Legal Studies Research Paper Series Vol. 14, No. 4

The Faculty has published Volume 14 Number 4 of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN.

This issue includes the following articles:

Chike Obianwu & Kenneth Okwor: Central Bank Digital Currencies: Analytical and Operational Primer on the eNaira (11/2023)

This chapter provides an expository and teleological account of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) through the prism of the eNaira, Nigeria’s CBDC. This chapter argues that the central bank’s legal authority to issue the eNaira is nebulous and the eNaira adds no unique value to Nigeria beyond what is already available under existing payment technologies. The eNaira is like the physical Naira in all respects except tangibility and programmability. Consequently, perennial Naira instability will bedevil the eNaira with equal force. As designed, the eNaira may lead to the structural and/or cyclical disintermediation of banking and will give the central bank heightened surveillance capacity. Many of the benefits of the eNaira will only accrue, with minimal disintermediation risks, if eNaira adoption is matched by a corresponding reduction in the demand for and use of cash. eNaira has the potential to expand financial inclusion, to enable socially-orientated government-to-person monetary transfers, and to improve the usability of central bank money if the underlying macroeconomic issues are resolved.

Simon Deakin & Christopher Markou: Evolutionary Law and Economics: Theory and Method (12/2023)

The standard model of evolution in the economics of law, its important insights notwithstanding, lacks a good account of inheritance to go with analogues to variation and selection. The normative implication of the standard model, which is that self-organising and spontaneous orders will tend to efficiency, is also misplaced. Just as the association of evolution with progress, characteristic of the theory of legal evolution of a century ago, is now understood to be anachronistic, so it is time to discard outmoded notions linking judge-made law and common law legal reasoning with evolution to efficiency.

Setting aside the unwarranted normative connotations of evolutionary models would release them to shape empirical research. Evolutionary theory informs methods, including leximetrics, time-series econometrics and machine learning, with the potential to throw light on the structural dynamics of legal change, and to resolve questions of law’s coevolution with the economy which were raised but not resolved by the legal origins debate.

Nicholas McBride: 'A Straightforward Case of Nuisance': A Note on Fearn v Tate Gallery [2023] UKSC 4 (14/2023)

This is a note on the extraordinarily important, and potentially revolutionary, decision of the UK Supreme Court in Fearn v Tate Gallery [2023] UKSC 4 on the scope of the law on private nuisance. In deciding to afford a remedy to claimants complaining that tourists accessing the defendant's 'viewing gallery' could look into their flats, the UK Supreme Court broke new ground on (a) what could amount to a private nuisance; and (b) what approach should be adopted to determine whether a given interference with the use of a claimant's land should be regarded as sufficiently significant to amount to a nuisance. This note summarises and critically evaluates the UK Supreme Court's approach to both of these questions.

Brian R. Cheffins & Bobby V. Reddy: Murder on the City Express - Who is Killing the London Stock Exchange's Equity Market? (16/2023)

In Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot deduced that no single culprit was responsible for a murder on the eponymous train. In this article, which is intended to serve as an aide memoire to assess anticipated reforms, we similarly reason that there is no single suspect responsible for a recent decline in fortunes of the London Stock Exchange’s equity market. We note that globally-relevant factors, such as the rise of private capital, may have impacted the health of the U.K.’s primary stock market. However, sufficiently material differences in various stock market metrics exist between the London Stock Exchange and stock markets elsewhere to suggest that U.K.-specific factors are also significant. We canvass several of those factors: Britain’s listing requirements and corporate governance regime, a paucity of public company investment research, the withdrawal of U.K. pension and insurance firms as public company investors, a U.K. investment culture that prioritises dividends over growth, a lack of world-leading British corporations, and managerial shortcomings. We suggest that all of these factors likely have contributed to the U.K.’s equity market travails, a finding which implies that generating effective reforms will require coherent and expansive policymaking.

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