In today’s globalized competitive landscape several dimensions such as labour, markets and capital are integrated. As a result, companies attempt to gain inbound foreign capital. To achieve that they investigate away countries to host their operations and to trade their shares. While the...

Intellectual property law is not prepared for a world where non-humans create significant inventions, music, literature, and art. Generative artificial intelligence’s ability to produce valuable properties without attributable authorship defies the theories of ownership that underlie modern...

In the common law legal system, the main sources of law are habits that live in society as a legal culture, as well as agreements that have been agreed upon by the parties. Meanwhile, in the civil law legal system, the regulations set by the government are the main source of law. There are two...

Administrative law has the objective of protecting individuals from the possible abuse that they can encounter from powerful administrative branch of the government. This law also governs the conditions and procedures in which administrative decisions can be reviewed by court. However, judicial...

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) formed the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA) to facilitate trade liberalization between the bloc’s members. These Member States have continued to implement the agreement according to the dispute settlement mechanism set by the ASEAN...

"Parol Evidence is a principle which common law courts have developed for the purpose of determining the role and weight to ascribe to contractual writings." Though this principle is "universally recognised" as affirmed by Fansworth, but is generally used in Common Law world. It has been...

In this book, Stephen Copp has brought together some of the world’s leading figures in the field of law and economics to discuss questions that are central to our understanding of how a free-market economy operates.Though most people accept that a free economy cannot exist in a legal vacuum,...

The view that the common law is a body of rules laid down by the courts is, for some of its proponents, implicit in the nature of the law as a system of authoritative guidance, but it has implications that are unattractive in principle and contrary to the conventional understanding of legal...

Legal scholars often classify countries into ‘legal families’. The research on ‘legal origins’ refers to this literature; yet, it then goes further as it uses distinct categories into which each country’s law is allocated in quantitative studies. Today, this line of research, which goes...

This book chapter explores how common law (state or federal) tort law evolves to fill regulatory voids. Particularly in areas that pose emerging, and incompletely understood, health and safety risks, common law tort liability holds out the potential for a dynamic regulatory response, one that...

This chapter, based on a report presented on the occasion of the annual meeting of the German Society of Comparative Law in 2017, focuses on recent developments in the law of set-off and penalties/liquidated damages, highlighting specifically the decisions in Cavendish Square Holding BV v. Talal...

The queries and contentions regarding the place of the enforcer principle in common law jurisdictions such as that of the United Kingdom have been orphaned in a conceptual pandemonium, bringing about an identity crisis to the realm of Trusts & Equity. Debates as to what constitutes the kernel of...

This text is a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law. It aims to answer the question, “what can the civil law tradition tell us about the New Private Law?” It seeks to do this by offering one civilian’s perspective on private law, on U.S. private law, and on the...

This paper proposes that the concept of the ‘trust’ held for over a thousand years under the British legal system is drawing to a close. Education and Legislation is heralding the demise of that ancient and noble institution in the Australian context. The Paper puts forward various...

Drawing on two hand-collected data sets of 10,466 state supreme court cases from 2019 and 7,354 state supreme court cases from 2003, this study examines patterns of citations to prior opinions of courts located in other states. We find robust evidence that state supreme courts preferentially...

On February 25, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court in Rodriguez v. FDIC unanimously ruled that there should be no federal common law, including in the area of taxation, except in extraordinary circumstances. Some commentators have raised the concern that this hostility to federal common law may...

Australian mediation practice is thriving. Effective forms of mediation are practised in court-connected schemes, in the public sector, in the community justice sector and in the private business sector. Indeed, no industry is excluded from the application of mediation. In contrast,...

This essay reviews the origins and development of the debate over the “efficiency of the common law hypothesis.” The essay begins with the earliest explanation for the observed tendency of the common law as proffered by Richard Posner. It then examines the Rubin-Priest and contemporary...

This paper is a pre-print version of the Introduction to Ernest Lim's A Case for Shareholders' Fiduciary Duties in Common Law Asia published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, which was awarded the Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Runner-up Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. This...

We evaluate Richard Posner's famous hypothesis that common law converges to efficient legal rules using a model of precedent setting by appellate judges. Following legal realists, we assume that judicial decisions are subject to personal biases, and that changing precedent is costly to judges....

A central requirement in the design of a legal system is the protection of law enforcers from coercion by litigants through either violence or bribes. The higher the risk of coercion, the greater the need for protection and control of law enforcers by the state. This perspective explains why, in...

In a Case Law regime Courts have more flexibility than in a Statute Law regime. Since Statutes are inevitably incomplete, this confers an advantage to the Statute Law regime over the Case Law one. However, all Courts rule ex-post, after most economic decisions are already taken. Therefore, the...

A judgment will be enforced or recognised in other nations or states only if the court that issued the judgment had “jurisdiction in the international sense”. For recognition or enforcement of a judgment in personam, the foreign court must have had jurisdiction over the party against whom...

Before 1804, France was strictly divided in terms of legal regimes: a part was under Roman civil law while the majority of the territory was under customary laws which, as with common law, gave more flexibility to judges and fewer rights to the state. This dichotomy offers the unique opportunity...

I model the ocean as an array of lines set within a two-dimensional frame, and show how the Exclusive Economic Zone emerged as an equilibrium in customary international law. I find that custom codifies the efficient Nash equilibrium of enclosure for nearshore fisheries. For highly migratory and...

This article offers a concise typology of spontaneous norms - i.e., norms that are formed or sustained through decentralized collective behavior in a community. The typology combines three criteria for identifying spontaneous norms: (i) implicit formation of (customary) rules, as opposed to...

I model the ocean as an array of lines set within a two-dimensional frame, and show how the Exclusive Economic Zone emerged as an equilibrium in customary international law. I find that custom codifies the efficient Nash equilibrium of enclosure for nearshore fisheries. For highly migratory and...

There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origins of a country—that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law—profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal...

This is the introduction to four lectures published together in the November 2019 issue of Lloyds Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly. The lectures were part of a special series, "The Common Law and Finance: Perspectives from the Bench" held in Oxford in 2018-2019. In the series, senior judges...