Category Archives: General
Abraham and Baker, ‘Five Sober Prescriptions for Homeowners Insurance’
ABSTRACT In this Article, we offer five sober prescriptions for homeowners insurance. The prescriptions have the virtue of being capable of implementation, having the potential to mitigate the homeowners insurance crisis, and not depending on unrealistic assumptions about policyholders, regulators, or markets. We are not suggesting that merely by snapping one’s fingers, these prescriptions can […]
Desai and Riedl, ‘Using Agency Law to Tame AI Agents’
ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agents have entered the marketplace. By some estimates, AI Agents, which promise to execute tasks and even take over your computer to do so, present a more than $400 billion market. The potential power of AI Agents has fueled legal scholars’ fears that AI Agents will enable rogue commerce, human manipulation, […]
Benjamin Gardner, ‘There is Such Thing as a Tame Bear: A Technical Reframing of AI Liability and the Applicability of the Wild-Animal Rule’
ABSTRACT In ‘Nondeterministic Torts: A Technical Approach to AI Liability’, Trent S Kannegieter argues that because today’s in-production large language models (LLMs) are unavoidably nondeterministic, the harms they cause should sound in strict liability under ferae naturae, the wild-animal rule that applies to bears and other untameable animals. The Note’s methodological commitment – that liability […]
Albert Tan, ‘Final, but Not Yours: Protocol Finality, Private Law and The Allocation of Digital-Asset Loss’
ABSTRACT A system for ordering transactions is not a law of ownership, and the Bitcoin protocol was never meant to be the second thing. It settles the sequence in which transactions are recorded. It does not decide who, as between rival claimants, is entitled to what has moved. The distinction is not a technicality. It […]
Felipe Jiménez, ‘Beware Judge & Co’
ABSTRACT Richard Hyland’s ‘Common Law Judging and the Great Tradition’ offers an admirably erudite reconstruction of the common law’s central commitments. Hyland is right that the common law is not a system of rules mechanically applied and that good adjudication ultimately requires good judges. But accepting that judges have broad, ineliminable discretion is different from […]
Jonathan Silver, ‘Tracing the Future’
ABSTRACT This paper argues that the modern law of tracing rests on unstable conceptual foundations. The traditional exchange-product theory was increasingly unable to explain the cases that mattered most, particularly those involving bank transfers, mixed accounts, missing transactions and payments made in the wrong order. Foskett v McKeown appeared to offer a new explanation by […]
Helen Fielder, ‘Bitcoin, Property or Money? Reframing The Debate Before the High Court Part II – Following the Logic: Returning to the Common Law Method’
ABSTRACT This article is the second in a series considering the legal classification of Bitcoin in light of two matters presently before the High Court of Australia: Poulton v Conrad and Yeates v The King. Part I examined the competing arguments concerning whether Bitcoin is property, money, information, a digital commodity or a new form […]
Hoffman and Arbel, ‘Generative Gap Filling’
ABSTRACT Contract law polices a line between interpretation, the recovery of meaning a text already holds, and gap filling, the supply of terms the text lacks. The boundary rests on an unchecked premise: that courts need to fill gaps themselves because the document has run out of meaning. We tested it. Borrowing a masking design […]
Brooke Coleman, ‘Outrage: Anger and Angst in the Civil Justice System’
ABSTRACT Outrage is having its moment in our politics, interactions, and culture. Our civil justice system, as the place where conflict can be resolved and perhaps made right, has not escaped this same reality. There are ‘judicial hellholes’, ‘benchslaps’, and ‘lunatic judges’. As our collective tolerance for outrage increases, it is tempting to dismiss these […]
Kathryn Zeiler, ‘What We Should Know About the Reliability of Empirical Legal Studies’
ABSTRACT The findings of replication studies conducted in the early 2010s led many to declare that science was in the midst of a ‘replication crisis’. Since then, a growing number of reforms have been proposed and tested. The field of empirical legal studies seems behind other fields such as psychology, economics, political science, medicine, biology, […]