Category Archives: General
Michael Guttentag, ‘The New Law and Inequality Scholarship’
ABSTRACT An emerging body of scholarship is challenging the orthodoxy that the tax system rather than the legal system should be used to address inequality. This ‘New Law and Inequality Scholarship’ argues for using law to address inequality for both practical and theoretical reasons and, notably, is grounded in the same kind of rigorous and […]
Nelson Guimaraes Barros, ‘The Absence of the Nobel Prize in Law: Between Scientific Recognition and the Civilizational Relevance of the Legal Order’
ABSTRACT This essay investigates the reasons why law remains excluded from the Nobel Prize system, arguing that this absence does not stem from a technical limitation of the legal discipline, but rather from a restrictive conception of science that marginalizes forms of normative and institutional rationality. Drawing on the critique developed by thinkers such as […]
Philip Sales, ‘Certainty and Flexibility in the Law: Insights from English Law’
… Certainty and flexibility in law is without doubt a big and important topic. I believe that maintaining a reasonable balance between certainty and flexibility is a central aim of any legal system. My lecture is focused on the legal system in the UK, but I think that this is illustrative and I hope that […]
Weis and Mullins, ‘Does Nature Need Rights?’
ABSTRACT Rights of nature (RoN) appear to provide a promising alternative to anthropocentric environmental rights. But do they meet the demands of transformative green constitutionalist projects? This article addresses that question by examining the juridical dimensions of RoN. We draw on empirical studies of RoN laws to identify and examine the challenges of redeploying ‘rights’ […]
Victor Frimpong, ‘Artificial Intelligence on Trial: Who Is Responsible When Systems Fail? Toward a Framework for the Ultimate AI Accountability Owner’
ABSTRACT Identifying the ultimate human actor responsible for the harm caused by AI systems remains one of the most urgent and unresolved challenges in AI governance. While existing literature emphasizes transparency, bias mitigation, and explainability, it often neglects the question of who is ultimately accountable for AI-enabled decisions and their consequences. This article introduces the […]
Simon Franz Ewers, ‘What’s Wrong with Bentham’s Test? Methodological Concerns and Suggestions’
ABSTRACT Matthew Kramer’s theory of right-holding is a major contender in the debate about rights. Kramer proposes a version of the Interest Theory that amends the Basic Idea of the Interest Theory – that rights protect interests – by incorporating Bentham’s Test, an algorithm that identifies the party to whom an existing duty is owed. […]
‘Experimental Jurisprudence’
Experimental jurisprudence (or ‘X-Jur’) addresses questions of jurisprudence or legal philosophy by complementing traditional philosophical analysis with empirical methods. Often those methods include survey experiments that examine laypeople’s intuitions about legal-philosophical thought experiments and concepts of legal significance (eg, causation, intent, reasonableness). Other times, experimental jurisprudence focuses on the cognitive processes underlying legal reasoning. This […]
Ishita Ishita, ‘Uniform Civil Code: Constitutional Promise or Political Agenda?’
ABSTRACT The Uniform Civil Code (UCC), foreseen in Article 44 of the Indian Constitution, aspires to a uniform body of personal laws to provide for equality, gender justice, and national integration. In a secular democracy, personal laws must conform to constitutional precepts, rather than religious laws, according to advocates, especially to safeguard women’s rights. Nonetheless, […]
Kathryn Ramsey Mason, ‘Civil Means to Criminal Ends’
ABSTRACT The divide between the civil and criminal legal systems is one of the most fundamental distinctions in American law. There are laws, however, that do not fit clearly into either category and the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on how to categorize these statutes has been murky. Crime-free rental housing ordinances, which encourage or coerce private […]
Kukhariev, Kostiuchenko and Krasytska, ‘Reforming Ukraine’s Civil Legislation as a Tool for Economic Recovery and Ensuring Sustainable Development in the Post-War Period’
ABSTRACT The post-war reconstruction of Ukraine necessitates two principal components: the large-scale physical rebuilding of destroyed infrastructure and the implementation of deep structural reforms. Among these reforms, the transformation of civil legislation is of particular significance. The effective regulation of property and contractual legal relations is a necessary prerequisite for the restoration of entrepreneurial activity, […]