Category Archives: Legal Theory

Unearthing Cartojuridism

Maps are all around us. Maps not only inundate our reality, impel our direction, depict weather forecasts, provide demographic data, and distinguish electoral districts, but they also mark property boundaries, affirm state lines, represent territorial limits, provoke geopolitical crises, and sustain sovereign claims. These are all more or less well-known cartographic functions and have merited scrutiny, in varying degrees, from various disciplines. But the historically constituted intrinsic ties that bind maps and law, cartography and jurisdiction, the visual and the legal, are yet to receive sustained attention in legal scholarship.

The Extension of Vicarious Liability in Determining Group Companies’ Liability

It is an unresolved but important issue whether one legal entity can be vicariously liable for another legal entity’s tort in a corporate group. The debate over a parent company’s liability for its subsidiary’s torts has emerged, particularly in the context of environmental harms or mass torts resulting in personal injuries. Often, liability claims surpass the subsidiary’s value, leading to its insolvency, and tort creditors attempt to claim against alternative defendants, especially the parent company. 

Individual Liberty

Aspects of individual liberty are considered in two recent articles, with some implications for the role played by law in working through the practical implementation of liberty in society. ‘Other People’s Liberties’ published in Ratio Juris questions whether the undeniable advantages of liberty to an individual are readily transferable to a number of individuals, relating together within a society. ‘Overcoming von Wright’s Anxiety’ published in Theoria attempts to deal with an enduring anxiety experienced by Georg Henrik von Wright throughout his engagement with deontic logic across the course of his professional life, over the apparent reducibility of permission to an absence of obligation.

Rethinking Relational Architecture: Interpersonal Justice Beyond Private Law

Private law is often said to be distinctive in a certain sense: it is about ‘interpersonal justice’. But consider the following: Antony Duff says criminal law is to be understood in a certain relational way. Kristen Rundle says that the Fullerian ideal of the internal morality of law concerns certain relations between the lawgiver and law subject. Avihay Dorfman argues that there are relational aspects of many public law duties. If there is any meaningful use of the relational architecture in these domains, it must extend beyond the vision offered by what is traditionally known as the ‘bipolarity’ thesis in private law.