Fred Rodell, the once revered Yale Law School professor and the “bad boy of American legal academia” wrote that “[t]here are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” His harrowing words acutely capture my conflicting relationship with (legal) writing, but more on point, it makes the path laid out before me (as someone in legal academia), a more difficult one to take.

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? 

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.

The biggest challenge of the 21^st century is undoubtedly the question of how to tackle the effects of a rising population, expanding industrialisation and growing environmental degradation. Apart from an ever complex world, there are externalities that are the result of the way humankind has been treating its planet in the last centuries. The rules of private law play an instrumental role in this.

Public authority increasingly relies on private standards and corporations’ due diligence processes in the regulation of sustainability and human rights in global value chains. How can it ensure that private actors driven by economic considerations are trustworthy in the regulation of their value chains?

Many things happened at the Faculty in the past fortnight. Friday 26 January, we celebrated the 42^nd Dies Natalis of the UM. The one thing I always like about this celebration is that it is enormously varied compared to other universities’ anniversaries.

This thesis discusses the ability of Public-Private Partnerships (hereinafter PPPs) to generate socio-environmental benefits, thus, their capability to promote sustainable development goals throughout Europe. 

Julia Reda, the only representative of the Pirate Party in the European Parliament, delivered the lecture “Copyright Showdown” at the Faculty of Law and explained how two controversial articles in the proposal might undermine the long-awaited EU copyright reform.

Sofia Ranchordas (University of Groningen) and Catalina Goanta (Maastricht University) have been awarded a Flexible Grant for Small Groups by the Independent Social Research Foundation (UK) for their project “DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Marketing: Regulating Social Media Influencers’.

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 EU and the UK reach on the latter’s withdrawal.