We are delighted to announce the first issue of the LSE Law School’s Legal Studies Working Paper Series for 2025.
Cressida Auckland (WPS 1/2025) explores the implications of the Law Commission’s expected proposal to align the test for testamentary capacity with the test for capacity under the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005 in cases involving mental disorder, arguing that such cases cannot be easily accommodated within the framework of the MCA and reforms to the test for capacity in the MCA are thus needed before it ought to be applied to the testamentary context; Nafay Choudhury (WPS 2/2025) revisits the Cotterrell-Nelken debate within law and society research, arguing that the debate remains useful in helping socio-legal scholars reflect on how the boundaries of the discipline of sociology of law are formed and on how their political commitments often implicitly structure their understandings of what law is; Grégoire Webber (WPS 3/2025) argues that, contrary to Aileen Kavanagh’s claim in her recent book The Collaborative Constitution, even institutional arrangements which prioritise either judicial or legislative supremacy – such as the Dworkinian or Waldronian models respectively – are instances of collaborative constitutions; Grégoire Webber (WPS 4/2025) examines opposition between the branches of government, highlighting how each institution acts as a constitutional guardian by checking and restraining the others’ powers, and introduces the norm of responsible opposition to distinguish between constructive opposition and obstruction, emphasising how opposition should challenge and scrutinise rather than paralyse government; Philipp Paech (WPS 5/2025) examines the principles that underpin the scope of the MiCA Regulation, the EU’s new legal instrument for the regulation of crypto-asset markets, finding that while the novel design of the Regulation’s scope is in principle conducive to achieving its regulatory goals, it nevertheless opens up room for regulatory arbitrage, thereby pushing definitional considerations from the rulemaking to the enforcement stage; Sarah Paterson (WPS 6/2025) offers a qualified defence of the ‘rule in Gibbs’, which provides that a debt is only discharged in a foreign insolvency proceeding if the contract is governed by the law of that proceeding, arguing that while the rule could be abandoned in true insolvency cases as part of a detailed cross-border insolvency regime, it remains the right rule in the cross-border corporate restructuring context; Philipp Paech (WPS 7/2025) develops a framework to identify fact patterns that, in the context of the issuance, holding and transfer arrangement underlying each tokenisation of real-world assets, dent investors’ ownership rights and thereby endanger the viability of business models which are responding to the economic rationales for tokenisation; David Murphy (WPS 8/2025) examines the epistemological activity involved in financial regulation, uncovering how the construction and dissemination of abstract categories and internal rhetorics by the regulators, attempts to define valid translations into the system by the regulated, and the policing of this purported compliance, constitute it, and showing that this ‘truth game’ involves both erasure, when the original subjects of regulation and their relationship are lost in translation, and semiosis, when new ones are created; and David Kershaw (WPS 9/2025) explores, following the late Gerald Frug, how the legitimacy of the corporate form is maintained by the shifting balance corporate law strikes between enabling the deployment of expertise and reflecting societal expectations of control, through its continual and often unacknowledged movement between subjective and objective directorial obligations.