Category Archives: Fundamental or Human Rights
Hassan Ahmad, ‘The Jurisdictional Vacuum: Transnational Corporate Human Rights Claims in Common Law Home States’
ABSTRACT Private MNCs that operate in developing host states through overseas subsidiaries are regularly accused of human rights and environmental violations. Host state plaintiffs who then seek redress in home states where a corporate parent is domiciled face a number of doctrinal limitations. Focusing on the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, this Article […]
Ralf Michaels, ‘The Right to Have Private Rights’
ABSTRACT Hannah Arendt, famously, was no believer in human rights. Human rights, she thought, are unsatisfactory because they are territorially unlimited but ineffective. Her own alternative – the right to have rights, through membership in a political community – is not satisfactory either: such rights are effective but territorially limited and subject to the state’s […]
‘Risky Speech Systems: Tort Liability For AI-Generated Illegal Speech’
Jane Bambauer, ‘Negligent AI Speech: Some Thoughts about Duty’, 3 Journal of Free Speech Law 344 (2023); Nina Brown, ‘Bots Behaving Badly: A Products Liability Approach to Chatbot-Generated Defamation’, 3 Journal of Free Speech Law 389 (2023). How should we think about liability when AI systems generate illegal speech? The Journal of Free Speech Law, […]
‘Growing AI litigation risk requires business response’
The risk businesses face from litigation is changing as artificial intelligence (AI) tools become more popular. Businesses need to recognise this and consider the different kinds of risks associated with AI technology and how they might give rise to liability. Risks associated with AI can arise with the data those systems use, with use of […]
Barbara Evans, ‘Rules for Robots, and Why Medical AI Breaks Them’
ABSTRACT This article critiques the quest to state general rules to protect human rights against AI/ML computational tools. The White House Blueprint for an Al Bill of Rights was a recent attempt that fails in ways this article explores. There are limits to how far ethicolegal analysis can go in abstracting AI/ML tools, as a […]
‘Winter is coming: the future of First Amendment analysis, and the prospects for New York Times v Sullivan, after NYSR&PA v Bruen’
Cold winds now blow in the US Supreme Court around the stability of a century’s worth of First Amendment doctrine; even New York Times Co v Sullivan 376 US 254 (1964), the most stable of that Court’s speech precedents, now seems in danger of being blown away in the storm, thanks to the recent decision […]
‘The American Law Institute Launches Restatement of the Law, Constitutional Torts’
PHILADELPHIA — The American Law Institute’s Council voted today to approve the launch of Restatement of the Law, Constitutional Torts. The project will be led by Reporters John C Jeffries, Jr of University of Virginia School of Law and Pamela S Karlan of Stanford Law School. The project will examine the law of 42 USC […]
Enyinna Nwauche, ‘Does South Africa’s Proposed State Ownership of Data Make Any Sense?’
ABSTRACT This paper interrogates the proposed state ownership of data by South Africa’s Draft National Cloud and Data Policy 2021 and argues that the quest for state ownership is evidence of South Africa’s policy preference for the state custodianship of critical natural resources. The paper suggests that a preferred reading of the proposed state ownership […]
John Crain, ‘The Constitutional Tort of Shielding Criminal Wrongdoers in Violation of the Equal Protection of the Laws’
ABSTRACT When it comes to the obligations of state prosecutors, the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of ‘the equal protection of the laws’ does not mean that state governments must protect people equally. As a matter of constitutional interpretation this means that a prosecutor’s decision not to prosecute a criminal wrongdoer, no matter how benighted by prejudice, […]
León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, ‘A New History for Human Rights: Conflict of Laws as Adjacent Possibility’
ABSTRACT The pivotal contributions of private international law to the conceptual emergence of international human rights law have been largely ignored. Using the idea of adjacent possibility as a theoretical metaphor, this article shows that conflict of laws analysis and technique enabled the articulation of human rights universalism. The nineteenth-century epistemic practice of private international […]