Legal Studies Research Paper Series Vol. 15, No. 4

The Faculty has distributed Volume 15 Number 4 of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN.

This issue includes the following articles:

Bobby V. Reddy: Getting in a Bind - Comparing Executive Compensation Regulations in the US and the UK (5/2024)

Executive compensation is a topical issue on both sides of the Atlantic, with concerns that the pay of managers of US and UK publicly traded companies has spiralled out of control. However, a minority narrative has emerged that a discrepancy in pay levels favoring executives of US over UK companies is leading to corporations shunning the London Stock Exchange and an exodus of talent from the UK to the US. When determining the reasons for cross-border pay variations, regulation is an obvious candidate for blame, but is it the only piece of the puzzle? In this article, US and UK executive compensation regulations are compared, finding that the UK does indeed have a stricter regulatory environment, with, in particular, shareholders being given a binding “say-on-pay” in contrast to a simple advisory vote in the US. The divergence in pay levels between the US and the UK cannot, though, solely be attributed to differences in regulations, and cultural attitudes toward high pay also play a role, together with the general outperformance of the US exchanges in recent years. It is easy to get in a bind over regulations, but with executive compensation, other factors are also at play.

Andreas Samartzis: State Authority and True Political Community: Exploring the Basis of Political Equality (6/2024)

Legal theorists have propounded various conditions that need to hold for state law to have prima facie authority: congruence with substantive or procedural moral principles, democratic pedigree, and effectiveness, to name a few. These accounts fail to take into consideration the relevance of the identity of those subject to state law for its authority. This omission ignores the complaints mounted against the authority of state law by politically disempowered long-term residents, alienated cultural minorities, and foreigners forced to provide cheap labour in their native countries, without having the option to migrate to countries where the products of their labour have seamless access. These complaints reflect competing conceptions of what constitutes a true political community, whose members have a moral duty to establish effective democratic institutions together and afford one another equal political rights. Although political philosophy has engaged extensively with these issues in developing justifications for claims to democratic inclusion, collective self-determination, secession, and global justice, normative jurisprudence generally treats the state as a closed, self-sustaining system. This assumption is neither empirically sound nor practically tenable. Bracketing the complaints for inclusion or independence from discourses on the authority of law gives rise to serious political instability and perceptions of injustice both within affluent states with migrant or ethnic minorities and across the globalised world. Normative jurisprudence must engage with these complaints head on, rather than leave their resolution to the accidents of history and the politics of power.

This article develops a normative account of a true political community based on the stable and comprehensive socio-economic interaction of persons through their effective subjection to comprehensive institutional authority. I single out this state of affairs due to its effect on the fundamental interests of persons and its concomitant relevance for personal autonomy. Section II defends the practical relevance of a normative account of a true political community for determining future political action. Section III examines candidate principles for membership to a true political community. These are volitional and nonvolitional. They include consent and affirmation, on the one hand, and common subjection to state authority and affected interests, on the other. This section demonstrates the shortcomings of each of these principles and elaborates on the principle of socio-economic interaction. Sections IV and V draw the implications of the proposed account for challenges to state authority on the basis of calls for redefining the political community that originate within and outside the state. Section IV examines how the proposed account handles the most radical instance of challenge of state authority within the state, namely secession. Section V examines the relation between political community and global justice by applying the proposed account to socio-economic interaction in the global economic order and the European Union (EU). Though the conditions for shared political membership do not hold at the global level even on the basis of ideal theory, the high level of socio-economic integration in the EU and the effectiveness of EU institutions create a strong case for equal political rights, at least in ideal theory. Through this examination, the proposed account paves the way for evaluating claims to equal citizenship in other regional economic integration organizations.

Philip Murray: On the Doctrinal Foundations of Administrative Law (7/2024)

This article seeks to defend an orthodox, “ultra vires” account of English administrative law whereby judicial review is seen as principally concerned with enforcing the jurisdictional limits of administrative powers. It is argued that the ultra vires doctrine is not only rooted in the courts’ constitutional responsibility for upholding the rule of law but that it best respects the sovereignty of Parliament. As such, the ultra vires doctrine offers the best means of resisting statutory ousters of judicial review in a way that does not risk constitutional crisis. Jettisoning the doctrine will do more harm than good.

David Erdos: Palestine and the Modern Commonwealth: Past Engagements and Future Membership? (8/2024)

All Commonwealth summit communiqués from the late 1960s through to the mid-1990s maintained a focus on the Palestinian conflict and highlighted approaches which could lead to its just resolution. Whilst pressure peaked in the late 1970s and 1980s, the most significant issue – potential Palestinian membership – only arose in 1997. A decision was deferred and Palestine has not been mentioned in summit communiqués since. This silence dovetails with a diminished summit and supporting Commonwealth Secretariat. Nevertheless, the Commonwealth can and should re-engage by providing a realistic roadmap (including Secretariat support) for Palestinian membership which benchmarks internal standards but is not dependent on Israel or similar factors outside the Palestinian Authority’s direct control.

Ahmed Izzidien, Holli Sargeant & Felix Steffek: LLM vs. Lawyers: Identifying a Subset of Summary Judgments in a Large UK Case Law Dataset (10/2024)

To undertake computational research of the law, efficiently identifying datasets of court decisions that relate to a specific legal issue is a crucial yet challenging endeavour. This study addresses the gap in the literature working with large legal corpora about how to isolate cases, in our case summary judgments, from a large corpus of UK court decisions. We introduce a comparative analysis of two computational methods: (1) a traditional natural language processing-based approach leveraging expert-generated keywords and logical operators and (2) an innovative application of the Claude 2 large language model to classify cases based on content-specific prompts. We use the Cambridge Law Corpus of 356,011 UK court decisions and determine that the large language model achieves a weighted F1 score of 0.94 versus 0.78 for keywords. Despite iterative refinement, the search logic based on keywords fails to capture nuances in legal language. We identify and extract 3,102 summary judgment cases, enabling us to map their distribution across various UK courts over a temporal span. The paper marks a pioneering step in employing advanced natural language processing to tackle core legal research tasks, demonstrating how these technologies can bridge systemic gaps and enhance the accessibility of legal information. We share the extracted dataset metrics to support further research on summary judgments.

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