Kiwumulo George, ‘The harms caused by the Internet of Things: categorising damage and legal liability under the EU and UK liability frameworks’

14 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
The Internet of Things blurs the line between virtual and physical worlds. Increasingly, adaptive and autonomous IoT systems have changed the way we interact socially and economically; emerging technology will continue to integrate pervasive IoT systems into society. These systems are increasingly complex, and the likelihood of harm is high. Existing laws and regulations often struggle to adequately address the potential harm. This thesis aims to define the types of harm that IoT systems are likely to cause. Harm caused by the Internet of Things includes physical, mental, and economic harm. In addition, these IoT systems may violate an individual’s right to privacy, control, and autonomy. The study analyses EU and UK laws and tests whether existing frameworks may address the harms caused by these IoT systems: it analyses the Product Liability Directive in connection with the General Data Protection Regulation, the Artificial Intelligence Act, the Data Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act, in comparison with the corresponding frameworks in the United Kingdom. Using black-letter analysis, comparative approaches, and examples from various smart systems such as smart grids, smart medical devices, hiring technologies, and smart transportation systems, this thesis will identify inconsistencies and gaps in the assignment of legal responsibility and risk. Furthermore, it will illustrate that the legal and regulatory environment is fragmented and that the many ongoing reforms create and entrench legal uncertainty. Notable examples are the 2026 deferral of the effective date of the digital edition of the Artificial Intelligence Act and the variable rates of member state implementation of the 2019 EU Product Liability Directive. This thesis also argues that the Internet of Things creates risks that fall outside the established and accepted thresholds of legal concern in the EU and UK. Recent amendments to EU laws increased access to legal redress for victims of material bodily harm, but responsibility for such acts remains undefined because of artificial intelligence and other factors beyond the control of producers and service providers. This thesis advocates a risk-based liability framework for IoTs and other similarly evolving technologies.

George, Kiwumulo, The harms caused by the Internet of Things: categorising damage and legal liability under the EU and UK liability frameworks (October 12, 2025).

Posted in European Private Law, Tort | Leave a Comment

Singh and Singh, ‘Unleashing the protector’s wider role in A and 6 others v C and 13 others [2026] UKPC 11′

13 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
This case note examines A and 6 others v C and 13 others [2026] UKPC 11 (‘Re the X Trusts’), in which the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council clarified the default role of trust protectors exercising consent powers. Holding that, unless the trust instrument provides otherwise, protectors may exercise an independent judgment on the merits of trustee decisions, the Board resolved a question that had long divided courts and commentators. This note summarises the judgment and discusses its implications for trust drafting and the administration of offshore trusts.

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Ayushi Singh and Subhashini Singh, Unleashing the protector’s wider role in A and 6 others v C and 13 others [2026] UKPC 11, Trusts & Trustees. Published: 9 October 2026.

Posted in Equity and Trusts | Leave a Comment

Hong Wu, ‘The Duty-of-Care Dilemma of Companion AI in Mental Health: Care Ethics and Regulatory Responses under EU Law’

13 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
Companion AI in mental health, anthropomorphic conversational systems providing emotional support across sustained periods of use, has moved from prototypes to mass-market products, and recent suicide cases in Europe and beyond have brought its risks to the centre of EU digital governance. This article argues that the EU’s regulatory framework, the AI Act, the Medical Devices Regulation, the GDPR, the Digital Services Act, and the revised Product Liability Directive, rests on a dual rights-based and product-based foundation ill-suited to the harms generated by companion AI: relational harm, emergent vulnerability, and emotional dependency. Distinguishing four legally distinct types of companion AI, only the first of which is a medical device, and drawing on care ethics, in particular Chadha-Sridhar’s account of hybrid non-voluntarism, it contends that these systems do not engage the physician’s traditional duty of care but give rise to a relational duty of care, triggered by users’ serious need and allocated in layered form, with the application operator as its primary bearer. It identifies three mismatches: between rights-based reasoning and relational harm, between static and emergent vulnerability, and between the product-based paradigm and continuous-care oversight. It proposes a limited but systemically significant shift towards a relational model, under which the duty of care operates as an auxiliary normative tool through the positive obligations of the EU fundamental rights order and the open-textured safety standards of the product-based instruments, within the internal market competence conferred by Article 114 TFEU.

Wu, Hong, The Duty-of-Care Dilemma of Companion AI in Mental Health: Care Ethics and Regulatory Responses under EU Law (October 11, 2026).

Posted in Deontology and Moral Responsibility, European Private Law, Tort | Leave a Comment

Fernando Cardenas Piepereit, ‘Who Owns the Rain? AI Contribution, Human Authorship, and a Status of Its Own’

13 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
Who holds the rights to what an AI system contributes to a work, and when does a legal order need a status for AI that is not derived from the human? Taking EU, US and Chinese law as the baseline, I test four models against one yardstick: existing law plus disclosure and operator duties, a narrow organiser right, a commons for unguided output, and a status of its own. Ownership of output and status decouple: rights held by an AI would leave the human organiser worse off, while status turns on evidence about the system. I propose three stages ordered by reversibility; The first model does most of the short-term work.

Cardenas Piepereit, Fernando, Who Owns the Rain? AI Contribution, Human Authorship, and a Status of Its Own (October 11, 2026).

Posted in Intellectual Property | Leave a Comment

Leow and Liau, ‘A Comparative Common Law Study on Restitution from the State’

12 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
When should restitution from the State be available? The jurisdictions examined in this paper – England, Canada, Australia – once gave a common answer to this question, but they no longer do, for reasons concerning both these jurisdictions’ constitutional and unjust enrichment laws. The aim of this article is to provide an account of these fascinating reasons, consider their application to another jurisdiction with a common law heritage, Singapore, and to consider what might lie ahead in the future. The findings of this article, a work of comparative common law, are of interest not just to those in these four jurisdictions, but potentially to many others, including the United States, where questions have arisen about whether tariffs imposed by the Trump administration but overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States must be repaid.

Leow, Rachel and Liau, Timothy, A Comparative Common Law Study on Restitution from the State (October 11, 2026).

Posted in Public law, Remedies and Procedure, Unjust enrichment | Leave a Comment

David Erdos, ‘The CJEU limits freedom of expression under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): C-199/24 Legal Newsdesk Sweden’

12 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
Legal Newsdesk concerned a paid search service providing criminal information on individuals. Disclosure was not oriented towards a collective public and so clearly fell outside of journalism. The CJEU further held that journalistic disclosure must be ‘in compliance with the rules and codes of conduct of the profession of journalist’ and ‘factual allegations’ must be ‘verified so as to be sufficiently reliable’. Even journalism was not exempt from GDPR remedies and liability and reference to freedom of expression did not permit derogations ‘on the basis of’ Article 85 beyond special expression. Rights reconciliation mandates a narrow interpretation of several of these holdings.

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David Erdos, The CJEU limits freedom of expression under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): C-199/24 Legal Newsdesk Sweden, Journal of Media Law. Published online: 11 October 2026.

Posted in Defamation and Privacy, European Private Law, Fundamental or Human Rights | Leave a Comment

Engstrom and Qian, ‘How Tort Law Drives Change’

12 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
Tort law is conventionally understood as a blunt, backward-looking, money-moving instrument. On the standard account, tort law promotes safety – if at all – by forcing defendants to internalize the costs of accidents. Money, in other words, is the sine qua non of tort’s deterrent effect – the system’s engine, and beating heart.

This Article challenges that view. Drawing on a trove of new evidence – including previously undisclosed settlement agreements, deposition transcripts, and internal corporate records, as well as original survey data and nearly ninety in-depth interviews with plaintiffs’ lawyers, defense lawyers, expert witnesses, and injured clients – we show that tort law can do far more than shift dollars. Instead, by stimulating organizational learning, surfacing hidden risks, activating legislators and regulators, and binding actors to new rules of conduct, tort law governs.

To see this wider landscape is to see a tort system that looks far less like a crude pricing device and far more like a multifaceted – and, at times, expressly altruistic – engine of institutional reform. This new perspective – based on a raft of new information – ought to expand the views of those who study the tort system. And, perhaps more importantly, it ought to inform the day-to-day work of those who represent the people the system seeks to help.

Engstrom, Nora Freeman and Qian, Lisa, How Tort Law Drives Change (October 9, 2026).

Posted in Tort | Leave a Comment

Xiyin Tang, ‘Ex Ante Copyright’

12 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
Copyright law is famously described in ex post terms. Much emphasis is placed on the doctrine’s various uncertainties, resolved only after lengthy and expensive litigation. Few have considered the role that the billion-dollar entertainment insurance industry might play in reversing this typical narrative. Elsewhere, insurance law scholars have long acknowledged insurance’s role as an ex ante regulatory tool, complementing or even supplanting government oversight in industries as diverse from policing to corporate governance. This Essay argues that in the creative industry, too, insurance acts as a form of ex ante copyright: a regulatory tool within the copyright system that can, if designed correctly, provide greater certainty and facilitate, rather than chill, creativity up front.

The very availability of insurance increases the well-documented phenomenon of moral hazard, or, greater risk-taking. Yet, and unlike in other areas such as auto, health, or fire insurance, creative moral hazard might be positive, exhibiting a counteracting force to a variety of uncertain ex post chilling copyright doctrines. And while the typical role of the insurer is to reduce moral hazard, the changing landscape of content liability insurance – for example, that insurers are increasingly more willing to issue policies based on fair use rather than requiring licenses – evinces the uniqueness of copyright infringement torts, in which complete reduction has never been, nor should be, the goal. Studying the evolution of liability insurance in the content industries is also instructive for general insurance law scholarship, as it suggests that there may be some torts, like copyright infringement, for which there is an optimal level of tortious conduct and, in turn, some optimal level of moral hazard.

Tang, Xiyin, Ex Ante Copyright (October 10, 2026), Journal of the Copyright Society (forthcoming 2027).

Posted in Intellectual Property | Leave a Comment

‘The Real Housewife of William Blackstone’

12 October 2026 | Author: steve

Julia Rudolph, ‘William Blackstone, Family Man: New Contexts in Gender, Jurisprudence, and Jamaica’, Law & History Review 1 (2026). William Blackstone is, of course, an omnipresent name for law students and law professors alike. At least once a week during the semester, I teach a Supreme Court opinion that cites the eighteenth-century English jurist’s writings for some proposition or another. Typically, though, these opinions give no introduction to the man behind the quotations. Sentences begin with phrases like, ‘As Blackstone explained’, ‘Blackstone denounced’, and ‘Blackstone says’, as if the words come from some disembodied presence rather than an actual man. As a result, William Blackstone the person can remain curiously abstract in legal education, for all the ubiquity of his name. In fact, I learned from Julia Rudolph’s article ‘William Blackstone, Family Man’ that even those historians who are specialists in his era have lots of unanswered questions about his inner life … (more)

[Sara Mayeux, JOTWELL, 12 October 2026]

Posted in Family Law, Legal History, Property | Leave a Comment

Ian Williams, ‘Precedent in Early-Modern Equity: The View from the Star Chamber’

12 October 2026 | Author: steve

ABSTRACT
Precedent played an important role in theoretically one-off equitable interventions becoming regular, and equity becoming more law-like. However, the available sources limit our ability to understand the role of precedent in the Chancery in the key formative decades around 1600. This article uses the court of Star Chamber as a proxy for the other equity courts. It shows a much more significant use of precedent than has previously been understood, and that the practice of precedent in the court was similar to that in the common law courts. Equity was becoming more like the common law in the early-17th century.

Ian William, Precedent in Early-Modern Equity: The View from the Star Chamber, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. Published: 12 October 2026.

Posted in Equity and Trusts, Legal History | Leave a Comment