Category Archives: General
Hourigan, Wilson and Lim, ‘A Modest and Principled Proposal for Civil Justice Reform in Ontario’
ABSTRACT Ontario’s civil justice system is in crisis. The current system does not provide for ‘access to justice’ under any sensible definition of the term and is increasingly inaccessible even for Ontario’s middle class. Consequently, lawyers and pundits have called for a massive increase in funding to the justice system. Such funding might address perceived […]
Gralf-Peter Calliess, ‘The Future of Commercial Law: Governing Cross-Border Commerce’
ABSTRACT The transnationalisation of commercial law is the key development in the field, where transnationalisation is understood as the combined internationalisation and privatisation of the governance of commercial transactions triggered by the ongoing globalisation of commerce. The key dilemmas related to this trend result from a reflection of the pros and cons of private ordering. […]
Michael Briggs, ‘AI and Civil Justice: Preparing for the Tsunami’
Civil justice continues to lie at the heart of the Rule of Law. The rules and principles governing civil procedure are vitally important. As Lord Justice Birss recognised in his foreword to the most recent edition of Zuckerman, the exercise of identifying the principles and making the rules is a task that has been greatly […]
Cory Dodds, ‘Legal Deserts Over Time’
ABSTRACT Legal deserts – counties with exceptionally low attorney availability – shape housing stability, personal safety, health outcomes, and economic security in rural communities. Yet, national scholarship has not yet determined whether attorney scarcity is transient or durable and relies largely on cross-sectional snapshots and population-based headcounts benchmarked to the American Bar Association’s (ABA) threshold […]
Simon Stern, ‘Personable Reasons, Reasonable Persons, and Legal Fictions’
ABSTRACT Persons in law can be formed in four ways, explained by reference to standing, capacity, identity based on a trait, and imaginary figures. Although any of these may motivate the claim that the result is a legal fiction, that ascription does not invariably follow. The relations among persons in law and legal fictions are […]
Ewan McGaughey, ‘Democratic socialism and the law’
ABSTRACT Are democracy and socialism compatible? Does democratic socialism work? And what is its relation to the law? This paper shows that democratic socialism is the dominant political model in wealthy democracies, overwhelmingly popular among voters, and the chief driver of human progress. It explains how democratic socialism was built through the understanding of capitalism’s […]
Wilding and Emberson, ‘A geography of access to justice: mapping social welfare legal aid need and provision in England and Wales’
ABSTRACT Our research combined statistical data, interviews, and geographic information system (GIS) tools to map social welfare legal aid ‘deserts’ in England and Wales. This novel mixed methodology enabled us to explore the spatiality of unmet legal aid need. We show that provision may be spatially uneven even where provider offices do exist, indicating that […]
‘Access to Elite Legal Careers’
Nikia Gray, Kyle Rozema, and Danielle Taylor, ‘Who Enters the Pipeline to Partnership at Leading American Law Firms?’ (December 13, 2025), available at SSRN. Equity partners at America’s leading law firms occupy positions of extraordinary wealth, influence, and prestige atop the legal profession. Who reaches those positions, and through which pathways, is a revealing measure […]
‘A Method for the Madness of Tech Law’
Ryan Calo, Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach (2025). For decades, law-and-tech scholarship has relied on intuition and analogy: a new technology arrives, legal scholars declare it ‘disruptive’, and commentary proliferates, particularly concerning its governance and affordances. Ryan Calo’s Law and Technology is an ambitious and lucid attempt to give an unruly field a shared […]
Mumtaz Enser, ‘Responsibility Without Gaps: A Relational Theory of Responsibility in AI Systems’
ABSTRACT This paper synthesizes and systematizes a conceptual framework developed across a series of earlier preprints on artificial intelligence, responsibility, and socio-technical practices. It argues that the so-called ‘responsibility gap’ is not a genuine feature of AI systems, but a category mistake resulting from the mislocation of responsibility at the level of system outputs. Drawing […]