Category Archives: Fundamental or Human Rights
Yi Xuan Wong, ‘A Remedy of One’s Own: Damages under the HRA 1998’
ABSTRACT Section 8(3) of the Human Rights Act 1998 permits UK courts to award damages if satisfied that the award is necessary to afford the claimant ‘just satisfaction’. This article has two aims. First, it unpacks how UK courts have approached the question of what constitutes ‘just satisfaction’ through an empirical study of all existing […]
Hannibal Travis, ‘Fair Comment: Restoring the Rightful Scope of Fair Use and Free Speech after Warhol Elster’
ABSTRACT Social criticism and self-expression are being suppressed under overbroad intellectual property regimes. The US Supreme Court has had multiple opportunities to apply its precedents on common-law torts, statutory crimes, and administrative regulations to copyright, trademark, and the right of publicity, but it has failed to do so. Indeed, the Court has tripled down on […]
Elena Izyumenko, ‘Music Metadata as a Fundamental-Rights Question, or EU’s Positive Obligations to Secure Cultural Visibility and Equality Online’
ABSTRACT Music metadata – credits, identifiers, language labels, territorial tags, and genre descriptors – functions as the operative infrastructure of streaming. It shapes what becomes searchable, recommendable, charted, and remunerated. This chapter argues that metadata is therefore not a neutral technical resource but a constitutional site where structural inequality is produced or mitigated. When metadata […]
Miranda Mourby, ‘Private by default: reasonable expectations in secondary uses of patient data’
ABSTRACT The ‘reasonable expectations of privacy’ test has become central to English information law. The fact-specificity of this test has obfuscated the scope of patients’ privacy rights. In both R (W, X, Y and Z) v Secretary of State for Health and Prismall v Google, the claimants were found to lack a circumstantially reasonable expectation […]
John Campbell, ‘Misuse of private information and the protection of reputation after ZXC v Bloomberg – Is privacy of information still a requirement?’
ABSTRACT While it is well established that Article 8 protects reputation, a defamation action remains the appropriate remedy unless the claimant has, in addition, a reasonable expectation of privacy. The Supreme Court in ZXC v Bloomberg found that information could be characterised as private if it harms reputation providing that such harm is sufficiently serious […]
T Markus Funk, ‘Freedom vs Dignity: What US and German Defamation Law Protect (and What They Sacrifice)’
ABSTRACT Defamation law exposes a jurisdiction’s deepest constitutional instincts. In the US, First Amendment doctrine reflects a belief that truth best emerges from unrestrained speech. The US model, reflecting historical antecedents, is designed to prevent government suppression of dissent, even at the cost of corrosive falsehoods being spread, In Germany, in contrast, post-authoritarian constitutionalism following […]
Izyumenko and Geiger, ‘Freedom of Expression and Intellectual Property before the European Courts’
ABSTRACT This paper presents the second chapter of the forthcoming book Human Rights and Intellectual Property before the European Courts: A Case Commentary on the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights, the first comprehensive guide to how Europe’s highest courts address the intersection of intellectual property (IP) […]
‘Conflict of Laws as Pedagogy’
Susanne Lilian Gössl, ‘“Mirin” and Beyond – Gender Identity, Domestic Private International Law, and Human Rights in the EU’, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, available at SSRN (20 May 2025). Fights over gender identity have preoccupied American politicians in recent years. The dialogue surrounding these issues has not always been civil and […]
Just Published: Kohavi, Constitutional Rights in Private Law
Constitutional Rights in Private Law – Tom Kohavi This book provides the philosophical foundations for the application of constitutional rights in private law – and more broadly, for social justice-oriented private law reform. It does this by connecting lessons from political and moral philosophy to those from constitutional and private law theories about their nature […]
Iwona Wróblewska, ‘Do We Need the Concept of Drittwirkung to Protect Fundamental Rights in Private Relations? A Lesson from Germany’
ABSTRACT The Drittwirkung determined the discussion on the impact of fundamental rights on private relations, significantly influencing the dogmatics of fundamental rights and the paradigm of their application in Germany. The current state of development of the Drittwirkung is a result of a dialogue over the course of several decades in German academia between the […]