Category Archives: General
Call for Papers: Legal Research & Analysis, Volume 4 Issue 4 (2026)
Legal Research & Analysis (ISSN 3007-6455 Online, 3007-6447 Print) invites original research papers, review papers, case comments and book reviews for its December 2026 issue. The journal is quarterly, open access and peer-reviewed, and welcomes theoretical, comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship on all areas of law. This includes contract, tort, property, unjust enrichment and private law […]
Shahshahani and Beim, ‘Judges, Lawyers, and Legal Innovation’
ABSTRACT We investigate the conditions that support or suppress legal innovation through a formal model that incorporates a litigant’s strategic decision about how to frame a case. Litigants’ legal innovation depends on the distribution of judicial ideology and aptitude, meaning a judge’s ability to adjudicate innovative legal arguments. We show that judicial aptitude sometimes matters […]
‘A Warning on Agentic AI’
Deborah DeMott, ‘When Agentic AI Met the Common Law of Agency’, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology (forthcoming, 2026), available at SSRN (27 May 2026). Professor Deborah DeMott’s article ‘When Agentic AI Met the Common Law of Agency’ is a much needed breath of fresh, cold air in the overheated, overhyped debates surrounding Agentic AI. […]
Luís Duarte d’Almeida and Fábio Perin Shecaira, ‘When Are Arguments from Scholarly Legal Authority Legitimate?’
ABSTRACT Judges often cite legal scholars. Sometimes they defer argumentatively to scholars as authorities. Such arguments, we claim, are neither sound nor legitimate. Legal scholarship serves two functions. One is modest and descriptive: reporting the undisputed content of legal sources and existing consensuses on some point of law. Such matters can lend themselves to authoritative […]
Northon Salomão De Oliveira, ‘The Human Person in Contemporary Legal Theory: From Human Being to Legal Person and the Foundations of Rights’
ABSTRACT Contemporary legal systems use the word ‘person’ for two different operations. The first recognizes every human being as a subject of law. The second attributes legal personality to entities such as corporations, foundations, rivers, religious idols and, prospectively, software, because doing so serves identifiable legal functions. Scholarship on legal personhood tends to treat both […]
‘Subordination: A Functional and Theoretical Analysis’
There has been no serious scholarship on subordination since a 1961 Yale Law Journal article which described subordination as then utilized and discussed how it applied in practice. Our recent Article updates and, in scope, goes beyond that earlier article, analyzing subordination not only from a functional but also from a theoretical perspective. The inquiry […]
Dagan, Dorfman and Rosen-Zvi, ‘It’s (Not All) Personal: Civil Litigation and the Values of Rights of Action’
ABSTRACT Existing approaches to civil litigation, both regarding its theoretical underpinnings and its practical instantiations, take diametrically opposing perspectives on the value of personal rights of action. Some view them as inviolable and thus vehemently oppose any mandatory arbitration clauses and treat class actions as presumptively dubious. Others have no principled objection to either, as […]
Simone Sepe, ‘Hohfeld Deconstructed’
ABSTRACT An account limited to what a person may or must do does not identify to whom a duty is owed or what legal effects an act produces. A public duty need not give an individual a private claim. An owner who has a contractual duty not to sell an asset may still have the […]
Rachel Leow, ‘Agency in the Law: Definitions, Concepts, and Complications’
ABSTRACT What do we mean when we talk about agency? The answer depends on one’s discipline. Agency has different meanings and normative significance in law, morality, politics, economics, and other disciplines. This chapter was written for a conference on the theory of agency relationships, bringing together lawyers, philosophers, and economists to discuss different perspectives on […]
Good Faith (Theoretical Inquiries in Law, September 2026 )
Introduction (Andrew S Gold and Yifat Naftali Ben Zion) An anatomy of good faith (Lusina Ho) Good faith, the excluder (Nick Sage) Trust, good faith and contractual relations (Prince Saprai) Choosing versus having to be loyal (Avihay Dorfman) Finding loyalty in good faith (Andrew S Gold and Geneviève Helleringer) Good faith in corporate law: between […]