Category Archives: General
Mark Geistfeld, ‘Tort Law in a World of Scarce Compensatory Resources’
ABSTRACT Large corporations facing extensive tort liabilities have often gone into bankruptcy, forcing tort plaintiffs to accept pennies on the dollar as compensation for their injuries. Bankruptcy painfully illustrates the social fact that the compensatory properties of tort law depend on the availability of compensatory resources. Although this feature of tort law is self-evident, no […]
Rabanos and Spaic, ‘The Death of the Legal Author. Authority, Intention, and Law-Creation in the Advent of GenAI’
ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence in the form of chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) has taken the world of law by storm. Philosophy of law is struggling to catch up with the theoretical significance of the advent of technological development and the way it may modify traditionally established understanding of legal phenomena, such as […]
Claudio Michelon, ‘How Capacious is the Kantian System of Rights?’
ABSTRACT This paper discusses ways in which the Kantian account of private law might be more capacious than some of its critics believe it to be, and identifies more precisely the reasons that Kant’s system excludes from bearing on private rights. The development of Weinrib’s conception of private law in Reciprocal Freedom clarifies that certain […]
Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco, ‘Abstraction and Determination in Weinrib’s Reciprocal Freedom: The Dynamics of Backward-Looking and Forward-Looking Deliberation in Judging’
ABSTRACT The recognition of the particular in law is crucial, and any good lawyer or judge should be able to correctly establish the potential instantiation of the abstract into the particular. This is the arduous task of the so-called ‘determination’. In his influential new book, Reciprocal Freedom, Ernest Weinrib elucidates the dynamic relationship of transforming […]
Kaarlo Tuori, ‘How private is European transnational private law?’
European transnational private law is an offshoot of European regulatory private law. A critical analysis of European transnational private law as a putative new field of law presupposes a critical analysis of the credentials of European regulatory private law. Let me present my analysis in the framework of the systematization of law. During the 20th […]
Claudio Novelli, ‘The Radial Conception of Legal Personhood in Seven Theses’
ABSTRACT This paper summarizes the Radial Conception of legal personhood in seven theses. On this view, legal personhood resists checklist definitions; it is a category anchored in a paradigmatic central case formed by the convergence of entrenched (and idealised) models of the world. This structure yields prototype effects, establishing the central case as a cognitive […]
John Flood, ‘The Ethics of Large Law Firms’
ABSTRACT Large law firms create ethical quandaries for lawyers and the legal profession because two ethical imperatives co-exist, the professional obligations as enshrined in codes, and the organizational requirements as evinced in bureaucratic structures. The former is agentic necessitating active action on the part of the lawyer, while the latter is more passive in its […]
Engstrom and Knowlton, ‘Unauthorized Practice: Assessing Available Evidence’
ABSTRACT A debate is now raging concerning whether to relax the rules that govern the provision of legal services, to welcome nonlawyers into the fold. In recent years, roughly a dozen states have taken precisely this step, seeking to expand access to those currently priced out of the legal services marketplace. But in other places, […]
Debadatta Bose, ‘Postcolonial Private Law’
ABSTRACT For decades, theorizing postcoloniality in law has remained captive to the framework of international law with a focus on distributive justice. This approach, while important, has treated the individuals at the heart of postcolonial struggles – the farmer, the miner, the factory worker – as macroeconomic abstractions rather than as rightsholders. In this Article, […]
Mx Yibo Li, ‘Characterising Ecosystem Power: the Use of Pricing and Contractual Leverages’
ABSTRACT This paper presents a conceptualisation and characterisation of ecosystem power, distinguishing it from market power and bargaining power. Unlike market power, which primarily concerns external relationships of a firm, and bargaining power, which addresses bilateral relationships, ecosystem power operates through multi-sided relationships, shaping pricing and contractual structures and determining welfare distribution among stakeholders within […]