Latest blog articles

  • (Dis)trust in trade: bad news for the global energy transition?

    The urgent transition to low-carbon energy systems requires massive investments and international cooperation. Yet chances of collaboration and exchange are growingly difficult in a context where trust is in short supply. How can we understand (dis)trust patterns in this complex domain?

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  • Think twice before speaking of constitutional review in Turkey

    Turkey has never been governed by the rule of law. This simple fact, long known to political dissidents, members of ethnic and religious minorities, and progressive legal scholars in Turkey, has finally started to be publicly acknowledged by the international community. But, this acknowledgment...

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  • Trump’s World Trade War: the need for a rules-based response

    The United States is threatening the multilateral trading system with a World Trade War - a combination of aggressive unilateral trade restrictions and a wilful disabling of the rules-based dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Other WTO Members must unite around a...

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  • Conference ‘InnovAItion Law for Technology 4.0’

    How do we explain a decision made by a machine-learning algorithm? Do works of art created by artificial intelligence enjoy copyright protection? If intelligent games gather data of their users, who is liable if users are harmed by such games?

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  • Trusting relationships in evolutionary legal theory

    Trust in the legal system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has promoted an historic global expansion of trade and investment. That trust is at risk of erosion. The evolutionary role of complexity may hold the key to understanding why.

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  • The US imposing hardship on Palestinian refugees

    The US government is breaching its obligation to promote universal respect for human rights by cutting back on its contribution to UNRWA for aid to Palestinian refugees. Other states have extraterritorial human rights obligations to compensate for this reduction.

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  • Let’s give the emperor some (real) clothes!

    The oft-lauded flexibility of the ‘constitution’ arguably make the UK a potentially unstable and unreliable negotiating partner: there will, for example, be no entrenched or judicially enforceable domestic legal principle that will prevent Parliament from reneging on whatever agreement, if any, the...

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  • The “responsive city” reloaded

    Public-private partnerships on the local level can succeed only if this new drive toward responsible data use in US cities and localities is here to stay. But as new technologies are eroding the famed anonymity of city life, are our cities becoming also final bastions of privacy protections? 

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