Category Archives: General
Taekema and van der Burg, ‘Globalisation: A Call for Contextualising Legal Research and Reframing Its Background Theory’
ABSTRACT This article argues that globalisation poses a serious challenge to the traditional way of doing legal doctrinal research. Globalisation drives us towards comparison, creating comparative awareness; it creates the need to understand multidimensional legal orders; and it problematises the paradigm that the state is central to legal change. We argue that these three implications […]
Lance Ang, ‘Digital Currency as Money: The Case of Stablecoins’
ABSTRACT The commercialisation of ‘payment-like’ digital currencies in the financial system challenges our pre-existing state-centric legal conception of money due to their self-governing and decentralised nature. Stablecoins – particularly those which are backed by reserves and pegged to a single fiat currency on a 1:1 basis (SCS) – have the potential to reduce the transaction […]
Philip Maymin, ‘Financial Personhood’
ABSTRACT The prospect of artificial general intelligence raises urgent questions about the standing of artificial agents. These questions are often run together under the single heading of personhood. This paper begins by separating them: legal personhood is a divisible bundle of capacities and protections, while moral patiency, the status of having interests that matter in […]
Ela Leshem, ‘Law’s Shifting Circles’
ABSTRACT This Article undermines two myths in American legal history: first, that the law’s circle of moral concern has steadily expanded; and second, that legal protections have always centered on human persons. As to the first, the law contains multiple, shifting circles of moral concern, expanding along some dimensions and contracting along others. As to […]
‘European Society without European Private Law? Public and Private Law Closer Together’
Integration Through Law was and remains, in various forms, the major driver of European integration. Constitutional Pluralism arose out of constitutionalisation, counterbalancing the move to neoliberalism in the new millennium. In Commission v Hungary, the Court recognised European society ‘in which pluralism prevails’ as a legal concept. The Court radiates judicial authority at a time […]
Jonathan Brown, ‘Direct Representation and Negotiorum Gestio in Scots Law’
ABSTRACT The Scottish Court of Session recognized, in 1887, that ‘it is a frequent case, if a man is not able to manage his affairs, and has a relative who is willing to take the responsibility, there are many instances in which, without their coming to the court… the management goes on with his assistance’. […]
Shawn Bayern, ‘Autonomous Organizations and the Decline of Anthropocentric Law’
ABSTRACT This article charts the legal and technological developments that have enabled nonhuman systems, such as artificially intelligent software, to take actions that have significant consequences under private law, such as the making of contracts, the management of companies, and the incursion of tort or restitutionary liability. Because of these developments, it is important to […]
Deumier and Devinat, ‘Civil Code Reforms and Sources of Law: The French and Quebec Experience Compared’
ABSTRACT Can civil codes be reformed ‘like any other piece of legislation?’ A comparison of the French and Quebec experiences illustrates the methodological challenges that arose from civil code reform projects for the Civil Code of Québec during the last two Centuries. It also reveals the complex relationship that jurists have with ‘their’ own civil […]
Dagan and Dorfman, ‘The Work and Values of Relational Justice’
ABSTRACT In Relational Justice we lay out a new approach to understanding some of society’s most important building blocks, arguing that private law should, and to a significant degree already does, abide by the fundamental commitment to reciprocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality. The generous and rigorous book reviews of Aditi Bagchi, Marija Bartl, […]
Martha McCluskey, ‘Autonomy’
ABSTRACT This essay discusses the theme of autonomy in Martha A Fineman’s analysis of the human condition, written for a volume of essays on the development and key contributions of Fineman’s Vulnerability Theory. Over several decades, Fineman has critically examined individual autonomy as a foundational myth that impedes democracy and social justice. This myth remains […]