The Ius Commune Workshop on Contract Law took place on 25 November with its main theme being Empirical Research in Contract Law. During the workshop, five presenters reported on either their fully-fledged projects or shared ideas on early-stage studies.

The EU recently introduced text and data mining exceptions to copyright infringement. However, they are too narrow and situation-specific to enable scientific development. In my master thesis, I suggest adopting a non-enjoyment exception for new technological uses, including text and data mining.

Observing the long-awaited Proposal for a Directive on improving labour conditions of people working through digital labour platforms.

While the trade mark system seems to embrace the expansion of trade marks to Virtual Reality, an intervention is required when an interplay between the virtual and real-world exists.

What can we learn from the ‘Great Debates’ in legal history? Or more specific, what could the participants of the Workshop Ius Commune in the Making: Great Debates in the History of Law (25 November 2021) learn about these debates? What shaped and still shapes great debates?

Language plays a fundamental role as a channel for law. It can enable members of society to access justice. Conversely, an inadequate use of language may result in a dissociation of law from a specific society. Language is a fundamental means to convey messages, to know the law, and to shape the law. On occasions, law is presented in languages that do not correspond to those of the targeted societies. Comparative legal history can attest of such occasions. Similarly to radio frequencies, on such occasions messages were disrupted by “electromagnetic interferences” and did not reach their destination.

Admittedly, the right to erasure, or more colloquially, the right to be forgotten is nothing new in the European legal landscape. Indeed, this right can be found as far back as 1981 in the predecessor of the Modernised Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data (CETS No. 108) (Convention 108+).

Germany has elected a new government. One of the legal reforms coalition of Social democrats, the Green party and the free liberals want to put on the tracks is the legalization of cannabis. From a criminological point of view, this is the right decision.

In the 1980s, in the heyday of Thatcherism, Scottish actor Ian Richardson starred in the leading role of Francis Urquhart in the BBC series House of Cards. In it, Urquhart, who starts out as the Chief Whip for the Conservative government led by Thatcher’s fictional successor, schemes against and manipulates his fellow MPs in order to emerge as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Indeed, it was this BBC version that provided the blueprint for the eponymous US Netflix drama that was all the rage during the Obama Years.

Having caused around five million deaths worldwide as of October 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic and an IP waiver proposal on Covid-19 related medical products before the WTO have been issues of world attention.