New papers in the LSE Legal Studies Working Paper Series

After the celebrated Special Issue on Hope in Law distributed last December, we are delighted to announce the third issue of the LSE Law Working Paper Series for 2025. In this issue, Joseph Spooner (WPS 46/2025) draws together underappreciated links between bankruptcy and consumer financial regulation by highlighting the intersecting functions of a regulatory framework increasingly oriented towards a principle of responsible lending, and a bankruptcy system that operates both as a market ground rule and a last resort protection against the risks of consumer over-indebtedness. The paper examines the potential of, and obstacles to, the dissemination of insight across these two fields; Eva Micheler and Jenkin Chim (WPS 47/2025) defend a ‘real entity theory’ of corporations and companies and defend such theory against critiques by Bainbridge and Watson, arguing that a ‘real entity theory’ is the most suitable explanation to explain the separate legal personality of corporations and companies and their collective decision-making nature; Grégoire Webber (WPS 48/2025) comments on Alexandre Lefebvre's Liberalism as a Way of Life by arguing that liberalism is less deep than other comprehensive doctrines, being non-teleological, pluralistic, and without an ordered vision of final ends, instead leaving to each person to cultivate their own self-direction; Kai Möller (WPS 49/2025) examines the role of liberty in Ronald Dworkin’s theory of rights and argues that while Dworkin’s conception of liberty is somewhat deficient from a moral and philosophical perspective, from a legal and constitutional perspective it provides a ‘good enough’ protection of a distinct sphere of liberty, making his final restatement of rights the first in his long career to become a candidate for being judicially endorsed and applied; Iain Ramsay and Joseph Spooner (WPS 50/2025) examine the HM Treasury’s consultation on the Review of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and argue that it oversimplifies the FOS’s role by treating it solely as a facility for the resolution of individual disputes, thereby overlooking its regulatory importance in protecting legal rights, promoting access to justice, and shaping business behaviour; Eva Micheler and Elena Zaccaria (WPS 51/2025) critique the UK Digitisation Taskforce's Final Report, arguing that the proposed reform represents a fundamental expropriation of investor rights by permanently removing retail investors' access to legal ownership and direct enforcement of shareholder rights; Martin Loughlin (WPS 52/2025) examines the decline of judicial self-restraint in constitutional review, arguing that the neglect of what Alexander Bickel called the passive virtues has led to the emergence of a new era of judicial activism which fails to respect relative institutional competences; Jo Braithwaite (WPS 53/2025) argues that, in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Philipp v Barclays, English courts have largely resisted developing common law routes to redress for victims of authorised push payment (APP) fraud, with post-Philipp litigation revealing both the limitations of common law claims and the tension between judicial restraint and the UK’s unprecedented regulatory shift toward mandatory reimbursement for certain APP frauds; Floris de Witte (WPS 54/2025) argues that while EU internal market law is formally receptive to diverse urban policy goals, its reliance on proportionality as a method of legal “legibility” disaggregates and simplifies cities in ways that obscure their lived, integrated character and thereby constrain the legal imagination and protection of genuinely liveable European cities; Marie Petersmann (WPS 55/2025) examines the manufactured cognitive dissonance in how major carbon emitters like RWE simultaneously reject and embrace climate attribution science based on their economic interests, highlights the spatial and temporal displacement of carbon harm inherent in contemporary climate mitigation strategies, and calls for a reparative approach to planetary climate justice; and Anna Lukina (WPS 56/2025) examines the relationship between Kelsen’s normativism and Schmitt’s decisionism and, despite their deep differences on how law and the state relate, offers a hybrid synthesis that better captures the way legal orders operate in both normal and exceptional circumstances