We are delighted to announce the third issue of the LSE Law School’s Legal Studies Working Paper Series for 2024.
Oliver Hailes (WPS 17/2024) offers a defence of an integrated hierarchy of environmental over investment protection under general international law, using it to examine 12 types of environmental protection clauses in investment treaties and identify which clauses reflect general international law, may enhance environmental protection, or make a negligible contribution; Giulia Claudia Leonelli and Francesco Clora (WPS 18/2024) draw on legal and economic insights to put forward a threefold categorisation of net-zero subsidies, employing an examination of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tax credits to operationalise the relevant categories and demarcate the boundaries between justifiable trade-distorting and unjustifiable protectionist or discriminatory subsidies; Marie Petersmann (WPS 19/2024) identifies distinct grammars of climate justice that tend to be adopted in climate litigation, arguing that a reparative approach articulated in terms of entangled harms, more-than-human care, terrestrial spatiality, and the enduring character of climate harm addresses important limits of both a traditional grammar and an emerging progressive grammar of climate justice, opening up a register of political thought for climate justice that starts in the law yet vastly exceeds and disrupts it; David Gindis and Eva Micheler (WPS 20/2024) propose a narrative model of the company in terms of nested levels of governance, arguing that such a model would allow for a shift of focus from board-level actors and phenomena towards the economic reality of the company, providing not only a positive description of the law but also putting corporate lawyers in a stronger position to intervene in ongoing debates in corporate governance; Alperen Gözlügöl (WPS 21/2024) argues that over-regulation was not the root cause of the malaise of London stock markets and that deregulation will not provide an adequate fix and suggests instead that at fault are more fundamental issues relating to the UK market ecosystem, which will not be resolved through recent deregulatory reform initiatives; Jo Braithwaite and David Murphy (WPS 22/2024) examine the extra-territorial dimensions of financial regulation, which has become increasingly commonplace since 2008, first developing an analytical framework based on Global Administrative Law, and subsequently applying this framework to the globally significant EU regime for third country central counterparties (CCPs) and the latest 'EMIR 3.0' proposals; Edmund Schuster (WPS 23/2024) revisits the long-standing debate on the Takeover Directive’s mandatory bid rule and contends that, although present, the rule’s economic inefficiencies are likely overstated given the acceptance of similarly-effective provisions by participants in private markets and that, therefore, there should be greater optionality in the rule’s applicability; Christos Hadjiemmanuil (WPS 24/2024) reflects on bail-in’s first decade as a central tool in bank resolution regimes and examines challenges to its operationalisation in regulatory practice, before concluding that its credibility and appropriateness in situations of system-wide distress remain uncertain; and Sarah Trotter (WPS 25/2024) explores the notion of a 'right to hope' articulated by the European Court of Human Rights in recent years, moving beyond law to ask what it might mean to live with a sense of a right to hope as distinct from an idea of a right to hope.