Category Archives: General
PT Babie, ‘What Indeed Has Rome to Do with Australia?’
ABSTRACT This review essay of Arthur Emmett’s ‘Roman Law Under the Southern Cross: Sidere Ius Civile Mutato’ exhorts Australian lawyers to gain a better understanding of Roman law for one reason: a firm grasp of the classical world allows the ancient Romans to speak to us from the past, offering sage advice for dealing with […]
Abigail Moncrieff, ‘The Uncertainty Principle and the Common Law Baseline’
ABSTRACT Long after Erie abandoned the myth of the common law’s neutrality, the Court continues to treat common law distributions as though they involve no ‘state action’. The Court thus fails to extend constitutional scrutiny to property or contract rights that affect access to constitutional freedoms, provoking harsh critiques from Cass Sunstein and the broader […]
Zhong Xing Tan, ‘After Kant: A Contractualist Approach to Interpersonal Justice in Private Law Theory’
ABSTRACT In the recent history of private law theory, the task of restoring interpersonal justice to a position of chief importance has been undertaken by those who draw from the wellsprings of Kantian philosophy. But in defining the domain of interpersonal justice, Kantians have also narrowly confined it. In this article I offer a post-Kantian […]
Just Published: Kohavi, Constitutional Rights in Private Law
Constitutional Rights in Private Law – Tom Kohavi This book provides the philosophical foundations for the application of constitutional rights in private law – and more broadly, for social justice-oriented private law reform. It does this by connecting lessons from political and moral philosophy to those from constitutional and private law theories about their nature […]
Nicola Lacey, ‘Institutionalising Hope in Law?’
ABSTRACT Can we institutionalise interpersonal ideas such as hope in law or in the practices through which law is interpreted and enforced? Why might it matter to do so? What effects would it have? In this paper, I focus on what we already know, or might infer from existing research, about the feasibility and the […]
Kurki and Siemieniec, ‘Towards An Agency Turn in Animal Law’
ABSTRACT The article proposes an agency turn in animal law, following in the footsteps of the political agency turn in animal ethics. The law currently operates on the assumption that animals are passive non-agents, which is reflected in the nature of their legal representation as voiceless and incompetent. We challenge this assumption by identifying three […]
‘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 […]