Current Legal Problems 2024

Institutional investors, as stewards, exercise power on behalf of their clients/beneficiaries, and in doing so, regard a broader spectrum of ‘unseen’ others - end investors, investable assets, and the broader economy, environment, and society. This analytical framework reveals a crucial distinction: the interests of these unseen others may not align with those of the clients/beneficiaries on whose behalf investor stewards act. By introducing multiple stewardship relationships —client stewardship, end-investor stewardship, asset stewardship, and sustainability stewardship—this article develops a model of enlightened stewardship and addresses a key challenge: stewardship beyond client stewardship mainly operates outside the domain of hard law. The article advocates for stewardship codes to...

Engineering uses duplication to create fail-safe systems. The existence of two system components capable of performing the same function increases reliability, as the supposedly superfluous component can be turned on if the main one breaks down. Although redundancy ensures that many of our modern conveniences such as computers and planes do not crash, this solution has not been extensively explored in a legal context. This article will articulate some of the advantages of redundancy between different areas of the law (administrative, civil and criminal) and at an institutional level (among bodies performing monitoring, investigative, prosecutorial and adjudicative functions in the same and in distinct jurisdictions). Legal efforts to combat corruption around the world provide illustrative...

This article analyses impartiality in Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) by identifying the way that the parties’ trust in arbitrators is constructed. Drawing on the findings of a large-scale empirical project, it questions the applicability of an orthodox judicial doctrine of impartiality to ISDS on the grounds that trust in arbitrators is constructed on a fundamentally different basis from that of trust in judges. The primary feature of a judicial doctrine of impartiality is that trust is founded on an absolutist approach to impartiality which is intended to ensure that judges have no predispositions to parties. In contrast, trust in ISDS is founded on the method of party appointment which is based on a very different assumption—that arbitrators’ predispositions can be valuable...

The use of legal fiction in public law has shown no sign of abating, as demonstrated in the enactment of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. Accompanying questions or concerns are about the degree to which they are problematic, useful, or detrimental, what is to be done about them, and whether their prevalence is specific to British or English legal culture. This article examines what has been done, or what has happened, to deal or to cope with them, in orthodox constitutional legal doctrine and administrative law liability. After adopting a working definition of legal fiction and showing Dicey’s own preoccupation with the constitution’s legal forms and fiction, it does so through two case studies. Both involve basic orthodox constitutional legal...