Category Archives: General
‘Are Wrongs Always Right Violations?’
Nico Cornell, Wrongs and Rights Come Apart (2025). Nico Cornell’s terrific book Wrongs and Rights Come Apart rejects the commonly held view that moral wrongs are simply moral right violations. Rather, wrongs and rights ‘come apart’: there can be wrongs without right violations and right violations without wrongs. The book proceeds by providing a range […]
Arthur Ripstein, ‘The law’s own terms’
ABSTRACT In this short article, I cannot do justice to all of the aspects of The Idea of Private Law, let alone to all aspects of the private legal relationship that is its subject matter. Instead, I limit myself to a brief description of the order in which these aspects of the relation develop before […]
David von der Thannen, ‘The “End of History” and International Arbitration: An Empirical Study on the Civil v Common Law Divide’
ABSTRACT When lawyers speak of comparative law, they mostly think of the ‘civil’ and the ‘common law’ − two legal traditions that are widely viewed as isolated from one another. In the realm of international arbitration, however, these traditions inevitably collide. Accordingly, authors have rightly referred to arbitration as a ‘real-life laboratory for the development […]
Alex Raskolnikov, ‘A new view of formal equality and a case for predistribution’
ABSTRACT A long-held egalitarian view is that formal equality – the absence of formal legal distinctions based on the material resources of individuals – is regressive. If legal rules are the same for the rich and the poor, the rich benefit and the poor suffer. This Essay argues that this view is mistaken. Far from […]
Andrew Gold, ‘The Many Kinds of Justice in Private Law’
ABSTRACT Private law theorists often employ a single type of justice to explain the field. Typically, the chosen type is corrective justice. While it is true that courts look to do ‘justice between the parties’, I will argue that ‘justice between the parties’ is an open-ended category that encapsulates multiple types of justice. Seeing private […]
Vincent Okonkwo, ‘Is Money Money? Digital Currencies, Moneyness, and the Future of the Legal Fiction of Money’
ABSTRACT Most academic analyses on the ‘money’ status of cryptocurrency are performed either formalistically or superficially. The paper on the subject and the unity of conclusions are suggestive of this fact. These assessments religiously ask whether cryptocurrencies meet ‘definitive’ standards of ‘money-ness’ in monetary economics. They would mostly resolve that cryptocurrencies do not. This article […]
Lionel Smith, ‘Obligation and Duty – Two Things or One?’
ABSTRACT This paper examines, from a conceptual and lexicographical perspective, the question whether there is a difference between owing an ‘obligation’ and owing a ‘duty’. It argues that although the words are sometimes used as synonyms, there is a clearly articulable sense in which obligations (that is, the burdensome end of them) are a subset […]
‘The Veil of Legislative Intent’
Francesca Poggi and Francesco Ferraro, ‘From the Ideal Legislator to the Competent Speaker: Uncovering theDeception in Legislative Intent’, 15 Jurisprudence 464 (2024). What lies behind one of our most engrained and persistent assumptions in law – the existence of a specific kind of intention underlying the utterances of an authority? This is the question that […]
Steven Schwarcz, ‘Commercial Reasonableness’
ABSTRACT This Article examines the critical but largely unaddressed subject of commercial reasonableness. The inquiry is important because, inter alia, commercial reasonableness can signal the presence of good faith, which is an implied duty in all contracts; whereas commercially unreasonable behavior signals bad faith. A transaction that is not commercially reasonable may be unenforceable. The […]
Manish Oza, ‘Justiciability in Private Law: Religion and Politics’
ABSTRACT This paper is about whether private law disputes are ever non-justiciable. I argue that, as a general rule, a private law dispute is justiciable if and only if the claim asserts that the plaintiff’s legal rights have been breached by the defendant. Contrary to recent suggestions, there is no rule that renders disputes non-justiciable […]