The supposed neutrality of IP law The aim of intellectual property (IP) law is the promotion of innovation and creation (Menell et al., 2023). Normative theories justifying IP protection focus on defining the appropriate allocation and scope of IP rights. Generally, IP law theory refrains from passing a normative judgment about the type [...]
Introduction Sustainability concerns such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality are the defining issues of our time (Dyer 2024; Hickel 2020; Steffen et al. 2015). The relationship between these issues and human activities is, to a notable extent, influenced by legal ideas on the rights, freedoms, and duties of different parties such [...]
In recent years, the topic of consumer vulnerability has come to the fore in the context of the digitalisation of the economy insofar as it can be seen as a symptom of, and embodying the various asymmetries that characterise digital markets (see e.g., BEUC, 2022). One of the many features of the digital [...]
Capitalist global processes of production and consumption are unjust. Social movements have been claiming this for decades. Production for private consumption requires an extensive use of natural and finite resources, which we are depleting. Many goods we consume in the European Union are primarily produced outside of the Member States in a manner [...]
Data-driven technology has become a mainstay in our societies. Feeding AI systems and the IoT, large-scale datasets have the potential to radically reshape our understanding of things and basic social practices. It should thus come as no surprise that regulating data has become a central concern of regulation across the world. The European [...]
Two decades on, much of the scenario against which the Manifesto was written has changed. The substantive problems it highlighted, however, have not diminished - if anything, they have intensified. The tension between socially oriented and market-driven law remains. So too does the difficulty of thinking about social justice in a post-national context, [...]
A few years ago, Katharina Pistor published a book that presented a powerful illustration of the profound political, economic and social consequences that have resulted from a depoliticised and market-centric approach to private law. In The Code of Capital: How Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Pistor shone a spotlight on the role of [...]
1. Social Justice and Globalization, c. 1990—2020 As a child in the 1980s, the clothes I wore were manufactured in the country where I lived, Finland. As an adult in the 2020s, when I buy clothes to my own children, they are “designed” in Finland but manufactured in places such as Bangladesh, China [...]
Though not the centrepiece, sustainability was already on the radar of the Manifesto for Social Justice in European Contract Law in 2004: ‘It is important to align the general principles of social justice that govern the market order with standards designed to protect public goods such as a healthy environment.’ Twenty years later, [...]
Introduction In 2004, a group of scholars signed a collective work with the evocative title “Social Justice in European Contract Law: A Manifesto”. Starting from the idea that private contract law had the potential to shape the future of the European Union, the document aimed to achieve two main objectives: 1. The [...]