Current Legal Problems 2025

A natural response to those who commit offence in highly disordered mental states is to consider that they did not know what they were doing at the time. This common response is compatible with the theoretical idea that in states of sane or insane automatism, self-awareness is lost, and our agential connection to our capacities breaks down. It is also consistent with a philosophically coherent grounding for exculpation in such cases, one based on the absence of non-observational knowledge, and on the defeat of agency that flows therefrom. The theoretical good sense in our natural response to affected agents (they did not know what they were doing!) reveals problems in the current law of automatism, and illuminates a more apt defence.

Scholarship and even political and policy discourse regarding migration and borders tend to focus on the migration of natural persons, and (inter)national borders as the domain of the nation-state, conceived of as an expression of the latter’s sovereignty. In liberal theory, nation-state borders are critical legal and political infrastructure of collective self-determination, bulwarks for democratic self-rule. This Article is a provocation to consider migration, borders, and sovereignty from a different vantage—one that centers the migration of transnational commercial corporations, and their capacity to constitute, govern and wield borders and migration to advance the will of their constituencies . I focus in particular on corporations as migrants that are uniquely threatening to...

A new wave of legal scholarship has challenged the dominant neoclassical account of price formation, demonstrating that prices are not formed according to its prescripts and do not perform the task of economic coordination in line with its axioms. As opposed to emerging from voluntary exchanges between private actors, prices on this alternative reading are the products of processes of political and legal ordering that constrain the choices and opportunities of some social groups as they enable and empower others. Prices, legal scholars insist, are ‘legally engineered’. But what possibilities emerge from such a reframing? Could legal analysis be used to model and predict the behaviour of prices in the political economy? And would doing so give us any inroads into making the prices that...