACT We study investment incentives when contracts do not cover all payoff-relevant contingencies. In a principal-agent model with moral hazard, the agent’s non-contractible investment changes both the distribution over contracted contingencies and the probability of an unforeseen contingency governed by legal default and ex post negotiation. First, we develop a framework separating awareness effects across […]
Alexander Ressos, ‘Contentious trusts: when legacies divide – The court’s supervisory jurisdiction, the integrity of the trust and the limits of settlor control in cross-border family disputes – English, offshore, Hong Kong, Singapore, Swiss, and Liechtenstein perspectives’
ABSTRACT Across the common-law trust world, settlors entrench family wealth structures with confidentiality clauses, reserved powers, duty-excluding clauses, protector vetoes, no-contest clauses, firewalls and exclusive-jurisdiction clauses. This article argues that none of these devices can oust the court’s irreducible supervisory jurisdiction over the administration of a trust: they merely relocate the dispute to information rights, […]
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 […]