Latest blog articles

  • Some of the favourite expressions of online platform providers around the world are that they ‘only offer a platform’ and are ‘in no way responsible for statements made or goods offered by third parties on their platform’. However, recent US case law held Amazon liable for physical harm caused by...

  • What does the term ‘MOCCA’ evoke in your mind, a kind of coffee or a specific brand? This Kat randomly asked this question to her friends currently at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition Munich. Most of them regarded ‘MOCCA’ as a kind of coffee instead of a specific brand except...

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    in Law
  • Nobuki Yamamoto, a Japanese contemporary artist, made an eye-catching work of ‘goldfish swimming in a phone booth’ (‘Work 1’) by December 2000 at the latest. In October 2011, a student organisation called ‘Goldfish Club’ at Kyoto University of Art and Design produced Work 2 and exhibited it for a...

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    in Law
  • The yearly Ius Commune conference, this year held online on 26 November 2020, traditionally includes a contract law workshop. This year the theme of the workshop was “Contract law in times of corona and other sanitary crises”. Five researchers presented recent work dealing with subthemes.

  • The annual Ius Commune conference and its contract law workshop on “Contract law in times of corona and other sanitary crises”. 

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    Jean Monnet

    Jean Monnet (1888-1979) is, in some ways, an unlikely person to be honoured by having a university hall called after him. Indeed, Monnet left school at the age of sixteen, never obtained a university degree, and indeed never started university studies. He grew up in the city of Cognac as the son of...

  • Recently, Chanel Co., Ltd. lost a trade mark infringement case regarding its ‘Double C’ logo in China. The full text of the decision can be visited via here (Google translatable). The case has drawn wide attention and, mostly, negative comments. Does this seemingly-counterintuitive loss indeed, well...

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    in Law
  • When a court invalidates an agreement because the rules of contract law were violated, then that agreement is deemed to have never existed. It was never valid and never will be valid. Aside from a few exceptions, everything that has already been performed under the agreement must be undone.