Current Legal Problems 2026

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...

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...

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’...

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.