Category Archives: Fundamental or Human Rights
Symeon Symeonides, ‘Rome II and Cross-Border Violations of Human Rights, Infringements of Personality Rights, and Other Cross-Border Torts’
ABSTRACT This essay discusses the problematic application of the European Union’s Rome II Regulation to cross-border torts, namely those in which conduct occurring in one state causes injury in another state. The general lex loci damni rule of Rome II (Art. 4(1)) mandates the application of the law of the state of injury to these […]
Dan Burk, ‘Asemic Defamation, or, the Death of the AI Speaker’
ABSTRACT Large Language Model (‘LLM’) systems have captured considerable popular, scholarly, and governmental notice. By analyzing vast troves of text, these machine learning systems construct a statistical model of relationships among words, and from that model they are able to generate syntactically sophisticated texts. However, LLMs are prone to ‘hallucinate’, which is to say that […]
Chantal Mak, ‘Human Rights in Private Law’
ABSTRACT This Chapter introduces the academic debate on the role of human rights in private law for an audience of Master students in transnational and European private law. It first explores the ways in which dignity may provide a foundation for extending human rights protection to private legal relations and sets out the legal context […]
Graeme Austin, ‘Authors’ Human Rights: Lessons for Common Law Jurisdictions’
ABSTRACT The September 2022 decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Safarov v Azerbaijan reminds us that failing to protect authors’ rights is not just an economic issue. It can be a breach of human rights. Using the ECtHR decision as a springboard, this article explores the implications of a human rights […]
David Elder, ‘The Law of Defamation, the First Amendment, and Justice William H Rehnquist’s Attempts to “Hold the Balance True”: A Framework for Assessing the Continuing Viability of New York Times v Sullivan’
INTRODUCTION Justice, later Chief Justice, William H Rehnquist had a long and sometimes controversial career as a jurist. A book edited by Craig Bradley, The Rehnquist Legacy, is an excellent introduction to the still-growing literature. The author has a quibble with Professor Geoffrey R Stone’s article therein, ‘The Hustler: Justice Rehnquist and “The Freedom of […]
Anne Lafarre and Bas Rombouts, ‘Towards Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence: Assessing Its Impact on Fundamental Labour Standards in Global Value Chains’
ABSTRACT Human rights due diligence (HRDD) is the main (voluntary) process through which companies can assess and address negative human rights impacts. In recent years, however, mandatory HRDD requirements are increasingly seen as a more effective way to persuade more companies to better address human rights risks in their global value chains (GVCs). This study […]
Otto Spijkers, ‘The Influence of Climate Litigation on Managing Climate Change Risks: The Pioneering Work of the Netherlands Courts’
ABSTRACT This paper analyses the way in which the responsibility for managing climate change risks is addressed by the Dutch courts in the Urgenda and Shell cases. A foundation called Urgenda initiated proceedings against the State of the Netherlands; followed by Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) initiating proceedings against Shell, a multinational oil corporation […]
‘When Property and Legality Diverge’
Aziz Huq, ‘Property Against Legality: Takings after Cedar Point’, 109 Virginia Law Review (forthcoming 2023), available at SSRN. There is a nearly universal assumption in contemporary property theory that clearly defining property rights in terms of exclusion enhances rule of law virtues of clarity, stability and predictability. And there is a corresponding assumption that a […]
NA Moreham, ‘Privacy, defamation and ZXC v Bloomberg’
ABSTRACT The significance of the Supreme Court decision in ZXC v Bloomberg extends well beyond recognition of the ‘starting point’ that, up to the point of charge, a person who is subject to police investigation has a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of information about it. The Supreme Court’s willingness to use the privacy […]
Maryam Khan and Farieha Aziz, ‘The “Defamation Backlash”: Law and the Feminist Movement in Pakistan’
ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the global #MeToo movement, we engage with questions regarding the constitutive role of law in the contemporary feminist movement in Pakistan. Why has the new wave of the feminist movement not leveraged the existing ‘legal opportunity structure’ (LOS)? What explains the movement’s skepticism of the law at a critical juncture […]