By centering the Asia-Pacific as a critical site of inquiry, we can understand more about the nature of regulatory approaches to discrimination, enforcement practices, and their implications for the development of workplace equality practices in the region. Focusing on Australia and Hong Kong, this post illustrates some of the challenges posed by discrimination law reform.
Climate litigation has surged worldwide, with notable cases capturing public attention and fuelling academic discussion. While these cases often spark debate on judicial ‘activism’ in compelling government action, the fundamental role of private law, especially the right to prevent damage, is frequently overlooked. This blog post, which relates my article ‘The Overlooked Role of Public Law: Channelling the Right to Prevention into Climate Litigation’ published in Carbon & Climate Law Review, sheds light on how private law principles, commonly used to address harm prevention, underlie these prominent climate cases. This holds particularly true in Europe, where private law drives judicial reasoning and the outcomes of these cases. This post explores this overlooked dimension in key European climate cases, including Urgenda (Netherlands), Greenpeace (Norway), Klimaatzaak (Belgium), L’affaire Du Siècle/Notre Affaire à Tous (France), Klimaseniorinnen (Switzerland), and Neubauer (Germany).
The prevailing orthodoxy is that when a fiduciary accepts a bribe, they hold it on an ‘institutional’ constructive trust for their principal. Given that English law does not recognise the ‘remedial’ constructive trust, ‘constructive trusts’ as used herein refers to the ‘institutional’ constructive trust unless otherwise stated. Much of the academic and judicial discussion has focused on whether this should be so, or whether the principal’s claim for the bribe should merely be a personal one. These discussions are often confined purely to equitable doctrines. However, a fiduciary’s corruption is not only equity’s problem, but also the concern of the State.
In a co-authored article with Pedro M. Batista and Georg Ringe, ‘Good Administration in AI-enhanced Banking Supervision: A Risk-based Approach’, recently published in the Columbia Journal of European Law, we investigate the legal and regulatory challenges of adopting supervisory technology (SupTech), particularly AI-related technologies, by EU banking supervisors. This research makes a significant contribution in furthering the development of the emerging interdisciplinary field at the intersection of AI, administrative law, and banking regulation.
In certain proceedings, English courts must determine whether an entity before it, which claims to be a foreign state or government, does indeed possess that status. If it does, it will be entitled to state immunity, it will have capacity to enter into legal relations and to sue and be sued, and its laws, acts, and judgments can be recognised under English conflict of laws rules. If the entity lacks that status, these will be denied.
The England and Wales Mental Capacity Act 2005 and the Singapore Mental Capacity Act 2008 appear to be twins on paper, sharing the same core principles, the same definition of incapacity, and near-identical best interests checklists for making decisions for people who lack capacity (‘Ps’). Yet they have gone on to live very different lives, as seen in distinct bodies of case law, divergent judicial interpretations, and legislative intentions which have emphasised different themes. My co-authored article ‘The Two Lives of the Mental Capacity Act: Rethinking East-West Binaries in Comparative Analysis’ published in the Medical Law Review explains these differences, similarities, socio-cultural underpinnings, and opportunities for bi-directional learning. My collaborators for this interdisciplinary project were legal philosopher Dr Camillia Kong (School of Law, Queen Mary University of London) and bioethicist Associate Professor Michael Dunn (NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine).
We have come a long way from only having women in the secretarial pool (as depicted in Mad Men), to having women and racial minorities at all levels of the workforce (as depicted in Super Store), to a company that creates a fictional world where women hold all the top positions (Barbie). Both Mad Men and Super Store are American TV shows – Mad Men was made in the present-day to depict life in the world of advertising agencies in New York in the 1960s. Super Store is a series about the issues workers face in a big company in the present day. Barbie is a big-budget film funded by Mattel, the company that created the doll called Barbie. In an article forthcoming in the UC Law Business Journal (formerly Hastings Business Law Journal), I argue that both shows and the movie have interesting things to tell us about present-day conversations and policy fixes to address diversity issues in corporations.
My invited refereed article published in the European Business Law Review is based on the keynote lecture I delivered at the University College London (UCL)—European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) Biennial Law and Ethics Symposium.
While climate change litigation in developed countries of the ‘Global North’ is a well-studied phenomenon, relatively few studies focus on climate case law emerging in the Global South, its distinctive characteristics and the contribution it is making, and may make, to implementation of international climate laws like the Paris Agreement.