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The goal of our paper is to demonstrate the potential effects of a tax on paying a ransom on the incentives of stakeholders involved: both the perpetrators (the attackers placing the ransomware) as well as the potential victim. We do think that there is a case for a ransom tax, but we do also realise that it is not easy to make that case, and hence we express this doubt in our title. A tax could stimulate ex ante cybersecurity and also (when price elasticity is not too low) reduce ex post ransom payments. In addition, a tax in combination with a smartly designed subsidy could have benefits.

Purpose This paper aims to draw attention to an urgent need for reform of the regulatory framework of the broader export credit system to ensure a new and comprehensive “safe haven” for officially supported export credits. The purpose is to analyse the complex debate on disciplines of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), creating a point of reference for future analysis of and debates around the “carve-out clause” of the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (ASCM) and a “safe haven” in a broader sense. Design/methodology/approach This paper takes inspiration from legal, economic and political science literature on subsidies and officially supported export credits, as well as on legal documents related to the WTO and the OECD. It examines the WTO subsidy and the OECD export credits framework, focusing on main legal and economic governance aspects. Then, it gives a critical analysis how “safe” a “safe haven” in a broader sense might be, assessing frictions of and solutions for the fundamentally different set of disciplines, limitations, financial instruments not covered by OECD regulations, as well as new challenges related to climate finance. Findings After assessing the challenges regarding the “carve-out clause” of the WTO subsidy framework and two tracks aiming to create a new “safe haven”, requirements for comprehensive disciplines for officially supported export credits are pointed out. Furthermore, several misunderstandings and mistakes appearing in the debate are clarified. Research limitations/implications Desktop research rather than empirical field work. Practical implications This paper creates awareness for governments and exporters how to deal with a complex system of interrelated disciplines. The question, how “safe” a “safe haven” in a broader sense can be, has not been resolved yet. Some authors focus on the WTO disciplines not taking into account the need for an effective matching procedure of the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits (the Arrangement). Furthermore, the introduction of several new pre-export financing programmes and the growing significance of climate finance-related instruments for export credit agencies creates both opportunities and challenges. This paper can serve as a reference point for the academic debate and further research. This paper also offers newcomers to the topic a comprehensive overview. Originality/value Although the “carve-out clause” and the Arrangement have been much discussed, there is limited literature review structuring both existing and new aspects of the debate, assessing (dis)advantages of arguments and interpretations. This paper both adds to the corpus of literature about the ASCM, as well as the Arrangement, and takes this corpus as the object of its analysis.

Tying has become a common practice in digital platforms. It may generate both pro-competitive effects and anti-competitive effects, which makes it difficult to distinguish between lawful and unlawful tying practices. The cases of Tencent and Android both involve tying conducts, but interestingly, the cases have different outcomes. This article explores reasons for these different case outcomes from a comparative law and economics perspective. By assessing the facts and legal rulings in Tencent and Android, we find that the different case outcomes result, on the one hand, from the different case facts, and on the other hand, from the different approaches used by the EU Commission and the Chinese Supreme People’s Court. The Court scores better in terms of ensuring legal certainty; nevertheless, it may face difficulties when it has to apply economic analysis. The Commission seemingly uses more economics, but the application is not full-fledged, as it disregards important case facts when assessing competition foreclosure, and employs asymmetric legal tests and evidence standards for anti/pro-competitive effects of tying. From a law and economics perspective, we provide suggestions for China and the EU, taking the recent Anti-Monopoly Guidelines on Platforms in China and the forthcoming Digital Markets Act in the EU into account.

Models of individual accountability for algorithms' actions fail when a human-algorithm association comes to be viewed as a collective actor. In some situations, human and algorithmic actions are so closely intertwined that there is no longer a linear connection between the emergent collectivity and the complex interactions of humans and algorithms. In such collective decision-making sequences, individual accountability can no longer be attributed. Therefore, a new perspective on human-algorithm associations that captures their emergent properties and organizational qualities is needed to develop appropriate models of collective accountability. This article seeks to answer a number of questions. How can the encounter between humans and algorithms within such a socio-technical configuration be adequately theorized? Can the configuration itself be understood as a hybrid collectivity? Can actions be attributed to the configuration as a personified collective actor? How will accountability be institutionalized for human-algorithm associations - in centralized or distributed collective forms?

We examined whether jurors who know that a prosecutor has a high conviction rate are more inclined to convict a defendant than jurors who know that the prosecutor has a low conviction rate. Using simulated criminal cases, we conducted two experimental studies with jury-eligible participants. Study 1 (N = 200) tested whether information about prior conviction rates (high or low) affected jurors’ estimations of the probability of guilt in the context of a robbery. Study 2 (N = 205) used another criminal trial context (murder) and another dependent variable (dichotomous guilty/not guilty verdicts). Study 2 also incorporated jury instructions on the reasonable doubt standard and included a control condition in which no information regarding the conviction rate was provided. In both studies, jurors in the high conviction rate treatment were significantly more likely to convict the accused than jurors in the low conviction rate treatment. When jurors are aware of a prosecutor's prior conviction rates, a self-reinforcing cycle may arise in which conviction rates determine conviction rates.

This article describes how the facts in social reality take an intermediate position between objective facts and purely subjective ‘facts’. In turn, these social facts can be subdivided into constructivist and non-constructivist facts. The defining difference is that non-constructivist facts are completely determined by an approximate consensus between the members of a social group, while constructivist facts are founded in such a consensus but can nevertheless be questioned. Ought fact are such constructivist facts. Because they are founded in social reality, a naturalistic theory of ought facts is attractive. Because constructivist facts are always open to questioning, we can explain why the facts in social reality may found ought facts but are nevertheless not the final word about them.

In discussing whether legal systems are necessarily coercive, legal philosophers usually appeal to thought experiments involving angels or other morally driven beings who need no coercion to organise their social lives. Such appeals have invited criticism. Critics have not only challenged the relevance of such thought experiments to our understanding of legal systems; they have also argued that, contrary to the intuitions of most legal philosophers, the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ would not hold that there is law in a society of angels because the view that law is necessarily coercive ‘enjoys widespread support among laypersons’. This is obviously an empirical claim. Critics, however, never systematically polled the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’. We boarded that bus. This article discusses findings from five empirical studies on the relationship between law and coercion.

Private actors as non-institutional, and therefore often overlooked, participants in EU legal processes – A specific focus on their role as private regulators – Private actors such as companies, contracting parties and industry associations, play a pivotal regulatory role in the EU legal order – Classifying the existing legal research on private regulation – A legal-doctrinal approach towards private regulation also needed – Theoretical background of a novel legal-doctrinal perspective on private actors – Addressing the most pressing practical methodological challenges – Specific focus on the problem of accessibility and the difficulty of understanding and interpreting private regulation doctrinally

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown exponentially in recent years, which not only generates value but also creates risks. AI systems are characterised by their complexity, opacity and autonomy in operation. Now and in the foreseeable future, AI systems will be operating in a manner that is not fully autonomous. This signifies that providing appropriate incentives to the human parties involved is still of great importance in reducing AI-related harm. Therefore, liability rules should be adapted in such a way to provide the relevant parties with incentives to efficiently reduce the social costs of potential accidents. Relying on a law and economics approach, we address the theoretical question of what kind of liability rules should be applied to different parties along the value chain related to AI. In addition, we critically analyse the ongoing policy debates in the European Union, discussing the risk that European policymakers will fail to determine efficient liability rules with regard to different stakeholders.

Officially supported export credits matter greatly for private contracts: they provide the possibility of large export transactions and contracts which would otherwise not take place. It is therefore important to know how these instruments are regulated on an international level. The international regulation for public European export finance has three levels: rules set by the WTO to curb export subsidies, the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits (which is a gentlemen’s agreement) and the EU state aid framework. Whilst the WTO framework has an official carve-out for the Arrangement, the EU state aid regime does not. Post-Covid, this article looks at the way to proceed with regulating official export credits, and how the different levels of regulation should be applied (and when), concluding that the Arrangement should be the core text of international regulation on export credits.

‘Green recovery’ is one of the key themes of the stimulus packages implemented around the world in response to the Covid-19-related economic downturn. Recent research points to the potential role of regulation that becomes less stringent during recessions (ie countercyclical regulation) as an instrument to stimulate a quicker recovery. When this argument is put in the context of a green recovery, two key questions arise: should we implement countercyclical environmental regulation? If yes, what environmental instruments are better suited to stimulate the economy in periods of economic downturn? This article addresses these questions by discussing the risks of countercyclical environmental regulation and comparing the countercyclical effects of two critical environmental instruments: carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. The article argues that policymakers should be cautious in implementing countercyclical environmental regulation because the benefits of this practice are uncertain and it entails various risks. The article also challenges the belief common among academics and policymakers that cap-and-trade is inherently more countercyclical than carbon taxes by showing that whether this is true depends on the design of these instruments and other contingent factors.

Summary This article focuses on the references (allegations) made by the lawyers in a selected number of cases to Roman and customary law as well as to court decisions when arguing their case. The analysis focuses on three similar civil litigation records from the Court of Friesland from 1716, 1718 and 1720. Network analysis was used to examine whether certain sources were more dominant (i.e. more central) in the network than others and to explore the relationship between the references. The lawyers in the three cases from the Court of Friesland appear to have used some references in common when arguing whether security rights (i.e. mortgages) included a right of pursuit and whether the auctioneer could recover the object if the buyer failed to pay.

Mediation in the context of the enforcement of judgments and other enforceable documents should be distinguished from the broader and more general question of whether or not enforcement agents may serve as mediators. In Europe, there are some jurisdictions where enforcement agents may indeed serve as mediators. This does not necessarily mean that in these jurisdictions enforcement agents use mediation in ongoing enforcement procedures executed under their supervision (the latter is qualified as ‘post-judicial mediation’ or ‘participatory enforcement’). In actual fact, examples of post-judicial mediation are scarce or non-existent even though they are discussed in literature. As will be shown in the present contribution, ‘post-judicial mediation’ is often not conceived as mediation in the strict sense (i.e. the bringing about of an amicable settlement under the guidance of a neutral mediator), but as a series of activities aimed at providing efficient and effective enforcement services. It is often better to refer to ‘post-judicial mediation’ as ‘participator enforcement’ or ‘amicable enforcement’. Best practices in participatory enforcement are the central topic of the present contribution.

In a world of rising long-term risks and their ensuing syndromes, the mitigation and financing of long-term risks are therefore arguably some of the most critical issues facing society. However, long-term thinking involving future generations draws limited attention in current political and social systems. Private insurance has received increased attention due to its expert role in risk management and its risk transfer mechanisms, and it has played an important role in dealing with some types of long-term risk, such as floods and earthquakes. Increasingly, insurance also contributes to disaster mitigation through regulating the conduct of policyholders by creating incentives for policyholders to counter short-termism and invest in reduction measures regarding long-term risks. In addition, it has been shown that supply-side problems and behavioural anomalies make it difficult to insure against long-term risks. Innovative long-term insurance solutions and a combination of public and private partnerships are proposed to overcome these restrictions.

For a long period, China's environmental law has been dubbed a ‘paper tiger’ due to the truism that China's environmental legislation is plentiful but not properly enforced. During the past few years, there have been impressive strides made by Chinese policymakers to address the non-compliance and weak enforcement of China's environmental law. As a result, China has bolstered a toolbox approach of environmental law enforcement, which provides law enforcers with a variety of instruments to induce compliance. This article provides a comprehensive and dynamic analysis of the available mix of (public) enforcement instruments and their relative importance under the current enforcement regime of China's environmental law by taking the recent legal and policy developments into account. More particularly, we assess the de facto application of the smart mix of administrative and criminal enforcement tools in China, by conducting a law and economic analysis on the public enforcement data of China's environmental law between 2012 and 2020.

We study a land-titling reform implemented as a randomized control trial to isolate its effects on litigation. The reform consisted of demarcating land parcels, registering existing customary rights, and granting additional legal protection to right holders. Ten years after implementation, the reform doubled the likelihood of households experiencing land-related litigation, but disputes did not escalate into more frequent violent episodes. We suggest that this increase in litigation reflects the complementarity of land titling by registration and by judicial procedures aimed at further clarifying property rights, as the reform registered titles to all parcels but left many titles subject to adverse claims. This raised the demand for complementary litigation aimed at perfecting titles for low-value parcels that, under the customary system, were optimal to keep un-clarified. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the increase in litigation took place among households that plausibly own land of lower value.

The Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) in China allows the responsible authority for merger control to consider not only the competition interest but also other public interest reasons when it reviews a takeover or merger. Where the responsible authority considers that the benefits of a takeover or merger to the public interest outweigh the harms to competition, it may ‘exempt’ the transaction. This ‘public interest exemption’ has never been formally applied since the introduction of the law in 2008. One explanation for this can be found in the ambiguity of the law: there are no legal provisions that clarify the public interest considerations. A second explanation is that China did not establish a separate review procedure for this public interest exemption. In practice, some approval decisions made by the enforcement authority led to confusion, as it was unclear whether the transactions were ‘exempted’ for public interest reasons or for industrial policies. This article reflects on the role of the public interest exemption in China. By drawing lessons from the past and examining the public interest exemption regime in Germany, it aims to provide suggestions for future reforms, against the background of the promulgation of the Amendment to the AML in 2022.

Nowhere in Europe are disputants forced to settle their civil or commercial disputes by way of mediation or any other form of alternative dispute resolution. Settlement is also completely voluntary in light of the fundamental right of access to court of Art. 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. This does not, however, mean that potential disputants may not be requested to attempt to settle their case before going to court, for example, by way of mediation, especially if strict time limits are observed for such procedure. In some European jurisdictions, attempting mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution before court action is initiated is mandatory, at least in certain cases. The present contribution will focus on such preliminary mandatory mediation attempts in a selection of jurisdictions.

Quantitative recidivism risk assessment can be used at the pretrial detention, trial, sentencing, and / or parole stage in the justice system. It has been criticized for what is measured, whether the predictions are more accurate than those made by humans, whether it creates or increases inequality and discrimination, and whether it compromises or violates other aspects of fairness. This criticism becomes even more topical with the arrival of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. This article identifies and applies the relevant rules of the proposed AI Act in relation to quantitative recidivism risk assessment. It does so by focusing on the proposed rules for the quality of the data and the models used, on biases, and on the human oversight. It is concluded that legislation may consider requiring providers of high-risk AI systems to demonstrate that their solution performs significantly better than risk assessments based on simple models, and better than human assessment. Furthermore, there is no single answer to evaluate the performance of quantitative recidivism risk assessment tools that are or may be deployed in practice. Finally, three approaches of human oversight are discussed to correct for the negative effects of quantitative risk assessment: the optional, benchmark, and feedback approach.

In the past four decades that China has devoted to its offshore oil exploration and production, a model of joint development between the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and foreign operators has been used. Drilling for oil offshore is a challenging task with multiple hazards, as oil spills both from daily operations and from offshore accidents, endangers the marine ecosystem of nearby waters. Unlike traditional damage (i.e., personal injury and property damage) via the environment, tort liabilities resulting from marine ecological damage require a separate regime where relevant rules are scattered in different legal instruments. Some unique features rooted in the Chinese offshore oil industry fundamentally shape the liability distribution and the approaches to ecological remediation. The Bohai Bay Oil Spill in 2011 demonstrated that China was in urgent need of dealing with this issue in practice. This study will describe the applicable legal remedies concerning this type of damage and analyse the existing compensation system. Based on a law and economics approach, some observations are made on the efficiency of the regime to evaluate if the applicable rules are in line with economic starting points when compensating marine ecological damage arising from offshore drilling.

La question de la réglementation des responsabilités de l’entreprise en matière de respect des droits de l’homme et de l’environnement figure, quel que soit l’endroit où elle est discutée, en bonne place de l’agenda politique. Les États membres de l’Union européenne sont à l’avant-garde de ce développement. Le présent article offre une vue d’ensemble non seulement des différentes tentatives de réglementation, mais surtout de l’ensemble des questions juridiques qui se posent dans une perspective globale. Les auteurs soutiennent que la réglementation des chaînes de valeur mondiales nécessite de prendre en compte les différents domaines juridiques – droit des sociétés, pratiques commerciales, clauses abusives, vente aux consommateurs, responsabilités contractuelle et délictuelle – et de développer des solutions intégrées qui dépassent la pensée généralement fractionnée en branches du droit.

In this paper we extend Heidi Hurd’s “correspondence thesis” to the termination of pregnancy debate and argue that the same reasons that determine the permissibility of abortion also determine the justifiability of acts involving conscientious objection against its performance. Essentially, when abortion is morally justified, acts that prevent or obstruct it are morally unjustified. Therefore, despite conscientious objection being legally permitted in some global south countries, we argue that such permission to conscientiously object would be morally wrong in cases of morally justifiable termination of pregnancy. After presenting and defending our “correspondence argument” we suggest that conscientious objection should be denied as a matter of public health policy in developing counties, even in cases where adequate referral services are possible. Towards the end, we extend our argument to midwives, nurses, and prospective students in the field. Given their essential position in resource‐poor contexts; they too have no claim to conscientious objection.

Most legal and political philosophers agree that typical legal systems are coercive. But there is no extant account of what typically makes typical legal systems coercive when they are coercive. This paper presents such an account and compares it with four alternative views. Towards the end I discuss the proposed account’s payoffs. Among other things, I show how it can help us explain what I call ‘comparative judgements’ about coercive legal systems (judgements such as ‘Legal system a is more coercive than legal system b’) and how it can help the development of social scientific inquiries into the coerciveness of our legal systems.

How insolvency courts handle conflicts is an important aspect of the Directive on preventive restructuring frameworks and it has become more important in the current COVID-19 crisis, as a result of which insolvencies are or will be on the rise. Insolvency courts are one of the key actors that can impact the length and costs of conflicts, and, consequently, the effectiveness and efficiency of insolvency proceedings. However, there is a lack of empirical research that examines when, why and how insolvency courts prevent actual or potential conflicts. This article reports the results of an empirical study that explored the strategies used by insolvency judges in the Netherlands to resolve conflicts and to prevent a dispute from becoming one. The results show that insolvency courts deploy “under the radar” mediation-like strategies to prevent actual and potential conflicts involving insolvency practitioners, enhancing the speed and cost-effectiveness of the winding-up of cases in the perceptions of stakeholders. Consequently, insolvency judges do not only act as adjudicators in court proceedings, but also take on mediation-like roles, at least in some jurisdictions. Limitations and challenges of these roles are discussed. The findings of this study are relevant for determining and regulating the roles and tasks of insolvency judges.

This paper addresses the specific challenges arising from the monetization of political speech on social media, and propose a normative argument to extend consumer disclosures to political speech. Political speech enjoys the highest degree of protection by national constitutions as well as supranational and international charters. Unlike commercial speech which usuallyenjoy less constitutional protection, political speech is the foundation of constitutional democracies. The blurring line between political and commercial speech introduces a new layer of complexity in tackling hidden political advertising. Indeed, political speech is likely to attract commercial speech inside a broader scope of protection with the result that potential limitations of this kind of speech would be required to pass a very strict test through the balance with other constitutional safeguards or legitimate interests according to the criteria of necessity, legitimacy and proportionality. This could also question the scope of other regulation designed to govern commercial speech like advertising. To this end, the paper compares regulatory and judicial interpretations adopted in Europe and the United States, and is structured as follows. In the first part, we explore the content monetization business models (including influencer marketing) used on social media, and we identify three types of influencer ‘personas’ who are prone to engage in political speech. The second part looks into the constitutional differences between commercial and political speech across the Atlantic. The third part provides the normative argument at the intersection between consumer law and freedom of expression, and the fourth part concludes.

Many of today’s products and services fall into the category of products and services that are, as such, legal but still unhealthy. Think of smoking as an example. This paper deals with the question of which mix of legal instruments should ideally be used in the light of such products and services. It distinguishes between products and services that predominantly lead to “harm to oneself” or “harm to others”. In the end, most law and economics arguments point in the direction of ex ante safety regulation. However, when there are concerns about the quality of regulation (eg due to lobbying efforts), liability has important added value. In the “harm to others” scenario, safety regulation is even more warranted because the larger number of victims and the increased difficulty to prove the causal link render litigation burdensome. Strict liability has several advantages over negligence and is, therefore, generally preferred. A strong point of negligence, however, is that it enables the court to conduct its own weighing of costs and benefits, which in specific circumstances may be better than that of the regulator or the producer. Furthermore, it enables the judge to consider not only the harm to the user, but also the harm to others in setting the due care standard.

Dissatisfaction with the administration of justice is as old as law proclaimed the distinguished American legal scholar Roscoe Pound in 1906. The system of administration of justice has been under considerable scrutiny in Cyprus following the excessive delays in resolving disputes that are highlighted in reports such as the European Union’s Justice Scoreboard, the World Bank’s Doing Business Reports as well as European Commission papers on Cyprus, urging authorities to modernize the system in order to be able to meet the demands following the financial crisis. For this reason, various experts have been assigned with the task of identifying the problems and coming up with proposals and solutions. The discussions, though, are not new as similar problems have been presented in common law jurisdictions, in particular, but they have been tackled decades ago, with the adoption of reforms that moved the adversarial system of justice closer to civilian stereotypes.

The Egyptian Arbitration Law No. 27/1994 (the ‘Egyptian Arbitration Law’) was enacted without delineating the subject of arbitrability of administrative contracts. This was one of the hottest pre-existing debates preceding the promulgation of the Egyptian Arbitration Law, yet the latter has succinctly mentioned that arbitration is valid between public and private entities. The Legislature did not find such wording sufficient to settle this debate and decided in 1997 to introduce a specific amendment elaborating this issue. The 1997 amendment might have settled the arbitrability of administrative contracts debate, however, it initiated another debate when it required that arbitration agreements under administrative contracts be approved by the competent minister. Until now, there are some unsettled issues concerning this ministerial approval requirement. For instance, which party is liable to procure such ministerial approval: the administrative authority or its private counterparty? Could this ministerial approval be implied? For example, what if the competent minister has attended the contract signing ceremony, would that be enough? Another recurring question is whether such a ministerial approval pertains to public policy or not. This article tries to answer these questions in light of the recent decisions rendered by the Egyptian courts and arbitral tribunals. Ministerial Approval Requirement, Administrative Contracts, State Contracts, Egyptian Arbitration, Public Policy, Annulment of Arbitral Awards, Enforcement of Arbitral Awards, Implied Consent, ex officio, Egyptian State Council

Summary During the Second World War Germany and German nationals looted the Netherlands and its nationals of many valuable assets, that were taken to Germany. Often the looting took the form of forced sales. In some cases, the sales price was too low, in other cases the German buyer paid market value or more, but often the buyer paid with guilders looted from the Dutch State. After the liberation of the Netherlands the ‘restoration of rights regime’ enabled victims of forced sales to seek annulment of the sales. This article concentrates on those movable goods that were sold to German buyers and that, after the war, returned from Germany to the Netherlands with the help of the Allied Forces, the so-called recuperation goods. If the seller did not seek annulment before the deadline of July 1951, for example because the price paid was considerable so that he preferred to keep the purchase price, or if his request was rejected, the Dutch State should not be forced to return these goods to their German buyer. Therefore, these goods were first subjected to Royal Decree E 133 which expropriated all German owned property in the Netherlands. Upon return to the Netherlands the recuperation goods became State property, but this measure could be undone by the seller successfully seeking annulment of the sales contract under Royal Decree E 100. However, if no annulment took place, the State remained owner of these goods.

This contribution explores the application of data science and artificial intelligence to legal research, more specifically an element that has not received much attention: the research infrastructure required to make such analysis possible. In recent years, EU law has become increasingly digitised and published in online databases such as EUR-Lex and HUDOC. However, the main barrier inhibiting legal scholars from analysing this information is lack of training in data analytics. Legal analytics software can mitigate this problem to an extent. However, current systems are dominated by the commercial sector. In addition, most systems focus on search of legal information but do not facilitate advanced visualisation and analytics. Finally, free to use systems that do provide such features are either too complex to use for general legal scholars, or are not rich enough in their analytics tools. In this paper, we motivate the case for building a software platform that addresses these limitations. Such software can provide a powerful platform for visualising and exploring connections and correlations in EU case law, helping to unravel the “DNA” behind EU legal systems. It will also serve to train researchers and students in schools and universities to analyse legal information using state-of-the-art methods in data science, without requiring technical proficiency in the underlying methods. We also suggest that the software should be powered by a data infrastructure and management paradigm following the seminal FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles.

Two English and two Dutch cases have recently clarified the (potential) liability of parent companies vis-à-vis third parties in relation to damage caused by their subsidiaries. They concern the decisions of the UK Supreme Court in Vedanta v Lungowe and Okpabi v Shell, the Hague Court of Appeal in Oguru v Shell and the Hague District Court in Milieudefensie v Shell (climate change case).

On 16 December 2020, the European Commission delivered on the plans proposed in the European Digital Strategy by publishing two proposals related to the governance of digital services in the European Union: the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The much-awaited regulatory reform is often mentioned in the context of content moderation and freedom of expression, market power and competition. It is, however, important to bear in mind the contractual nature of the relationship between users and platforms and the additional contracts concluded on the platform between the users, in particular traders and consumers. Moreover, the monetisation offered by digital platforms has led to new dynamics and economic interests. This paper explores the reform proposed by the European Commission by means of the DSA by touching upon four main themes that will be addressed from the perspective of consumer protection: (1) the internal coherence of European Union law; (2) intermediary liability; (3) the outsourcing of solutions to private parties; and (4) digital enforcement.

This study offers a contribution to the literature on access to justice and legal empowerment. It presents findings from qualitative empirical legal research and explores how obtaining access to justice contributes to conflict resolution. Fifty-four in-depth interviews were conducted with victims of domestic violence who had obtained access to the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina) with a domestic violence complaint. The study found that these victims benefitted from obtaining access to justice even when this did not directly achieve resolution of their conflict. The benefits were related to the actions taken by legal organisations contributing to their own perceptions of being agents capable of making decisions.

Recently, two EU instruments relating to business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships have been adopted: a new consumer sales directive and a directive on the supply of digital content. Three further EU instruments are in the pipeline: the so-called Omnibus Directive and a directive on collective redress together known as the ‘New Deal for Consumer’, and a Platform-to-Business regulation (P2B). This editorial aims to give a brief overview and a prima facie evaluation of the content of these instruments and to invite contributions offering a more in-depth analysis of the new rules and their expected impact.

In its efforts to counteract terrorist threats and contain the risks posed by returning foreign fighters, the Netherlands, like several other European states, has enacted legislation introducing denationalisation as a counter-terrorism measure. The Dutch measures target convicted terrorists and foreign fighters alike, the latter without the prior involvement of the judiciary. This practice not only challenges traditional conceptions of citizenship, but also raises several human rights concerns, of which discrimination is the most pressing. This Article therefore examines the measures taken by the Netherlands and analyses their compatibility with Articles 14 and P12-1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to assess the measures' disproportionate focus on Dutch-Moroccans from a legal perspective. Based on this conclusion of inequality, the Article then ventures beyond purely legal analysis to discuss the Dutch legislation more broadly, before linking the legal argument with normative critiques on the denationalisation of terrorists, and foreign fighters in particular. Taken together, the legal and normative findings establish that denationalisation as a counter-terrorism measure in the Netherlands cannot be reconciled with the legal or normative dimension of the equality principle.

The present paper focuses on the harmonisation of civil procedural law in Europe and on a global scale. As the title of the paper indicates, this will be done by also taking into consideration past experiences in this field. The question as to the desirability of harmonisation will not be discussed. The paper will especially focus on (1) Harmonisation as a result of national law reform, (2) Harmonisation as a result of competition between procedural systems, and (3) Harmonisation as a result of international harmonisation projects.

This chapter addresses the question of whether the cognitive sciences are relevant for law. The answer to this question will turn out to be a threefold ‘yes’. First, if law is traditionally conceived as a set of rules that prescribe what ought to be done, there is a role for the cognitive sciences in determining the facts of the cases to which the law is to be applied (evidential reasoning). Legal decision making often involves the application of open-textured concepts, and the cognitive sciences can study the psychological processes and perhaps also the biases involved in such an application. Moreover, the results of the cognitive sciences may also be important for the evaluation of law, and for determining what good law might be.A perhaps more ambitious role for cognitive sciences in law has to do with the determination of the content of the law. If law is a social phenomenon, and if social phenomena depend on what goes on in human minds, cognitive sciences can, at least in theory, study the content of the law. Some would argue that the cognitive sciences could never fulfil this more ambitious role, because law has to do with what OUGHT to be done, or ought to be the case, while sciences, including cognitive sciences, can only study what IS the case. It will be argued that this fundamental objection against this role for the cognitive sciences is misguided: there is no hard difference between IS and OUGHT and even if law belongs to the realm of OUGHT, cognitive sciences may still be relevant for determining the content of the law.Finally, the cognitive sciences may disrupt the image of humankind that underlies law. It turns out that people are less rational than they may seem at first glance, that they often do not know what motivates them, that it is not obvious what actions and agents are and that it is unclear what the best level of explanation is for human actions or bodily movements. A change in the image of humankind that underlies law, to reflect the recent insights of the cognitive sciences but also of ancient philosophical debates, may have important consequences for the contents of law.

This article argues that it is possible to hold autonomous agents themselves, and not only their makers, users or owners, responsible for the acts of these agents. In this connection autonomous systems are computer programs that interact with the outside world without human interference. They include such systems as ‘intelligent’ weapons and self-driving cars. The argument is based on an analogy between human beings and autonomous agents and its main element asserts that if humans can be held responsible, so can, in principle, autonomous agents, as humans are more like autonomous agents than is often assumed (rather than the other way round)., Bu makale otonom ajanların/aktörlerin yaptığı eylemlerden ötürü sorumluluğun sadece üreticileri, kullanıcıları veya sahipleri değil otonom ajan/aktörlerin de sorumlu tutmanın mümkün olduğunu savunmaktadır. Bu bağlamda otonom sistemler insan müdahalesi olmaksızın dış dünya ile etkileşime geçebilen bilgisayar programlarıdır. Bunlar “akıllı” silahlar ve sürücüsüz arabalar gibi sistemleri içerirler. Bu argüman insanlarla otonom ajan/aktörler arasındaki benzerliklere dayanmaktadır ve insanlar genellikle varsayılandan daha çok otonom ajan/aktörlere benzediğinden (ki bu tercih edilen düşüncenin tersidir) eğer insanlar sorumlu tutulabiliyorsa prensipte otonom ajan/aktörlerde sorumlu tutulabilir.

The relationship between law and coercion has been, and still is, a central topic in legal philosophy. Despite this, discussion about it is immersed in confusion. Some philosophers have noticed this, but hardly any work has been done to attempt to solve or even identify the confusions. This paper aims to fill this gap. Here I propose distinctions and qualifications that help us clarify the relationship between law and coercion and avoid confusion. Building on the clarificatory work, I then argue that despite there being several distinct philosophical discussions about the relationship between law and coercion, one of them should be prioritised.

This dissertation analyzes the impact that European Union law has had upon Cyprus law, focusing on the problems that arose after the financial crisis and how EU law can be used as a vehicle for dealing with problems of over-indebtedness. Contract law and civil procedure in Cyprus are only now experiencing major processes of transformation as a result of the financial crisis and the claims that reach courts, despite acceding to the EU 17 years ago. EU accession was initially seen by many as an opportunity for reform and modernization of the legal system, however, in certain areas of the law this was only realized, as a result of the problems caused by over-indebtedness and the lack of specific institutions to deal with such problems.

A challenge in computational legal research is the quantitative assessment of “relevance” in a network of court decisions. The term “sleeping beauty” (SB) was coined to denote an article that received almost no attention immediately after publication, but suddenly received multiple citations many years later. These publications can be identified by calculating their Beauty coefficient (B-coefficient). In this contribution, we apply approaches used for identifying SBs to decisions arising from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). We compared B-coefficients of CJEU cases with their centrality scores from classical algorithms from network analysis, finding that these measures tend to correlate. We discuss the implications of this that are interesting for legal scholars, acknowledging that future work is required to calibrate the scale of the time variable in the B-coefficient formula for finer-grained application to case law. Our study’s setup provides a foundation for new case law analytics methodologies that extends the power of traditional network analysis techniques for answering questions about the behavior of European courts.

Several crypto communities have claimed to have revolutionary potential and to present a possible alternative to the state legal order. In this paper, we first mention three different generations of crypto communities, revealing their shared narrative, before focusing on the Silk Road dark web marketplace. Based on the qualitative content analysis of the Silk Road forum, we look into whether this platform should be understood as a legal order, a revolutionary movement, or simply a capitalist marketplace. Lastly, the article includes a short discussion of the question whether or not an online platform such as the Silk Road poses a serious challenge for state sovereignty.

This article reports the results of a comparative empirical legal study that analyzed (1) strategic behaviour by actors in insolvencies that is salient to insolvency judges and (2) how insolvency judges respond to such behaviour. After examining four different European countries, namely Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal, the study reveals how differences regarding case allocation, judge – insolvency practitioner (IP) interaction, and remuneration and case financing can result in strategic behaviour on both the side of the judges and the IPs. From this, it follows that improving the efficiency and effectiveness is not merely a matter of implementing legislation and case law, but that it also requires a look into the dynamics between insolvency judges, IPs, and other actors in the insolvency process.

This contribution aims to unveil a side of influencer marketing that remains underexplored: the control of content through private law mechanisms. As the influencer market is inherently transactional, it is important to understand what business practices define this industry from the perspective of how legal risks are divided among contracting parties. We do so by first looking into influencer marketing business practices and identifying the parties engaged in the supply chain of influencer marketing, and reflecting upon the commercial interests visible in these transactions. We further contribute to existing literature with qualitative empirical research based on a survey sent to Swiss influencer marketing agencies, to shed light on how contractual practices shape up in the supply chain, and how influencer contracts divide responsibility for posted content.

Cities are increasingly influenced by novel and cosmopolitan values advanced by transnational technology providers and digital platforms. These values which are often visible in the advancement of the sharing economy and smart cities, may differ from the traditional public values protected by national and local laws and policies. This article contrasts the public values created by digital platforms in cities with the democratic and social national values that the platform society is leaving behind. It innovates by showing how co-regulation can balance public values with platform values. In this article, we argue that despite the value-creation benefits produced by the digital platforms under analysis, public authorities should be aware of the risks of technocratic discourses and potential conflicts between platform and local values. In this context, we suggest a normative framework which enhances the need for a new kind of knowledge-service creation in the form of local public-interest technology. Moreover, our framework proposes a negotiated contractual system that seeks to balance platform values with public values in an attempt to address the digital enforcement problem driven by the functional sovereignty role of platforms. (C) 2019 Sofia Ranchordas and Catalina Goanta. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.