Category Archives: General
Odinet, Tosato and Yadav, ‘The Moneyness of Stablecoins’
ABSTRACT Money is omnipresent. Yet defining its fundamental character proves surprisingly difficult. Functional descriptions tell us what money does, not what money is, and they certainly do not explain how something becomes money in the first place. These questions rarely surface in everyday commerce, but they become unavoidable when a new instrument emerges claiming to […]
‘In Support of Teaching Legislation and Legislative Interpretation as a Discrete Subject’
1. MY PATH TO TEACHING LEGISLATION When I started lecturing more years ago than I care to remember, I was asked what subjects I would be interested in teaching. Among other things, I volunteered to teach on the course on ‘legal system and legal method’, and particularly to teach legislative interpretation. This met with some […]
Pédamon and Vassileva, ‘The Reasonable Person in French and English Law: Insights on Contractual Interpretation from a Tale of Faux Amis’
ABSTRACT The French legislator asserts that the reasonable person, now enshrined as an objective standard of interpretation in Article 1188 of the Code civil following the 2016 reform, has been present in the code since 1804. Yet a historical overview reveals that the reasonable person in French law is not a homogenous character – distinct […]
D’Onfro and Epps, ‘Constitutional Rights and General Private Law’
ABSTRACT Public and private law are treated as doctrinally siloed opposites. But the two are surprisingly interrelated in the arena of constitutional rights. Courts must define, for constitutional purposes, various private law entitlements: what interests constitute property, when a contract has been made, and when government conduct constitutes the tort of trespass, among other pervasive […]
‘The Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory Celebrates its First Three Years’
Private law structures the legal building blocks that most profoundly affect our social and economic life — notably property, contract, and torts, as well as central aspects of family law, trust law, work law, and more. It governs our relationships with each other in the most important spheres of our lives: in the market, the […]
‘The new Business and Property Division’
Good afternoon. I would like to thank the Chancery Bar Association, and your new Chair, Janet Bignell KC in particular, for facilitating this event. I wanted to speak to the Association about the new Division, for what I hope are fairly obvious reasons. The changes relate directly to your work and your clients will be […]
‘Why the law in England is ill-equipped for the age of agentic AI’
There are potential gaps in English private law that could leave businesses unable to recover losses in circumstances where AI agents cause them harm by acting completely unprompted and seemingly beyond constraints imposed by those who developed or deployed them. The courts will need to take an expansive view of ‘intentionality’ to provide affected companies […]
Dagan and Dorfman, ‘Why Relational Justice’
ABSTRACT In Relational Justice (OUP 2024) we rethink the normative foundations of private law and chart the path for a just reconstruction. We claim that the fundamental maxim of reciphrocal respect for self-determination and substantive equality – relational justice, as we dub it – is (or should be) the distinctive normative commitment of a genuinely […]
Northon Salomão De Oliveira, ‘The Expansion of Legal Personhood: AI and Non-Biological Agency’
ABSTRACT Legal-personhood debates about artificial intelligence typically ask a capacity question: is a system autonomous, cognitively complex, or self-directed enough to warrant rights and duties? This article argues that the capacity question is the wrong gate. Drawing on the only jurisdictions that have actually extended legal personhood beyond the human being-corporate law, the Whanganui River […]
Tarunabh Khaitan, ‘Authorial and Authorised Purposiveness: Natural Persons, Organised Agents, and the Public-Private Debate’
ABSTRACT Liberal law rests on a familiar contrast: private persons may do whatever law does not forbid, whereas public bodies must justify action as authorised by positive law. Through legal ‘personhood’, this agentive public-private divide extends a presumption of autonomy-and the fundamental rights expressing it-to most non-state legal persons, including companies, charities, trade unions, political […]