Category Archives: General
‘A History Lesson’
Sophia Rosenfeld, Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (2025). In her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World (hereinafter Choice), historian Sophia Rosenfeld has added an engaging new book to her body of work tracing ‘ideas and assumptions’ in liberal democracies. As is her […]
Mukherjee and Chang, ‘Operational Agency: A Permeable Legal Fiction for Tracing Culpability in AI Systems’
ABSTRACT Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems can act with a high degree of independence yet lack legal personhood. This paradox fractures doctrines grounded in human-centric notions of mens rea and actus reus. This Article introduces Operational Agency (OA) – a permeable legal fiction functioning as a structured ex post evidentiary framework – and Operational Agency […]
Bell and McCunn, ‘Authoritative Ignorance: State knowledge and factual uncertainty in private law’
INTRODUCTION We might generally say, without necessarily reflecting much, that the state has an obligation to resolve private disputes brought to it, particularly to its courts, by its citizens. Parties present a dispute; relevant facts are established; appropriate legal rules and principles are applied; and an authoritative resolution follows. But a vital unsettling question arises: […]
‘Legal Theory and Capitalism Part I’ (Law and Contemporary Problems)
Foreword (Jedediah Britton-Purdy and Justin Deystone) Structure and Legitimation in Capitalism: Law, Power, and Justice in Market Society (Yochai Benkler) Law, Labor, and Identity (Chantal Thomas) Class Relations and the Law: A Model and Agenda for Research (Brishen Rogers) Diverse Legalities: Towards a Legal Theory for a Postcapitalist Political Economy (Amy J Cohen and Stephen […]
Rodrigo Vallejo, ‘The Jurisprudence of Process and European Transnational Private Law’
ABSTRACT The present chapter elaborates on the legal theory or jurisprudential foundations informing the notion of European transnational private law. Building upon the influential scholarship by Anu Bradford and Joanne Scott on the global reach of EU law, the chapter traces the widespread reliance in contemporary legal thought on proceduralisation parameters as a benchmark to […]
Vallejo, Beckers, Micklitz and Letto-Vanamo, ‘European Transnational Private Law – Considerations for a Research Agenda’
ABSTRACT This chapter introduces the building blocks of this book’s endeavour to lay the foundations of a European Transnational Private Law. After an effort of contextualising the research project in its wider institutional and research context, we explain the central concepts, ‘European’, ‘private law’ and ‘transnational law’, that the book relies on. This is followed […]
Adriana Placani, ‘The Morality of Risking and the Reliability of Rights’
ABSTRACT This work advances a novel account of the moral significance of risking. It argues that risking can be both a wrong and a harm in virtue of its negative impact on the reliability of rights, which is understood as the likelihood that rights will secure the interests that ground them. The essay also shows […]
Gavin Kerr, ‘Predistribution: What It Is, and Why it Matters’
ABSTRACT This article outlines two distinct ways of conceptualizing the idea of predistribution which reflect two distinct perspectives from which regressive ‘neoliberal’ policies and institutions can be challenged. These critical perspectives support correspondingly distinct, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, agendas for progressive predistributive reform. One conception – ‘social justice predistribution’ – encourages progressives to focus […]
Paulo Barrozo, ‘Capitalism and Jurisprudence’
ABSTRACT In our time, an amorphous and undertheorized notion of capitalism is the target of jurisprudential antipathy. Capitalism is indicted as the creator of ills and as the inhibitor of equality, freedom, truth, justice, democracy, human flourishing, planetary life, peace, and more. Among natural law and critical legal theorists in the United States, only liberalism […]
Balganesh and Zhang, ‘Legal Internalism as a Mode of Reasoning’
ABSTRACT Despite the often-repeated claim that ‘we are all realists now’, legal reasoning remains rule-driven, conceptual, deductive, and heavily path-dependent. Indeed, this remains true notwithstanding recognition that adjudication involves law-making and that ‘judge-made’ law is real. In this article, we argue that legal reasoning adheres to a phenomenon that is best described as ‘legal internalism’, […]