We are delighted to announce the first issue of LSE Law's Working Paper Series for 2019.
In this issue, Tatiana Cutts (WPS 1/2019) argues that, by making it harder for parties to avoid the impact of contracts that suffer from some serious defect in formative consent, smart contracts erode valuable relationships of trust and reliance; Priya S. Gupta (WPS 2/2019) analyzes New York’s 2018 initially successful proposal to Amazon to locate their second headquarters (HQ2) in New York City, providing the context of Amazon’s 2017-2018 city competition for the headquarters and offering multiple observations on the proposal, city governance processes, Amazon’s withdrawal from their initial acceptance, and the open question of future smart city, technological, and data-related collaborations; Carol Harlow and Richard Rawlings (WPS 3/2019) examine the increasing proceduralisation of public administration experienced in recent years, explore the potential for dissonance and exchange between public administration and administrative law, and point to some emerging problems due to the impact of automation on public administration; David Kershaw and Edmund Schuster (WPS 4/2019) explore the transformative potential of the UK Corporate Governance Code’s use of ‘company purpose’ and ask whether UK company law is capable of providing a legal ecology that can support purposeful companies; Jonathan Jackson and Ben Bradford (WPS 5/2019) critique the empirical strategy of Sun et al.’s (2018) study of the nature of police legitimacy in Southern China, and analyse data from 30 countries to illustrate that sensitivity to cultural context requires using a methodology that does not a priori impose the preconditions of legitimacy; Parthasarathi Shome (WPS 6/2019) reviews General Anti Avoidance Rules (GAAR) legislations from a range of different national contexts and provides a detailed examination of GAAR legislation in India, highlighting the importance of differentiating among tax mitigation, tax avoidance and tax evasion and cautioning against ignoring taxpayer rights in the quest to minimise presumed tax avoidance; and Grégoire Webber (WPS 7/2019) reviews the depth of judicial and scholarly consensus respecting the principle of proportionality and offers an expository and critical account of proportionality analysis, introducing readers to different understandings of proportionality and showing how the judicial and scholarly consensus is only surface deep.