Law Commons^™

Delays, Disruptions, And Diminished Margins: Reassessing Loss Claims In Indian Construction Law, Gautam Mohanty Mr, Gaurav Rai

National Law School of India Review

Loss of Profit claims by a contractor are premised on the assertion that the contractor has incurred financial losses due to the act of illegal and premature termination of the contract by the employer. Loss of profitability, on the other hand, is a claim made by the contractor of a decrease in the profit percentage in a contract on account of delays and disruptions in the work due to the actions attributable to the employer. Due to the homonymic nature of the terms, several judgments in India confuse one with the other and misunderstand the underlying principles of law applicable …

Finding Method To Madness: The Indian Supreme Court's Dignity Jurisprudence, Aishani Gupta

National Law School of India Review

This article critically examines the Indian Supreme Court’s use of the concept of dignity in constitutional adjudication. Though the Indian Constitution references dignity only thrice, its substantive development has occurred mainly through case law. Using recent literature on dignity as well as case law between 1978 and 2023 this article categorises three main uses of dignity: (i) the constitutional status of dignity; (ii) the expansion of dignity; (iii) homage to dignity. The paper argues that while dignity is necessarily multifaceted, its application should be consistent across similar fact patterns to ensure consistency. To support this, the author analyzes nine Supreme …

A Comparative Study On The Originality Of Ai-Generated Artworks: What Can Copyright Laws Learn From Refik Anadol?, Söğüt Atilla

National Law School of India Review

Originality is a fundamental requirement for works to receive copyright protection. However, as the term lacks a universally accepted definition, interpretations of originality vary across jurisdictions. This article first examines key theories underpinning copyright law to justify the necessity of an originality threshold. It then analyses how the United States, the United Kingdom, India, China, and the European Union define and apply this criterion. In the final section, the article argues that, these jurisdictions, when applying their well-established principles and case law consistently, can accommodate findings of originality in AI-generated artworks. The article critiques the misconception shared by some jurisdictions …

Reimagining The Asylum Law In India: A Study On The Duty Of Of Non-Refoulement, Siddeeqa Iram

National Law School of India Review

The right of refugees to seek asylum is undisputedly provided by international instruments but traditionally, the right to grant asylum has been the prerogative of the state concerned. States have a duty of non-refoulement under Article 33 of the Refugee Convention, prohibiting the expulsion or return of refugees. Given the correlation between International Human Rights Law and International Refugee Law, non-refoulement comprises non-rejection at the frontiers as well. Despite the principle being a part of customary international law, due to the ambiguity prevailing in its application, it is constantly flouted by the member-states. Further, as the principle of non-refoulement includes …

Unmasking The Rhetoric Of Reform – The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 In Context, Pranav Verma

National Law School of India Review

This legislative comment is a critical analysis of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 (‘BSA’), which has replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (‘IEA’). It analyses the major changes brought in by the BSA and discusses their implications. It further highlights the existing interpretive disputes within the IEA that the BSA leaves unaddressed. The BSA makes only a few substantive changes in improvement to the IEA, such as streamlining the rules on electronic evidence and expanding the scope of secondary evidence. Apart from this, most changes pertain to the renumbering of existing provisions and the deletion of obsolete colonial references. These …

Counterclaims In Investor-State Arbitration: A Tale Of Two Cases, Godwin Tan, Justin Tan

National Law School of India Review

This article explores the evolving role of counterclaims in investment treaty arbitration. While arbitral rules commonly permit counterclaims, their success has historically been limited due to challenges such as the scope of the parties’ consent to arbitration and the lack of a relevant investor obligation to ground the counterclaim. However, a discernible increase in counterclaims under the ICSID Convention over the past 15 years suggests that there may be a shift in practice. Against this backdrop, this article carries out a comparative analysis of two recent decisions – Iberdrola v. Guatemala (2020) and Lopez Goyne Family Trust v. Nicaragua (2023) …

Editorial Note, Shreyas Sinha

National Law School of India Review

Editorial Note for Vol 36(1).

Evolution Of Privacy Jurisprudence In The Supreme Court Of India: Evaluating The Impact Of Puttaswamy, Vrinda Bhandari, Rishab Bailey

National Law School of India Review

This paper studies the Supreme Court’s landmark privacy judgment in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India and, through an empirical analysis of 53 judgments, analyses the record of the Supreme Court in applying, rather than simply citing, the judgment in decisions from 2017 to early 2023. Puttaswamy is widely seen as a transformative decision, as it recognised privacy as a fundamental right and tied it to dignity, autonomy, bodily integrity, consent, and choice. Yet it did not arise from a lis involving a concrete factual dispute over the application of privacy rights. The Court was therefore not dealing with a …

The Social Life Of Free Speech: Who Gets To Speak And Express?, Anurag Bhaskar

National Law School of India Review

The interdisciplinary scholarship on free speech, though developed outside the Indian context, underscores the necessity of re-examining free speech not just as an individual right against the State, but as a socially embedded phenomenon, conditioned by historical inequalities and prevailing systems of power. Building on this framework, this article advances an anti-caste perspective on freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution. It examines the contours of free speech in a heterogeneous and hierarchically structured society, interrogating how caste hierarchies have shaped the boundaries of acceptable speech, and determining whose speech is heard and whose is …

The Authenticity Trap: Political Deepfakes And The Limits Of Current Regulation, Akriti Gaur

National Law School of India Review

This paper examines the emerging regulatory challenge posed by political deepfakes, with a particular focus on India’s 2024 elections and the legal responses that followed. It argues that regulatory responses that directly prohibit or remove political speech risk collapsing questions of authenticity into questions of legality. Using India as the central case study, and drawing comparative lessons from recent developments in the United States, the paper argues for a regulatory approach focused less on banning synthetic political content and more on provenance, disclosures, and institutional preparedness. Deepfake regulation, if poorly designed, risks strengthening state control over political discourse. The paper …

‘What Can A Comma Do?’: Re-Examining Victorian Criminalisation Of Obscenity Through The Flawed Interlinking Of ‘Decency Or Morality’ Under The Strain Of Modern Liberal Consciousness, Ratika Gaur

National Law School of India Review

This paper argues that the rhetorical nature of India’s post-independence obscenity jurisprudence stems from the interlinking of two distinct (behavioural v. normative) categories into the singular provision of ‘decency or morality’ under Article 19(2). This interlinking emerged amidst the socio-economic and cultural upheavals in Victorian England, wherein moral anxieties around the ‘visibility’ of obscenity reflected a crisis of political obligation within the modern liberal consciousness. Operating through the logic of deterrence, this consciousness criminalized obscenity due to its ideationally incapacity to accommodate liminal expressions—acts that were neither neatly civil, nor outright criminal, even when offensive. In this regard, one substantive …

Note By The Guest Editor, Siddharth Narrain

National Law School of India Review

Note by the Guest Editor.

Editorial Note, Rushil Batra, Barath Arjun

National Law School of India Review

Editorial Note for Vol 36(2).

Reimagining The Music Industry: In Search Of A More Perfect Union, Loren E. Mulraine -- Professor Of Law

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

This Article challenges the long-standing accepted business model of the music industry, including recording contract terms, ownership of masters, artist recoupment, and copyright terminations. It explores the negative implications of failing to revise these methods and neglecting to create a more equitable relationship between artists and recording companies. Indeed, the music industry is an outlier from almost every commercial industry in its financing structure. As such, this Article suggests that the future industry model should include equity ownership of master recordings. It then reviews the need to revise contract terms and eliminate the unilateral options and the unduly burdensome clauses …

That’S Using Your Head! Head Shaking, Nodding, And Smiling As Evidentiary Admissions, Marc Ginsberg

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Siren Song Of Territoriality, Robin J. Effron, Alan M. Trammell

Scholarly Articles

Territoriality—the theory that a state’s physical borders determine its power and sovereignty—boasts a long, venerable history. For centuries, it served as the dominant political theory for myriad ideas. It defined a wide range of doctrines, including personal jurisdiction, choice of law, and prescriptive jurisdiction. By the middle of the twentieth century, though, this rigid territoriality no longer described or responded to the challenges of a society that had grown increasingly mobile and interconnected. Courts replaced inflexible territorial theories with more functional theories rooted in fairness and state regulatory interests.

In recent years, territoriality has seen a curious resurgence. The Supreme …

Space Over Time: Housing For The Life Cycle, Lee Anne Fennell

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

People need housing throughout the life cycle, and what they need from that housing changes over time. Yet the menu of residential options is often too static, rigid, and limited to respond to these changes. What would it mean to configure housing to adapt to households’ evolving spatial requirements, risk tolerances, health challenges, and financial statuses? How could greater flexibility in the built environment enable communities to deliver better residential services to their populations? Elder housing offers a illuminating window into these questions and their answers. Addressing life-stage correlated housing mismatches could help to loosen the larger supply constraints—and failures …

Informative Jury Disagreement, Roy Baharad

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The article introduces a counterintuitive argument, contending that jury disagreement on the defendant’s guilt—a nonunanimous conviction—may well provide a more informative signal, compared to consensus. Because stronger consensus implies higher likelihood of herding, it is shown that beyond some threshold, further accumulation of votes to convict would carry negligible epistemic contribution, barely enhancing the posterior probability of guilt. On the other hand, while dissenting votes provide a direct signal of innocence, they indicate that herding has not been involved in the decision-making process, hence increase the epistemic contribution of any vote generated by said process— including votes to convict—and may …

Forced Migration And Women’S Empowerment: Evidence From Rohingya Refugees, Adam Chilton, Katerina Linos, Anup Malani

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

We explore a paradox: high levels of satisfaction among forcibly displaced Rohingya women in informal camps in Hyderabad, India. Despite experiencing extreme poverty, loss of family and community, and high levels of gender-based violence after resettlement, both men and women—particularly women—report significant increases in satisfaction. We structured a representative household survey, employed a trusted female Muslim interviewer with deep ties to the local community, interviewed comparable numbers of men and women, and embedded list experiments in our questionnaire, to allow people to answer sensitive questions indirectly. We attribute this paradoxical finding to increased freedom post-resettlement, facilitated by economic, legal, and …

Can Ai Hold Office Hours?, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Amy R. Motomura, Jason Reinecke, Jonathan S. Masur

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Rapid improvements in AI tools offer transformative opportunities in legal education, including the possibility of students using AI tools to answer questions that students might otherwise ask during office hours. But a critical challenge is the accuracy of these tools’ responses. Both general-purpose and law-specific AI models have been shown to “hallucinate” incorrect responses to a range of legal questions. Here, we evaluate the current capabilities of AI models when given the more constrained task of answering questions about a specific legal text. We provided three AI tools—OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google’s NotebookLM—with the text of Masur …

Introducing The Corporate Restructuring Machine: An Open Platform Approach, Horst Eidenmüller, Jared I. Mayer

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become apparent. Yet how will AI affect corporate reorganizations? Based on previous work on the use of AI applications in negotiations, we argue that the potential of such applications to increase the efficiency of corporate workout negotiations is significant. To do so, we imagine the “Corporate Restructuring Machine” (CRM). This is a private, online platform armed with AI tools and services that are designed to support or even automate corporate workouts (out-of-court restructurings). Stakeholders, particularly creditors and shareholders, could join the platform and opt into AI applications at different times, for different services, …

Taxing Corporate Payouts, Neil Dokurno, David A. Weisbach

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Corporate distributions total about $1.5 trillion per year, yet the system for taxing distributions is a mess. It favors buybacks over dividends, and therefore is a possible cause of the growth of buybacks in recent years. It is almost comically complex. And even with its fantastic level of complexity (or perhaps because of the complexity), it provides opportunities for egregious shelters.

Congress has repeatedly attempted reforms to fix these problems, with at best mixed success and often outright failure. Numerous commentators have proposed reforms but all either fail to eliminate the tax differential between buybacks and dividends or require significant …

The Uneasy Case For Copyright Disgorgement, Roy Baharad

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Along with lost profits damages that are designed to put copyright owners in the position they would have occupied in the absence of infringement, copyright law entitles rightsholders to seek disgorgement of any additional profits elicited by infringers. The disgorgement remedy is designed to infuse principles of unjust enrichment into copyright doctrine, allowing owners to collect any ill-gotten gain creditable to the infringement. Despite its prominence, this Article reveals a hitherto overlooked problem in applying the disgorgement remedy to copyright infringement. As a baseline for the analysis, the Article embraces the canonic distinction between two types of infringements: imitations and …

Can Consumers Protect Themselves Against Privacy Dark Patterns?, Matthew B. Kugler, Lior Strahilevitz, Marshini Chetty, Chirag Mahapatra

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Dark patterns have emerged in the last few years as a major target of legislators and regulators. Dark patterns are online interfaces that manipulate, confuse, or trick consumers into purchasing goods or services that they do not want, or into surrendering personal information that they would prefer to keep private. As new laws and regulations to restrict dark patterns have emerged, skeptics have countered that motivated consumers can and will protect themselves against these manipulative interfaces, making government intervention unnecessary. This debate occurs alongside active legislative and regulatory discussion about whether to prohibit dark patterns in newly enacted comprehensive consumer …

Continuity And Change On Corporate Boards, Peter Cziraki, Adriana Robertson

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The number of women on public company boards has increased dramatically in recent years. We study where these women directors came from and how they were absorbed. Since 2018, women with board experience obtain significantly more board seats than their male counterparts. Women directors are also more likely to have no previous board experience than men, indicating movement on both the intensive and extensive margin. Adding a woman director is associated with a transitory increase in board size roughly one third of the time. This increase is offset when an existing director rolls off. The bulk of this reversion happens …

Universal Public Defense, Alexis Hoag-Fordjour

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Impossible Task: Enforcing Disclosure Requirements In A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry, Keelin Ferris

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Users of the first global social network, MySpace, could have never imagined that a mere twenty years later, teenagers could be millionaires making thirty-second videos out of their parents’ basement. Social media platforms have blossomed and advanced to an unpredictable level in a short amount of time. The growth of TikTok, surpassing one billion users, has been one of the most substantial contributors to the change in landscape.[1] In 2025, “social media influencers” come in all shapes and sizes.[2] Social media users can scroll through Instagram reels and stumble upon their fellow PTA member, co-worker, or grandmother promoting …

The Limits Of Tradition: Counterman, True Threats, And The Categorical Approach To Free Speech, Brett Zicari

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Tradition is in vogue.[1] Across a wide variety of areas, the Supreme Court has embraced “history and tradition” as its primary methodology for determining the meaning of constitutional provisions.[2] Recently the Court has even suggested that a restriction on the use of names in trademarks could rest entirely on its traditional status,[3] but nowhere has this move toward tradition been as robust or longstanding as in the speech context. Since the 1940s, the Supreme Court has invoked tradition to defend content-based or categorical restrictions, and more recently, it has purported to rely exclusively on tradition.[4] The …

The Timing Of Claim Construction: An Analysis Of Claim Construction Procedure And A Proposed Rule To Ensure Cost Effective And Timely Relief In Patent Infringement Cases, Timothy A. Richard

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

The federal government issues patents to encourage inventors to produce new and useful works and advance the state of the art.[1] The patent process is simple: in exchange for the right to exclude all others from making and using an invention for an established period, the inventor provides the government — and ultimately the public — with a full disclosure of how to make and use the invention.[2] Despite this full disclosure, the terms used in patent claims are subject to judicial interpretation during litigation.[3] Both the Supreme Court of the United States (“Supreme Court”) and the …

Table Of Contents

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.