Category Archives: General
Alexander, Simon and Pinard, ‘How Should the Law Treat Future AI Systems? Fictional Legal Personhood versus Legal Identity’
ABSTRACT Today, artificial intelligence (AI) systems are more agentic, more autonomous and more unpredictable, than ever. A major, and underexplored, risk of agentic AI is the threat it poses to the coherence of laws and legal system. One solution is to reclassify some future AI systems as persons rather than as objects under the law. […]
Alex Stein, ‘Between probabilism and pragmatism: an essay on statutory interpretation’
ABSTRACT This article examines the credentials of the three dominant modalities of statutory interpretation: textualism, intentionalism, and purposivism. This article argues that these modalities share an unfulfillable epistemic ambition: the quest to uncover the empirically true meaning of a statute – a communicative act of the individuals authorized to legislate – under conditions of uncertainty. […]
Andriienko and others, ‘Innovative approaches to teaching private law in the digital age’
ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to analyze innovative methods for teaching private law in the context of digitalization and to identify the most effective practices. The methodology includes comparative law, formal legal analysis, and policy analysis to examine the integration of digital technologies into legal education. The results show that tools such as […]
Kate Elengold, ‘It’s All Debt To Me’
ABSTRACT Michelle owes $15,000 to a bank for credit card debt. Reid owes $15,000 to Memphis Memorial, a private hospital. Shirley owes $15,000 to the Raleigh Housing Authority. Josh owes $5,000 to the state of Louisiana and $10,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. Each debtor owes the same amount. None of them can afford to […]
Manish Oza, ‘Personification in Private Law’
ABSTRACT This paper is about whether it makes sense to attribute legal personality to non-sentient entities, such as rivers or idols. First, I argue that the way private law assigns the exercise of legal powers makes it possible to personify a non-sentient entity. Second, I argue that doing so creates a new locus of decision-making […]
Goldin and Liscow, ‘When Should the Legal System Help Redistribute Income?’
ABSTRACT In this Essay, we consider when legal rules should be efficient and when they should not. We focus on conditions that can cause the socially optimal legal rule to diverge from the efficient legal rule – ie, the legal rule that would be optimal absent distributional considerations. These conditions include preferences or behaviors that […]
Symposium: ‘Crossroads of Codification: A Comparative Dialogue’: ELTE Law Journal
Preface to the Contributions Regarding ‘Crossroads of Codification: A Comparative Dialogue’ (Orsolya Szeibert) The CISG and Unforeseeable Events (Ulrich Magnus) Codification at the European Level (Peter-Christian Müller-Graff) Codification in the Common Law (John Cartwright) The Civil Law’s Common Law (Christian von Bar) Learning from Common Law? The Binding Nature of the Hungarian Curia’s Judgments (Péter […]
Jenny Russell, ‘Breaking down “vulnerability” within legal doctrines’
INTRODUCTION ‘Vulnerable’, ‘vulnerability’ and its plural ‘vulnerabilities’ are terms that we use unthinkingly in day-to-day life. We might speak of vulnerable relatives, feeling personally vulnerable, or even of the vulnerability of financial systems. Given the commonplace usage of these terms, it is unsurprising that vulnerability is prevalent in legal discourse too. A Westlaw search for […]
Yonathan Arbel, ‘The Generative Reasonable Person’
ABSTRACT This Article introduces the generative reasonable person, a new tool for estimating how ordinary people judge reasonableness. As claims about AI capabilities often outpace evidence, the Article proceeds empirically: adapting randomized controlled trials to large language models, it replicates three published studies of lay judgment across negligence, consent, and contract interpretation, drawing on nearly […]
Hung Chi Chen, ‘Handbook of the Geometry of Legal Responsibility’
ABSTRACT This Handbook is designed as a learning tool for students seeking a clear and unified understanding of private law. Instead of presenting contract, tort, strict liability, and damages as separate doctrinal fields, it reconstructs them through a single structural framework: the geometry of legal responsibility. The Handbook introduces a minimal set of structural variables […]