Category Archives: General
Toy-Cronin and Berg, ‘Expanding access to legal services? Insights from non-lawyer advocates in New Zealand’s segmented market’
ABSTRACT New Zealand’s employment dispute system is unusual in permitting non-lawyer representatives (‘Advocates’) to advise and represent clients alongside lawyers. While Advocates have practised for many years in the Employment jurisdictions, little is known about their business models, pricing, or contribution to access to justice. This study provides an empirical account of this under-examined segment […]
Schillig and Meissner, ‘Cryptoassets Regulation and Private Law’
ABSTRACT Cryptoasset markets have expanded rapidly over recent years and, accordingly, have garnered significant regulatory attention. By contrast, the integration of cryptoassets within the relevant private and commercial law has been much more restrained and limited. We try to map the complex interactions of cryptoassets regulation – primarily focusing on MiCAR – with private and […]
Dominik Dworniczak, ‘Regulation in the Making: The Governance Effects of Civil Liability in EU Digital Regulation’
ABSTRACT This article argues that civil liability in EU digital regulation does more than enforce regulatory duties or compensate damage arising from regulatory breaches: it also produces governance effects by specifying regulatory duties and (re)allocating regulatory risks between market actors. Drawing on regulatory theory and examples from the case law of the Court of Justice […]
Taekema and van der Burg, ‘Globalisation: A Call for Contextualising Legal Research and Reframing Its Background Theory’
ABSTRACT This article argues that globalisation poses a serious challenge to the traditional way of doing legal doctrinal research. Globalisation drives us towards comparison, creating comparative awareness; it creates the need to understand multidimensional legal orders; and it problematises the paradigm that the state is central to legal change. We argue that these three implications […]
Lance Ang, ‘Digital Currency as Money: The Case of Stablecoins’
ABSTRACT The commercialisation of ‘payment-like’ digital currencies in the financial system challenges our pre-existing state-centric legal conception of money due to their self-governing and decentralised nature. Stablecoins – particularly those which are backed by reserves and pegged to a single fiat currency on a 1:1 basis (SCS) – have the potential to reduce the transaction […]
Philip Maymin, ‘Financial Personhood’
ABSTRACT The prospect of artificial general intelligence raises urgent questions about the standing of artificial agents. These questions are often run together under the single heading of personhood. This paper begins by separating them: legal personhood is a divisible bundle of capacities and protections, while moral patiency, the status of having interests that matter in […]
Ela Leshem, ‘Law’s Shifting Circles’
ABSTRACT This Article undermines two myths in American legal history: first, that the law’s circle of moral concern has steadily expanded; and second, that legal protections have always centered on human persons. As to the first, the law contains multiple, shifting circles of moral concern, expanding along some dimensions and contracting along others. As to […]
‘European Society without European Private Law? Public and Private Law Closer Together’
Integration Through Law was and remains, in various forms, the major driver of European integration. Constitutional Pluralism arose out of constitutionalisation, counterbalancing the move to neoliberalism in the new millennium. In Commission v Hungary, the Court recognised European society ‘in which pluralism prevails’ as a legal concept. The Court radiates judicial authority at a time […]
Jonathan Brown, ‘Direct Representation and Negotiorum Gestio in Scots Law’
ABSTRACT The Scottish Court of Session recognized, in 1887, that ‘it is a frequent case, if a man is not able to manage his affairs, and has a relative who is willing to take the responsibility, there are many instances in which, without their coming to the court… the management goes on with his assistance’. […]
Shawn Bayern, ‘Autonomous Organizations and the Decline of Anthropocentric Law’
ABSTRACT This article charts the legal and technological developments that have enabled nonhuman systems, such as artificially intelligent software, to take actions that have significant consequences under private law, such as the making of contracts, the management of companies, and the incursion of tort or restitutionary liability. Because of these developments, it is important to […]