We are delighted to announce the second issue of the LSE Law School’s Legal Studies Working Paper Series for 2025.
Jan Exner, Stephen Weatherill and Jan Zglinski (WPS 10/2025) make a proposal for a European Sports Act, explaining why the time is right for regulating the sector, arguing why the EU has the constitutional authority to do so, and outlining the content of the legislation; Marie Petersmann (WPS 11/2025) 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; Luke McDonagh (WPS 12/2025) examines what lessons the IP system can learn from the US OxyContin crisis by exploring how ‘industrialised hope’ transforms a scientific research output into a market commodity, highlighting several problems inherent in the current patent system, including misaligned incentives, inadequate patent examination, and insufficient regulation; Eva Micheler (WPS 13/2025) inspects the landmark company law case Hickman v Kent or Romney Marsh Sheepbreeders Association to argue its significance as a crucial step in the development of company law away from its origins in partnership law, and resists suggestions that the recent Privy Council case Tianrui v China Shanshui Cement Group’s reference to company constitutions as a ‘corporate contract’ undermines the conceptual understanding of constitutions as statutory instruments adopted through private action; Daniela Gandorfer and Eva Micheler (WPS 14/2025) analyse Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) through the lenses of firm theory and Ostrom’s institutional framework, arguing that their diverse structures defy simple classification and that concepts like autonomy and decentralization remain largely aspirational; Edmund Schuster and Kelvin Low (WPSP 15/2025) explain why DAOs have failed to replace traditional corporate structures, and why they are unlikely to succeed. Drawing on the theory of the firm, they show that proponents of DAOs often overlook the advantages of centralised management, hierarchical governance, and private information. Far from offering a superior alternative, the authors argue that DAOs are fundamentally ill-equipped to address the legal and economic realities of doing business in the real world; Renato Mangano (WPS 16/2025) scrutinises recent developments in Italian business law and insolvency law, namely the Civil Code and the Code of Business Crisis and Insolvency, noting the convenience of their introduction of a corporate duty to implement internal frameworks for the timely detection of distress, but suggests that such a duty would be more appropriately and efficiently implemented through a guidance-based soft law instrument; Jeremy Horder (WPS 17/2025) critiques Clause 130 of the Crime and Policing Bill 2025, which expands the company's identification with senior managers' wrongdoings to all the tens of thousands of crimes in UK's jurisdictions; Ayşe Gizem Yasar (WPS 18/2025) contests the caricatured portrayals of Kenneth Arrow and Joseph Alois Schumpeter in competition law and economics scholarship through a close analysis of former’s engagement with the US v Microsoft antitrust litigation of the late-1990s, arguing that the two economists’ account of innovation are more similar than typically assumed; Mona Paulsen and Dan Ciuriak (WPS 19/2025) propose the formation of a Caucus of small, open economies to collectively respond within the WTO to the destabilizing effects of US unilateral trade actions, arguing that such a group can leverage WTO norms and procedures—particularly through a situation complaint—to mitigate coercive pressures and restore multilateral engagement; Michael Wilkinson (WPS 20/2025) traces the various ways in which a materialist understanding of constituent power appears in the work of Sieyes, Marx, and Schmitt, arguing that it is Schmitt's conservative conception of constituent power as constitutional identity, severed from any notion of social transformation, that comes to dominate liberal constitutional thought.; and Martin Loughlin (WPS 21/2025) analyses the recent remarkable renaissance of constitutionalism and considers its legal and political implications.