Abstract This paper integrates empirical and doctrinal approaches to demystify the intellectual property law Typical Case system in China. IP Typical Cases have proliferated nationwide, yet their institutional meaning – particularly what makes them ‘typical’ and what functions they are intended to serve – remains obscure. Normative documents suggest a dual purpose: doctrinally, to unify the application of law across similar cases; and socially, to promote law popularisation and support broader social governance. This dual intention aligns with the findings from a semantic network analysis based on a large-N Weibo dataset, which reveals that IP Typical Cases embody economic, political, and legal dimensions. However, policymakers have overlooked the inherent tension between these functions: the legal function requires the doctrinal complexity of hard cases, whereas the societal function depends on simple, communicable cases suitable for public education. Given the predominance of non-hard cases and the pre-existing ambiguity surrounding the system’s intended purpose, the current IP Typical Case system struggles to realise either objective effectively. A clear recognition of the hard–simple division could enable the system to function more coherently, contributing both to the development of China’s case guidance system and, more narrowly, to the formation of IP legal dogmatics.
Abstract Software as a medical device (SaMD) offer significant promise for care and have become near ubiquitous within healthcare and medicine. Yet, the regulation of SaMD in the UK and Europe has not kept up with the technological state-of-the-art. In this paper we argue that there is a conceptual mismatch between regulatory frameworks designed for physical devices and the intangible nature of software. To demonstrate this, we identify three key gaps in the application of medical devices regulations to SaMD: (1) how the ‘intended use’ of digital devices impacts on whether they are captured by the relevant Regulations; (2) the problems created by the boundaryless nature of software for determining the device ‘manufacturer’; and (3) the challenges of managing changes to SaMD, especially where these are updated rapidly and frequently. Whilst recognising that recently published guidance and planned proposals to update medical devices regulation in the UK and EU attempt to address these challenges, we argue that they do not go far enough. Namely, they fail to properly attend to the foundational mismatch at the heart of regulating SaMD. In response, we propose three potential solutions to ensure that any forthcoming regulatory changes appropriately capture the nuances and risks specific to software.
In Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia , the Supreme Court of Canada took the unprecedented step of inaugurating a novel ‘tort of intimate partner violence’ targeting coercive control. 1 In giving benediction to this new nominate tort, the judgment charts a creative path for the law of torts in Canada, which will be of interest to Anglo-Commonwealth scholars and jurists more broadly. This comment highlights the principal innovative aspects of the Court’s decision, while identifying some analytical issues in its reasoning and cautioning against its uncritical adoption.
On 14 November 2025, the High Court of England and Wales handed down judgment in the largest environmental mass tort in UK history: the group claim by more than 600,000 Brazilian victims of the 2015 collapse of the Fundão tailings dam against the mining giant BHP Group. In Município de Mariana v BHP Group , the Court found BHP (through its UK and Australian-listed parent companies) liable on both strict liability and negligence grounds under Brazilian law. 1
The Irish Supreme Court’s decision in Kelly v UCD 1 is a significant ruling on judicial bias and disqualification. It is the first case to consider the implications of familial connections between judges and law firms representing parties since the Judicial Conduct Committee published its Guidelines on Judicial Conduct and Ethics in 2022. 2 The case clarifies the legal test for objective bias, delineates its boundaries, and addresses the role of judicial conduct guidelines in disqualification decisions. It also has broader implications for other common law jurisdictions, particularly England & Wales, where similar issues of judicial propriety and public confidence in impartial adjudication arise.
Orthodox accounts of negligence liability for 'pure psychiatric damage' view it as protecting the claimants' interest in their psychiatric health and often attack English law's restrictive duty of care rules for inadequately safeguarding this right. This paper challenges this widespread consensus by presenting and evaluating an alternative explanatory rationale. Drawing an analogy between the 'paradigm case' of primary victims and the tort of assault, the crux of the argument is that the interest protected in 'accident' cases is in avoiding anticipated immediate physical violence but the law sometimes extends the protection of this right to secondary victims in order to preserve the law's legitimacy. From this perspective, several intractable doctrinal problems that have long troubled adherents to the orthodox view become explicable.
The UK Supreme Court has recently clarified the principle of bad faith in UK trade mark law in the case of SkyKick UK Ltd v Sky Ltd. 1 This commentary examines the UK Supreme Court’s approach and provides a brief analysis of its implications on UK trade mark applications made for defensive purposes.
Despite the Supreme Court ruling on the matter in July 2023, the correct test for police misconduct for use of force (the use of force test) in England and Wales remains contested. This paper explores how the largely subjective criminal law test preferred by police stakeholders is inconsistent with addressing the institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police highlighted in the Casey Review. In doing so, it makes a novel contribution to police accountability debates by developing a new analytical framework which allows arguments concerning police accountability processes to be more clearly articulated and assessed. The framework envisages three axes of accountability. The conduct axis relates to the actual levels of force used against citizens. The cultural axis concerns the extent to which police accountability processes provide meaningful oversight of police managers and professional standards departments, while the constitutional axis is engaged with the balance of power at the various parts of the police accountability system. Plotting the relative impact of more subjective or objective use of force tests along each axis allows clarity of debate concerning the consequences of the preferred test and thereby highlights the mitigation necessary in relation to the negative consequences of a choice in either direction.
The public local inquiry in the planning system is expected to facilitate public participation in environmental decision-making. Public participation in environmental decision-making has the aim of enhancing environmental democracy, making better decisions and improving environmental protection. This paper argues that, despite the long history of participation in the planning system, public local inquiries in their present state are limited in their capacity to facilitate public participation. It contends that the public participation responsibilities of the public local inquiry are hampered by its adversarial procedures. Planning scholars have argued that the formal, adversarial nature of the public local inquiry makes it difficult for people with little legal experience to participate, thus acting as an obstacle to public participation and good decision-making. Drawing on inquiry case law and scholarship, this paper investigates the multiple purposes of the inquiry and how tensions between these purposes have been interpreted by the courts. In exploring the reasons for these conflicts, the paper provides an opportunity to refine the system to facilitate public participation and to ensure that the public local inquiry is fair to its participants and serves the democratic purpose it is expected to meet.
Why do states under-expend? Conventional explanations point to institutional failures. By contrast, drawing on the case of cesses in Indian tax history and practice, I take underspending not only as symptomatic of flaws in state administration, but also as constitutive of state forms. In this specific case, I argue that the underspending of earmarked funds, and their consequent pooling and remobilisation, produce a bifurcated state through its revenue arrangements. This argument is of substantive value, but it is also in the service of a broader conceptual move: reinterpreting something that might conventionally be understood as a marker of state failure or dysfunction, as in fact constitutive of the state. Finally, the argument also has a methodological dimension. In order to execute this redescription, I draw on a mix of archival material and analysis of case law. This extends an insight from tax law scholarship on the importance of a multi-disciplinary methodological apparatus to bring tax and constitutional scholarship together.
Little has been written about the rights of children in delict (a functional equivalent of tort), the legal field concerned with compensating those who have suffered injury or loss due to wrongful actions of others. Yet in many legal systems children can, and do, raise legal proceedings seeking damages for injuries caused by another's negligence. Negligent wrongdoers (normally adults) often attempt to reduce any damages awarded by arguing that the injured child was contributorily negligent. This paper analyses and compares how Scotland and South Africa approach such claims. Both have mixed, uncodified legal systems and have embedded children's rights in domestic law. In South Africa the provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are incorporated in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996 and in various statutes, notably the Children's Act 38 of 2005. The recent UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024 directly incorporates the child's Convention rights in Scottish law. We examine how each jurisdiction assesses childhood capacity for contributory fault, exploring what a rights-based approach might involve. Finally, we consider the (potentially) transformative role of courts. Drawing on the South African experience, we propose a way Scottish courts could integrate children's rights in contributory negligence decisions concerning children.
Despite the exponential rise in the number of couples cohabiting, across Europe, cohabitants are unable to access comprehensive legal protections. To strengthen calls for reform, this paper advocates for the adoption of a human rights framing and traces its potential development. It begins with an analysis of the current discourse and offers an explanation as to why there is limited engagement with human rights argumentation. The focus will then shift to the need for a human rights framing. Through an analysis of the merits of such, it will be demonstrated that the common criticisms of a human rights framing are not applicable in the cohabitation context. Moreover, it will be argued that, owing to a previous judicial recognition of human rights infringements, the debate is primed for the adoption of a novel framing. This paper will conclude by considering how a human rights framing could be applied in practice.
This paper critically examines the legal and normative implications of remote AI weapons detection (AWD) systems currently under trial in England and Wales. Positioned as a technological solution to rising knife crime and counter-terrorism challenges, these systems claim to reduce reliance on traditional stop and search practices by identifying concealed weapons without physical contact. We make an original argument that such technologies invert the established logic of stop and search - effectively transforming it into a new concept of 'search and stop' - with significant consequences for individual rights and police accountability. Through a doctrinal analysis of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), relevant case law from the European Court of Human Rights and England and Wales, and the directed surveillance regime under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the paper addresses five core questions: (1) whether AI-generated outputs can satisfy the legal standard of 'reasonable suspicion'; (2) whether remote scanning constitutes a 'search' in law; (3) the implications of these systems under equality law and police duties under PACE; (4) how the technology engages surveillance law and the right to privacy; and (5) what reforms or safeguards are needed for lawful and legitimate use.
Personal property has had an enduring bipartite categorisation of things in action and things in possession. But digital assets, supposedly situated outside both categories, have disrupted this categorisation. Recent statutory reform, through the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, seeks to permit a third category of personal property. This contribution outlines the effect of the Act and of a third category of personal property. The third category is negatively defined, dependent on the boundaries of the other categories for its scope. The breadth of the thing in action category is not settled, which means that the scope of the third category is undefined. The Act suggests that digital assets can be a 'thing' that is 'the object of personal property rights'. But the Act does not define what this thing is, nor does it tell us what rights an owner of a third category thing might have. Cases that have considered these questions have highlighted the transactional abilities these assets enable. If this is the focus, then these assets are best viewed as things in action.
On 31 August 2024, tickets for the Oasis reunion tour went on sale. The outcome was predictable. Prospective purchasers waited online for hours to buy tickets, many were disappointed. Tickets soon appeared on secondary sites at prices which greatly exceeded originally advertised prices. The resulting outcries fed into the new Government's manifesto promise to 'put fans back at the heart of events by introducing new consumer protections on ticket resales'. The best solutions to address the popular concerns are: (1) to improve the allocation of tickets in the primary market; and (2) add a greater degree of consumer protection to reduce information asymmetry in the primary market. The former reform requires no regulatory intervention. As a second-best solution I suggest rethinking regulation of the secondary market, as most of the current and proposed regulatory efforts in this market are either unworkable or exacerbate fan frustration. Regulatory interventions on basis of 'fairness' or 'putting fans first' exacerbate these market failures. The source of the problem is market failure in the primary market, and it is towards this that regulatory effort should be directed. Intervention in the form of secondary market price caps will undermine efforts to protect fans.
This paper examines the effect of post-Brexit UK trade agreements on devolved regulatory autonomy. It does so by: (i) carrying out a comprehensive mapping exercise of the overlaps between such agreements and devolved matters; (ii) analysing the domestic legal framework for the implementation of international trade commitments in devolved law; and (iii) identifying the extent to which trade agreements have affected devolved competences and/or caused substantive changes to devolved legislation. The paper demonstrates that UK trade agreements have rarely resulted in significant changes to devolved legislation. This outcome is attributable not only to the limited regulatory ambition of the agreements concluded so far, but also to the distinctive role played by UK domestic implementing legislation in shaping the scope of devolved autonomy. In particular, it shows how the interaction between international trade commitments and the UK's implementation framework operates as a 'double bind' on devolved autonomy.
Where private football rules govern a player's access to employment with a new club, EU law is engaged.1 In 1995, Bosman removed the most visible barriers to post-contract movement.2 However, it did not redesign the transfer system as a whole. The 2001 settlement between FIFA/UEFA and the Commission preserved a regulatory architecture in which compensation exposure, ITC-based clearance (through the International Transfer Certificate procedure) and fixed registration windows continued to shape mobility in practice.3 The immediate trigger for Diarra was BZ's failed move to Charleroi, after uncertainty over registration and potential joint liability under FIFA's transfer rules carried the dispute through the Belgian courts to the Mons reference.4 Diarra therefore tests whether that post-Bosman architecture, taken as a connected design of compensation exposure, clearance control and registration-period timing, restricts free movement and competition contrary to Articles 45 and 101 TFEU.5
This case note examines the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Slagelse Almennyttige Boligselskab, Afdeling Schackenborgv ae nge, where the Court found that a distinction between westerners and non-Westerners constituted discrimination under the Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000 implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin. The case note shows that while the finding in this case does help address xenophobia under the Directive 2000/43, the interpretive moves made by the Court in reaching this finding are normatively weak in five respects: (i) the meaning of ethnic origin, (ii) the distinction between direct and indirect discrimination, (iii) the meaning of xenophobic discrimination, (iv) the recognition of structural harm, and (v) the use of the narrative of integration in European policy.
The unique statutory provision that is section 423 of the Insolvency Act 1986, 1 offering redress to creditors that have been, or potentially will be, prejudiced by fraudulent transactions entered into by the debtor, has recently been the subject of interpretation by the Supreme Court in El-Husseiny v Invest Bank. 2 This asset recovery provision is not strictly confined to insolvency situations. 3 The core issue before the Supreme Court was whether the term ‘transaction’ in section 423 applied to a situation where a debtor procures a company which he owns to transfer a valuable asset for no consideration or at an undervalue which diminishes or eliminates the value of his shares in the company, or whether the provision required the debtor to personally own and transfer the asset in question. 4 This was a preliminary matter that was found against the debtor in the Court of Appeal which enabled the substantive trial to proceed. While the substantive trial decided that other elements in section 423 were not met, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the parties did not seek to stop it from rendering its judgment, and that in any case the issue was of sufficient importance for it to proceed. 5
