We are delighted to announce the third issue of the LSE Law School’s Legal Studies Working Paper Series for 2022.
In this issue, Michael Wilkinson (WPS 13/2022) offers a critique of Adrian Vermeule's Common Good Constitutionalism and argues that the project of common good constitutionalism lends itself to highly authoritarian readings, not because of its opposition to liberalism, but because of its steadfast refusal of any link between constitutional authority and democracy; Yusra Suedi (WPS 14/2022) analyses the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s conclusions in the famous Sacchi climate change case and argues that while the findings did not break new ground (in relation to the three admissibility criteria of extraterritorial jurisdiction, victimhood, and the exhaustion of domestic remedies), the decision nevertheless represents progress for international climate change litigation; Michael Wilkinson (WPS 15/2022) analyses constitution-making in postwar Europe through a critique of Bruce Ackerman’s Revolutionary Constitutions, concurring that an elitist (German) model has come to dominate in the European Union as a whole, but arguing that postwar constitutionalism in core European countries was elitist from the outset, and even counter-revolutionary in the direction of constitutional travel; Grégoire Webber (WPS 16/2022) explores indemonstrable human goods by introducing a methodology called a vignette of insight whereby one draws on everyday experiences to re-enact the inquiries and the non-practical insights that, together, facilitate the intellectual achievement that is a practical insight into a basic good and deploys this methodology to explore the goods of knowledge, play, and beauty; David Murphy (WPS 17/2022) proposes a framework for analysing the connection between cash markets, which are used to construct financial market benchmarks, and abstract markets, which reference them, and looks at three episodes (Libor, WTI, and Nickel dislocations) to evaluate the utility of a successful financial market benchmark, the status of abstract markets, and the proper aims of benchmark policy; Kelvin F.K. Low, Edmund Schuster and Wai Yee Wan (WPS 18/2022) propose to expose the ignorance behind the hype that the venerable corporation will either be revitalised by blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) or replaced by decentralised autonomous organisations; and Sarah Paterson (WPS 19/2022) uses complex systems theory to argue that financially distressed large corporates will only seek moratorium protection when the benefits such protection brings outweigh the signalling and information-processing problems associated with it; analyses the new Part A1 moratorium and the administration moratorium with this insight in hand; and suggests that if the policy choices which are revealed are deliberate there may be a need to revisit them.