On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission enacted one of the most significant regulations of the Biden years: a comprehensive ban on non-compete clauses. The final rule prohibits new non-compete clauses for all workers, regardless of line of work or income, and makes existing non-competes null and void for everyone except senior executives. A neurologist making $1 million a year and a gig worker making less than the federal minimum wage will both be covered when the rule goes into effect later this year. This outcome is the product of years of reporting, research, and advocacy, including a 2019 ..read more

Elbanna v Clark [2024] EWHC 627 (KB) is the latest in the line of recent High Court authorities concerning the circumstances in which the duty of care owed between participants in sport can be breached. Like Tylicki, Fulham and Czernuska it is a liability decision which ultimately turns on its own facts. Our blog post on those three decisions can be found here. Elbanna provides a helpful summary of the legal principles which are relevant to such claims. In Elbanna, after a preliminary issue trial on liability the High Court found that the Defendant was liable in negligence for the way in which ..read more

The corporation in the nineteenth-century American imagination by Stefanie Mueller, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, 211 pp, £ 85.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781399505000. In The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination, Stefanie Muller undertakes a legal, cultural, and literary perambulation of the United States with the aim of examining how the corporation was reinvented, transformed, and reimagined during the 19th-century. The book is an accurate fresco of the socio-legal developments and controversies surrounding the corporate form in the legal and popular imaginary ..read more

Clark v Adams [2024] EWHC 62 (KB) is an unusual personal injury claim: three joined claims brought for injuries suffered as a result of bombings attributed to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (‘Provisional IRA’) at the Old Bailey in March 1973, the London Docklands in February 1996 and the Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996. The claims were brought against the provisional IRA and against Gerry Adams, both in a representative capacity (as a representative of the provisional IRA) and in his personal capacity. It does not take much scratching of the surface to realise these are no ord ..read more

Zainab Batul Naqvi, Polygamy, Policy and Postcolonialism in English Marriage Law; A Critical Feminist Analysis, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2023, 239 pp, hb £85.00. Zainab Naqvi’s exploration of polygamy makes a significant contribution to an issue largely overlooked in contemporary literature on the treatment of diverse forms of marriage within English law. Drawing on new empirical data and case law analysis, Naqvi delves into the intersections between postcolonialism and human rights within the context of polygamous marriages. She critiques the treatment of women in such marriages und ..read more

ABSTRACT Marriage rates in the United States are at record lows; meanwhile, more couples are choosing to live together outside of marriage. Despite the changing landscape of romantic relationships, the law of non-marriage has not kept pace. Rather than having a coherent, majority rule approach, the individual states have employed differing methods of providing for property distribution at the end of a long-term unmarried cohabitation. Unfortunately, absent the formal protections offered by marriage for both parties following a divorce, many cohabitants are at risk of suffering inequitable prop ..read more

ABSTRACT In August of 2021, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine published its most recent opinion on the financial compensation of oocyte (egg) donors. For those not steeped in the historical controversy surrounding egg donor compensation in the United States, the document likely appears unexceptional. Within historical context, however, the guidelines represent an important change in conceptions of oocyte commodification. First, and most importantly, the most recent guidelines contain no mention of acceptable or recommended compensation levels, nor do they analogize egg donation to ..read more

Value pluralism and its conceptual companion, incommensurability, permeate law generally, and in particular the common law. Their significance for the common law reflects the authority which a common law system gives to judges to fashion rules of law when articulating their application to particular cases. This tends to lead them to examine the reason of the law and to seek to conform the content of legal rules to a material degree with the underlying rationale or rationalia for them. As Sir Edward Coke said in the seventeenth century, ‘Reason is the life of the law, nay the common law is noth ..read more

Are NDAs unenforceable when they protect more than trade secrets? The standard answer is no. NDAs can prevent disclosure of contractually-defined ‘confidential’ information that is shared in the course of a confidential relationship, even if it is not technically a trade secret. NDAs can, in other words, go beyond trade secrecy. NDAs have also not traditionally been treated as contracts in restraint of trade, like noncompetes are. An NDA’s purpose is, ostensibly, just to protect secrets. Similar to trade secret law, NDAs only prevent an employee from disclosing (and using outside authorization ..read more

ABSTRACT In the property rights approach to the theory of the firm, ownership matters if parties have to make partly relationship-specific investments, but ownership would be irrelevant if the investments were completely relationship-specific. We show that if negotiations after the investment stage require transaction costs to be paid, then ownership matters even when investments are completely relationship-specific. While in the standard model without transaction costs there are under-investments compared to the first-best benchmark, in our setting a party may overinvest in order to induce th ..read more