Category Archives: General
Michael Palmieri, ‘Consent Without Continuity: Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and the Structural Failure of Informed Consent Doctrine’
ABSTRACT American informed consent doctrine rests on an unexamined premise: the stable-agent assumption – that the patient who authorizes a medical intervention and the patient who experiences its consequences share a continuous evaluative framework. Materiality doctrine presupposes this continuity; causation doctrine embeds it; capacity doctrine assumes it. For most of modern medical practice, the assumption […]
Lindsay Head, ‘The Death of the Lawyer Authorship, Artificial Intelligence, and Rhetorical Personhood in the Practice of Law’
ABSTRACT This article applies Roland Barthes’s theory of the death of the author to the question of whether generative AI will replace lawyers. Drawing on postmodern theories of authorship — including Barthes, Foucault, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin — it first demonstrates that legal writing, like all writing, is culturally derived and multiply authored, such that a […]
Johannes Ungerer, ‘Default Rules’
ABSTRACT Default rules are legal norms that govern unless parties contract around them. This chapter discusses them as a tool of regulatory contract law. It delineates defaults from mandatory rules and non-binding guides, and shows how parliaments and courts generate, interpret, and recalibrate them across Civil and Common Law traditions. It widens the lens to […]
Eric Orts, ‘People and Persons in Private Law: From Corporations to Non-Human Biological Entities to Artificial Intelligence’
ABSTRACT This chapter argues for a foundational distinction between people and persons in legal theory, philosophy, political theory, and other social science disciplines. The chapter contends that a failure to understand this distinction can lead to confusion in policy making, resulting in problematic interpretations that can then become recalcitrant social realities, such as the view […]
Paul Miller, ‘The Fragmentation of Legal Personhood’
ABSTRACT The legal concept of personhood, like that of property, has become increasingly susceptible to nominalistic and positivistic renderings, according to which it merely denotes the contingent arrangement of incidents as ascribed by lawmakers to various objects (‘right and duty bearing units’). The results have been fragmentation in our concept of personhood an displacement of […]
Sue Carr, ‘The ever-developing common law’
… My starting point is clarity and certainty in the common law. Two judgments from 2015 come to illustrate this. First, Cavendish Square Holdings BV v Talal El Makdessi and Parking Eye v Beavis (2015), two joined appeals. The first, Cavendish, involved an agreement into which Cavendish had entered into with Makdessi, under which Cavendish […]
Jacob Appel, ‘Irrational People Have Rights Too: Moving Beyond Rationality in Decisional Capacity Assessment’
ABSTRACT The dominant method of assessment for decisional capacity, the ‘four abilities’ model, relies heavily on the reasoning abilities of the patient. This paper argues that the rational thinking required of medical patients to preserve their autonomy is a legal anomaly that is highly inconsistent with other areas of law, including the rules related to […]
Christina Lee, ‘AI Agents’ Shadow Principals’
ABSTRACT AI agents that can plan and perform complex tasks on behalf of their users, once the stuff of science fiction, have become increasingly real and prevalent, with enormous amounts of attention and money pouring into their development and use. With this rise comes the question of how to govern AI agents, as they pose […]
Cass Sunstein, ‘Five Objections to Commodification’
ABSTRACT In free markets, countless goods may be bought and sold. What was once not traded on markets-for example, access to public parks or sexual and reproductive capacities might be turned into a commodity. Time and again, allowing things to be bought and sold increases both autonomy and welfare. Still, there are pervasive objections to […]
James Toomey, ‘Legal Personal Identity’
ABSTRACT From contract to tort, private law presupposes a conception of ‘legal personal identity’ – a theory of what makes individual legal persons themselves, and the same selves across time. Scholars have noted the relationship between private law and personal identity before – but have largely presumed that the law straightforwardly reidentifies natural legal persons […]