Category Archives: General
Peter Cane, ‘PS Atiyah: An Academic Autobiography by PS Atiyah (ed James Goudkamp)’
ABSTRACT PS Atiyah: An Academic Autobiography is an unusual book. Autobiographical writing by academics is rare, if only because academic lives are seldom of interest to anyone except, perhaps, the author’s family and other scholars. It appears that Atiyah wrote his autobiography soon after he retired in 1988. Its story ends in 1991. He offered […]
Linda Mullenix, ‘Grand Bargains: A Principled Approach to Industrywide Legislative Liability Immunity’
ABSTRACT In April 2026 Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming introduced legislation entitled the ‘Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026’ to provide the energy industry with sweeping immunity for liability for their role in contributing to the climate crisis and other environmental harms. The legislation would prevent future lawsuits, […]
‘Mammoth judgments, and how to stop them’
While I was procrastinating over coffee this morning, a post by Hilary Young on LinkedIn drew my attention to an article by her colleague Paul Warchuk on the ‘trend of systemic prolixity’ in the judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) (forthcoming in the Canadian Bar Review). I enjoyed the article so much that […]
CRG Murray, ‘Academic Writing under the UK’s Research Excellence Framework’
ABSTRACT Discussions of academic writing often foreground intellectual curiosity and scholarly vocation while relegating the institutional conditions of research production to the background. This article instead examines the influence of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) as a significant determinant of legal academic writing in the UK. Against idealised accounts of scholarship that emphasise intellectual autonomy […]
Janssen, Bekker and Van Den Bos, ‘The pre-dispute phase up close: experiences of visitors to Dutch legal aid centres’
ABSTRACT Given indications of rising challenges for marginalized citizens in the pre-dispute phase of civil procedures, we studied this phase up close at Dutch legal aid centres using the framework of William Felstiner et al on naming, blaming, and claiming. Interviews were conducted with 116 visitors to these centres. We asked them when and why […]
Myriam Gilles, ‘Procedural Individuation’
ABSTRACT From climate change to platform monopolies to systemic discrimination, the defining injuries of modern life are collective in nature. Yet American procedural law increasingly insists on individualized harm, individualized proof, and individualized adjudication. Across doctrines once understood as distinct – standing, class certification, arbitration, pleading, remedies, and preclusion – federal courts are converging around […]
Northon Salomão De Oliveira, ‘Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Systems and the Future of Legal Responsibility’
ABSTRACT Fault-based and even strict-liability doctrines share an assumption that is quietly failing in the age of autonomous systems: that harm can be traced to a discrete, identifiable decision. Reinforcement-learned and continuously updated systems now generate outcomes that no designer selected, no operator approved, and no single dataset predicted. This article examines the resulting ’emergent-behavior […]
Nicholas McBride, ‘Private Law in the Ruins’
ABSTRACT In this paper I argue four things. First, the Grenfell Tower fire and the response to that fire almost perfectly manifest and expose fundamental problems and disorders that afflict, and are destined to doom, modern Western, liberal societies (‘MWLs’, for short). Second, these problems and disorders mean that private law is unable to achieve […]
Ammar Younas, ‘The Failing Subject: A Diagnosis of Legal Personhood for a Multi-Entity World’
ABSTRACT This article diagnoses a structural limit in the concept of the legal subject. It argues that the operations by which law assigns rights, liabilities, standing, and recognition all presuppose a subject that is singular, durable, present, and intelligible. One, that is, which persists as the same countable individual through ordinary time and can be […]
Jason Varuhas, ‘The Principle of Legality: Decline and Fall’
ABTRACT This chapter charts the decline and fall of the principle of legality in the UK and Australia. It explains the significant ways in which courts in both jurisdictions have reined in the doctrine in recent years. These techniques include a more restrained approach to identification of norms that trigger the legality principle; subordination of […]