We are delighted to announce the second issue of the LSE Law School’s Legal Studies Working Paper Series for 2024.
In this issue, Peter Ramsay (WPS 5/2024) integrates an analysis of the formal definition of criminal law with Martin Loughlin's 'political jurisprudence' of public law to develop a concept of criminal law as public law, a concept that provides both the basis of a new theoretical framework for social-scientific explanation of the law’s development and reveals an immanent standard of normative critique arising from the law's own essence; Mike Wilkinson (WPS 6/2024) traces the various ways in which a materialist understanding of constituent power appears in the work of Sieyes, Marx, and Schmitt, arguing that it is Schmitt's conservative conception of constituent power as constitutional identity, severed from any notion of social transformation, that comes to dominate liberal constitutional thought; Mike Wilkinson (WPS 7/2024) examines Hermann Heller's theoretical critique of liberalism, placing it in the historical context of Heller's initial support for the Weimar Republic but also his eventual sceptical diagnosis of the regime as a form of authoritarian liberalism; Martin Husovec and co-authors (WPS 8/2024) critically reflect on the ECtHR's recent decision in Sanchez, arguing that the confusion introduced by the Sanchez judgment into Strasbourg case law on liability for the speech of others disregards the EU's Digital Services Act and puts the Court on a collision course with EU law; Jan Zglinski (WPS 9/2024) assesses the significance of the recent European Super League ruling on sports governance and regulation, arguing that the decision will facilitate greater control of football federations through EU law, but could render EU policy making in the field more challenging; Paul Oldham and Siva Thambisetty (WPS 10/2024) set out a framework for how the contested Pandemic Access and Benefit-Sharing System could accommodate the interests of both developed and developing countries by building elements of trust, embedding incentives, and setting out structured monetary contributions under a 'PABS License and IP Framework’; Jo Braithwaite (WPS 11/2024) inspects Authorised Push Payment fraud from a legal perspective and evaluates the UK’s recent regulatory innovations, which include a mandatory reimbursement scheme for certain cases, before suggesting that further policies should prioritise a ‘joined-up’ response to the phenomenon’s challenges; Eva Micheler (WPS 12/2024) analyses the English law on separate legal personality and argues, based on a real entity theory of the firm, that companies should be understood as vessels for organisations to act autonomously; Rachel Leow (WPS 13/2024) explains why accounts of a principal’s liability for its agents’ wrongful acts vary significantly, by (i) drawing a distinction between ‘catalogue’ and ‘distinctive’ approaches and (ii) explaining how those who adopt ‘distinctive’ approaches rely on different features of agency in formulating tests for the principal’s liability; Suren Gomtsian and Edmund Schuster (WPS 14/2024) show that the historic policy of preferential tax treatment for dividend income was an implicit subsidy for UK-listed companies and argue that its repeal has been an under-appreciated factor contributing to the decline of the London stock market; Ting Xu (WPS 15/2024) examines the minor rights property market in contemporary China and presents a scaled analysis of the relationship between property and extralegality in uneven development; and Jacco Bomhoff (WPS 16/2024) explores the Cold War character of Private International Law by looking at the yearly summer courses at the Hague Academy of International Law, arguing that even though the Cold War was a foundational period for the field, the Cold War trends in Private International Law are best understood as part of a general modernising ethos rather than explained with reference to specific Cold War-related exigencies.