Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Professor Dimitry Kochenov (Central European University) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Enforcing Passport Apartheid through EU Law: From Internal Market to the Polish Border" on 23 February 2022 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CELS (the Centre for European Legal Studies). Biography: Dimitry Kochenov leads the Rule of Law Research Group at the Central European University Democracy Institute in Budapest and is Professor of Global Citizenship and Values at the CEU Department of Legal Studies in Vienna. He is also visiting professor of citizenship and the rule of law at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. Prof. Kochenov taught different aspects of citizenship, constitutional and EU law worldwide, including at Princeton, Oxford, Groningen, Turin and Osaka and published widely on these issues. His most recent book (Citizenship, MIT Press 2019) has been translated into several languages and reviewed in The New York Review of Books. Dimitry consults governments and international organizations on the matters of his academic interest and served as the founding chairman of the Investment Migration Council (Geneva). Abstract: The European Union is a clear-cut example of the passport apartheid in action, where blood-based statuses of attachment to public authority distributed at birth (citizenships), which predetermine the course of life of all of us to a great degree are taken particularly seriously. The contribution will elaborate on this starting point using two examples showcasing the EU law-based aspects of this global system of injustice: the near complete exclusion of non-EU citizens from the fundamental freedoms in the EU and the pro-active stance of the Union and the Member States in ensuring that the right to seek asylum in the EU is turned into an unworkable proclamation. The two examples will allow enriching a general sketch of what passport apartheid is and which role is played by it in the contemporary world elaborated by Prof. Kochenov in the I-CON with a focus at the global level: https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/18/4/1525/6169921. The analysis of the two examples suggests that the EU is a deeply atypical constitutional system in that it assumes that the core of its law should not apply to those who 'do not belong' by default, including, largely, the idea of the Union's very existence as a territory of directly enforceable supranational rights. This starting position fetishising the personal status of legal attachment to the Union makes the European integration project the best case study for passport apartheid in the world, since all the other legal systems are never as explicit in excluding the foreigners from the most essential rights by default. The atypical nature of the Union on this count is significantly undertheorized and this paper aims to start bridging the gap between the reality of EU law and the numerous proclamations about the Union's equitable value-laden nature. For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Professor Jens Frankenreiter (Washington University in St Louis) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Cleaning of Corporate Governance" on 22 February 2022 as a guest of 3CL (The Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law). Abstract: Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced. We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding eighty percent in the G-Index, the most widely used proxy for “good governance” in law and finance. Correcting these errors substantially weakens one of the most well-known results in law and finance, which associates good governance with higher investment returns. Second, we make our corpus freely available to others, in hope of providing a long-overdue resource for traditional scholars as well as those exploring new frontiers in corporate governance, ranging from machine learning to stakeholder governance to the effects of common ownership. Third, and more broadly, our analysis exposes twin cautionary tales about the critical role of lawyers in empirical research, and the dubious practice of throttling public access to public records. Bio: Jens Frankenreiter is a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of business law, contract law, and comparative law. His work draws on methods from economics, statistics, and data science to improve our understanding of contracting, private and public lawmaking, and legal institutions. A particular focus of his work is on the use of large amounts of texts and other forms of big data. His writing has appeared in leading academic journals, among them the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Jens holds a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Before coming to Washington University, he was a Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Bonn, a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, and a Post-Doc at the Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership. 3CL Seminars are kindly supported by Travers Smith. For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website at http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

Professor Ignacio Tirado of UNIDROIT and Universidad Autónoma Madrid, gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Deconstructing Insolvency Law: Towards a Bespoke Treatment of Business Financial Distress" on 8 February 2022 as a guest of 3CL (The Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law). 3CL Seminars are kindly supported by Travers Smith. For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website at http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

This was a joint 3CL/Cambridge Private Law Centre event. Additive layer manufacturing, better known as 3D-printing, is a manufacturing technology which has been evolving steadily over the last few decades, and has now advanced to the point where it can make the leap from niche technology to mainstream application. Its potential is such that it could change where and the manner in which many types of goods are produced. An interesting aspect of 3D-printing is that it allows for the unbundling of the production process. In this paper, I intend to explore what this could mean for the laws on the humble contract for the sale of goods, and whether the potential of 3D-printing requires developments in the law. Christian Twigg-Flesner LL.B. PCHE Ph.D. (Sheffield) is Professor of International Commercial Law at the University of Warwick (since September 2017). Previously, he was Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Hull, having joined there as Lecturer in 2004, and he previously taught at the University of Sheffield and Nottingham Trent University. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of Commercial, Consumer and Contract Law, with a particular focus on the implications of digitalisation. His research covers English, European and International dimensions. He is a Fellow of the European Law Institute, an Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, and one of the Law editors for the Journal of Consumer Policy. He has been a Senior International Fellow at the University of Bayreuth (2016-18), and visiting professor at the universities of Münster, Bielefeld, Osnabrück, and City University Hong Kong. He has spoken at conferences throughout Europe, as well as in Hong Kong and Japan. He has published extensively, particularly on EU Consumer and Contract Law. His books include Foundations of International Commercial Law (Routledge, 2021), Rethinking EU Consumer Law, with Geraint Howells and Thomas Wilhelmsson (Routledge, 2017), The Europeanisation of Contract Law (2nd ed, Routledge, 2013) and A Cross-Border-Only Regulation for Consumer Transactions in the EU – A New Approach to EU Consumer Law (Springer, 2012). He has edited the Cambridge Companion to European Union Private Law (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and the Elgar Research Handbook on EU Consumer and Contract Law (Edward Elgar, 2016). He is also an editor of the 13th and 14th editions of Atiyah and Adams’ Sale of Goods (Pearson, 2016; 2020; with Rick Canavan). 3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners. For more information see: https://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/centre-activities

Speaker: Professor Ignacio Tirado (UNIDROIT, Universidad Autónoma Madrid) 3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners. For more information see: https://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/centre-activities

There have been several recent egregious examples of private prosecutions, including the case of the Post Office prosecuting numerous Postmasters for losses caused by a faulty IT system. Professor John Spencer discusses these cases, the evolution of the system of private prosecutions, and the considerations involved in regulating such actions.Professor Spencer is Professor Emeritus of Law and Honorary President of the European Criminal Law Association. He has written extensively on criminal justice matters and has been involved in a number of law reform projects.For more information about Professor Spencer, please refer to his profile at https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/jr-spencer/79Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.

On 16 November 2021 Lady Dame Sarah Falk delivered the 2021 Cambridge Freshfields Lecture entitled "Modern Judging".The Honourable Mrs Justice Falk DBE spoke about modern judging, her experience as a High Court judge having followed an unconventional path to the High Court bench, the selection of judges, and some lessons learned from the pandemic for the conduct of proceedings.Dame Sarah Falk studied law at the University of Cambridge before starting her professional career at Freshfields. She was a partner at Freshfields between 1994 and 2013 and subsequently worked as a consultant. While at Freshfields she was involved in graduate recruitment as well as holding managerial roles. She became a High Court judge in October 2018, sitting in the Chancery Division, and was appointed to the Judicial Appointments Commission as the High Court representative in October 2019.The Cambridge Freshfields Lecture is an annual address delivered by a guest of the Cambridge Private Law Centre, and the event is sponsored by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.More information about this lecture, including photographs from the event, is available from the Private Law Centre website:http://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/events/past-events

An online event held by Cambridge Pro Bono Project and Action on Armed Violence.Over the course of its military involvement in the Syrian conflict, the UK Government has claimed that since 2014, some 1,700 British air strikes have only caused 1 known civilian death. Just last week, it was revealed that British forces are linked to the deaths of 86 children and more than 200 adult civilians during the Afghanistan conflict.The use of airborne explosive weapons by the United Kingdom in recent armed conflicts has created a risk that civilians might be the victims or unintended targets of the UK’s air strikes. By virtue of their operational characteristics and largely indiscriminate area-effects once detonated, airborne explosive weapons have been documented to have a greater potential to cause civilian death and injury than other conventional weapons.In a report written by Cambridge Pro Bono Project researchers for the London-based NGO Action on Armed Violence, the UK’s obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law as well as domestic public law to investigate, record and report civilian casualties have been examined.For its first CPP Speaker Series event of this academic year, the CPP in cooperation with Iain Overton, Executive Director of Action on Armed Violence, will discuss the findings of this report together with experts Georgia Edwards, UK Advocacy Officer and Conflict Researcher at Airwars, and Gavin Crowden, Executive Director at Every Casualty Counts.For more information see: https://www.cpp.law.cam.ac.uk/

Baron Cornelius Ver Heyden de Lancey (1889-1984) was a wealthy and public-spirited Dutchman who at different times in his life was a dentist, doctor, surgeon, barrister and art historian. In 1970 he created the De Lancey and De La Hanty Foundation, to promote studies in medico-legal topics. The Foundation generously gave Cambridge the Ver Heyden de Lancey Fund, which since 1996 has funded occasional public lectures on medico-legal issues of current interest.The 2021 Baron Ver Heyden de Lancey Lecture on Medico-Legal Studies was delivered by Dr Silvia Camporesi of King's College London on 20 March 2021, and was entitled "Law, Hormones, and Sport: a level playing field?".For more information about the Baron Ver Heyden de Lancey Lecture series, please see http://www.lml.law.cam.ac.uk/events/vhdl-events

Professor John Spencer of the University of Cambridge gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "The UK and EU Criminal Law: "... an Island, entire of itself"?" on Wednesday 26th October 2011 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CELS (the Centre for European Legal Studies). For more information see the CELS website at http://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/.