Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are a novel form of digital organisation, designed to pool and manage resources as well as allocate control for various objectives, ranging from issuing cryptocurrencies and stabilising the value of cryptoassets to supporting the operation and security of a blockchain network. Their defining features of ‘decentralisation’ and ‘disintermediation’ introduce significant governance and legal risks. By operating on decentralised ledger technologies such as blockchain and other emerging systems, DAOs not only present legal and regulatory challenges but also increase cybersecurity vulnerability. DAOs have facilitated pooling resources, notably through initial coin offerings, and have also functioned as management mechanisms for ‘monetary’...

Health data is generating significant value through aggregation and integration across populations, but the governance frameworks designed to manage this value are failing communities in the Global South. Foreign states and tech corporations are engaging in large-scale health data extraction through bilateral agreements, intellectual property enclosure, and AI-driven platform architectures that extract value while displacing community control. The ‘data commons’ has emerged as the dominant governance response to this relation, promising to reorient health data systems towards shared access, democratic stewardship and collective benefit. This article argues that current legal proposals for data commons, including trusts, stewardship arrangements and cooperatives, ignore the deep colonial...

Lawyers build from templates. Accounts of how law is made rarely mention them. New legislation tends to present itself as original. It is almost never made from scratch. This article makes the hidden process visible. It does so through a study of the near-global spread of environmental impact assessment (EIA) legislation since 1969, using computer-assisted textual similarity analysis to trace what I expected to be identifiable model laws and clear lines of legal inheritance. The search yielded instead a transnational repertoire of legal fragments, repeatedly recombined into new legislative forms across different legal traditions, languages and decades. EIA’s legislative spread was bricolage, not cut and paste. The findings sit uneasily with conventional accounts of legal change built...

Notwithstanding the passing of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, and the Equality Act in 2010, public discourse in the UK is saturated with controversies and conflicts about the definition and significance of gender and sex, to the extent that some have described this moment as one of gender/sex ‘culture wars’. This article analyses recent sex/gender conflicts that culminated in the 2025 landmark case For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers on the legal definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010, before stepping back in time to examine the ongoing legacy of the 1970 decision of Corbett v Corbett. Through an analysis of Corbett, I demonstrate how current legal ‘problem-representations’ of gender and sex depict them as binary, biological and fundamental but separable aspects of human...

This article critically re-examines the claim that bereaved and affected families are ‘at the heart’ of public inquiries. Moving beyond procedural inclusion, it develops an account of justice as inheritance to analyse how families and state institutions engage with the afterlives of state violence. Inheritance is understood as both personal and political, structuring three core demands made by families: recognition of continuing unresolved loss, the search for answers, and the pursuit of a transformative legacy to prevent repetition. Drawing on case studies of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, the Cumberlege Review, and the Kirkup Review into maternity services in East Kent, the article shows that inquiries’ underlying methodologies are insufficiently responsive to...

This article examines the place of hope in environmental law and environmental law scholarship, at a time marked by ecological crisis and ongoing questions about how this crisis should be addressed in teaching and research. Situating the analysis within the emerging interdisciplinary field of hope studies, it asks: is environmental law hopeful? While there is no straightforward answer, the article explores some of the ways in which hope may be relevant in this context. It proposes two complementary orientations. First, thinking towards hope treats hope as an object of inquiry, examining how hope appears and operates in environmental law through both ‘eventful’ moments, such as landmark decisions or emergency declarations, and more durable, ‘institutionalised’ forms, including legislated...

Liberal values have become prominent in the recent case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and are becoming the driving force behind the EU’s legal and political discourse. The CJEU insists that these values do not merely function in the sphere of politics. As an integral part of the very identity of the European Union as a common legal order, they also find concrete expression in principles containing legally binding obligations for the Member States. This raises the question of the CJEU’s role. Yet behind this institutional concern lies the further question of how to understand these values themselves. The applied meaning of these values will have to be not too thick, but also not too thin. While the CJEU must not pre-empt reasoned debate over the concretisation of...

Professor William Lawrence Twining, FBA (Quain Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence), who died on 9 October 2025 aged 91, served as the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Laws at University College London 1983–96 and as Research Professor of Law 1996–2004. He had previously held appointments at the University of Khartoum (1958–61), University College, Dar-es-Salaam (1961–65), Queen’s University, Belfast (1965–72) and the University of Warwick (1972–82). He also held a number of visiting appointments, most notably at the University of Miami.

This article explores the roles that regulatory norms play within EU competition law assessment. The question matters both for the consistency of the supervisory framework for economic activity in the EU and to better understand the legitimate concerns of competition law. Comparing the orthodox understanding of the inter-relationship between competition law and other regulatory norms with the contextual approach of contemporary antitrust assessment, the article examines potential tensions between these approaches through two case studies: regulatory non-compliance and regulatory gaming. In doing so, it considers how the more diverse public interest values within other market regulation may find indirect expression within competition enforcement and asks how we might justify the use of...

Various insolvency theories have sought to justify the legitimacy of insolvency law. While the three canonical theories arrived at their central claims through different methods, they share a broadly functionalist orientation and common core: insolvency as a form of social cooperation. Where they diverge is in the normative commitments they attach to that core and in the methodological approaches that give rise to them. Baird argues that the divide may possibly only be resolved with aesthetics and morals, while Gross contends that existing theories fail to articulate the philosophical basis of their claims, leaving the field without a fully developed account of its normative foundations. This article responds to these challenges, and broader question of insolvency’s legitimacy, by...