The Faculty has distributed Volume 17 Numbers 5 & 6 of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN.
These issues include the following articles:
Rumiana Yotova: Global Corporations in International Biomedical Law (11/2026)
Forthcoming in A Kulick, A Sanger and D Lustig (eds), Oxford Handbook on Global Corporations and International Law (OUP, forthcoming).
Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan: Corporate Control over Intellectual Property: From Paris to San Francisco (14/2026)
Both corporations and intellectual property (IP) rights are creatures of and coded by law-and hence in principle subject to the state's rule-making power. Since both commonly relate to activities that cross borders, private and public international law, as well as technologies, infrastructures and institutions are frequently designed to validate and facilitate such acts. Given how essential IP rights are for many intangible assets commercialised globally, it is not surprising that corporate actors aim to shape international legal regimes for the global protection and enforcement of IP. This paper reviews the role of corporate IP owners and users in creating, maintaining and updating the global legal infrastructure relevant for accessing, utilising and exploiting IP. Taking a bird-eye perspective, it shows how, since the advent of the international IP system in the 19 th century, corporations act as global norm drivers, entrepreneurs and creators, as well as norm antipreneurs and private standard-setters.
Simon Deakin & Linda Shuku: Exploring Computational Approaches to Law: The Evolution of Judicial Language in the Anglo-Welsh Poor Law, 1691-1834 (16/2026)
The use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyse the structure of legal texts is a fast-growing field. While much attention has been devoted to the use of these techniques to predict case outcomes, they have the potential to contribute more broadly to research into the nature of legal reasoning and its relationship to social and economic change. In this paper, we use recently developed NLP and ML methods to test the claim that judicial language is systematically shaped by economic shocks deriving from the business cycle and by long-run trends in the economy associated with technological change and industrial transition. Focusing on cases decided under the Anglo-Welsh poor law between the 1690s and 1830s, we show that the terminology used to describe the right to poor relief shifted over time according to economic conditions. We explore the implications of our results for the poor law, the theory of legal evolution, and socio-legal research methods.
Ira Chadha-Sridhar: Bad Care (20/2026)
Feminist criticisms of the ethics of care-from both within and outside the approach's own fold-have historically charged care ethics with "valorising caring". Feminist care ethicists have responded to this criticism by acknowledging that care can sometimes be bad-it can be performed poorly, prove lacking or deficient in some respect, or take place under deeply unjust structural conditions. But this consensus leaves the harder and more important question untouched-and it is this question that explains why the criticisms persist. Can caring actions be bad insofar as they are caring? Can the very feature that makes an action caring also make it morally bad? I argue here that it can. Analysing a range of caring actions that strike us as bad, I identify one category-which I call 'true bad care'wherein the very feature that makes the act caring is also what makes it morally bad. Here, the badness stems from the agent's intention to fulfil another's needs-one characterised by a paternalistic disregard for the recipient's say. Since such cases of true bad care exist, caring actions are not necessarily valuable even insofar as they are caring. This finding clarifies the moral valence of care ethics' foundational concept and paves the way for further development of the approach along these revised lines. It also demonstrates that paternalism and care are more conceptually intertwined than philosophers acknowledge. Paternalistic actions are not separate from care. They are the central case of bad care.
Simon Deakin & Kamelia Pourkermani: The Effects of Labour Laws on Productivity, Employment, Unemployment and the Labour Share of National Income: Analysis of New Evidence From the Cambridge Leximetric Database, with a UK-China Comparison (17/2026)
We report the results of an econometric analysis of the effects of labour laws in the UK and China. For data on labour laws we draw on the 2023 update of the CBR-LRI index, part of the Cambridge Leximetric Database, which codes for labour laws around the world between 1970 and 2022. The longitudinal coverage of the CBR-LRI enables us to use time-series techniques which model dynamic changes in an economy over time. We employ impulse response function analysis to estimate the effects of labour laws on indicators of efficiency (productivity, employment and unemployment) and distribution (labour’s share of national income). We find that stronger labour laws in the UK are associated with rising employment and falling unemployment, while those in China are associated with rising productivity. We also observe positive impacts of labour laws on the labour share in both countries. Breaking down our results according to particular types of labour law, the positive employment effect we see in the UK is associated with stronger working time protections, while the positive productivity effect in China is associated with more protective laws regulating flexible forms of employment and with stronger dismissal laws.
Simon Deakin & Ding Chen: The Birth of Insolvency in China: Judicial Innovation During the Wenzhou Curb Crisis (18/2026)
In this paper, through a case study focusing on the evolution of China’s insolvency law, we test the ‘transplant effect’ hypothesis, in particular the claim that transplanted laws can only work when there is local or ‘endogenous’ demand for them in the ‘host’ or ‘receiving’ state. We also test claims made for a ‘co-evolutionary’ understanding of the law-economy relationship in the context of China’s development. In addition to documentary sources, this paper draws on interviews we carried out in Wenzhou in September 2017 and December 2018. Our study shows that aspects of the transplant and coevolution hypotheses are in need of some modification if they are to explain China’s legal and economic development. The embedding of legal transplants is less a response to the demands of business actors, and more the result of proactive interventions on the part of judges and officials. The study also suggests that formal rules can be operationalized at the level of practice once they are seen as legitimate. While this is a process which takes time, a period of crisis provides opportunities for the learning process around the use of formal rules and procedures to be accelerated.
Ira Chadha-Sridhar: The Legal Concept of Care (21/2026)
The notion of 'care' is invoked within legal doctrine in the law of tort, medical law, and family law. Yet despite its centrality across these doctrinal domains, these invocations have rarely been studied together. This neglect seems to stem from an underlying assumption that 'care' refers to fundamentally different things in each context-rendering consolidated analysis unhelpful. This paper challenges that assumption. I argue that, contrary to the standard assumption, these areas of law all invoke distinct tokens of the same conceptual type. To establish this, I begin with an analysis of the ordinary concept of care that draws on literature in care theory, showing that the concept of care tracks three analytically distinct categories: action, attitude, and disposition. I then argue that each doctrinal domain structures legal duties around different facets of this same concept: tort law focuses on dispositions and actions, medical law on actions, and family law on actions, attitudes, and their combinations. A distinctly legal concept of care thus emerges-one that not only invokes the ordinary concept but also actively shapes it.
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