New papers in the LSE Legal Studies Working Paper Series

We are delighted to announce the first issue of the LSE Law School’s Legal Studies Working Paper Series for 2026.

Joana Setzer & Eoin Noel Jackson (WSP 1/2026) provide the first global analysis of climate litigation before apex courts, showing that while outcomes vary, these courts increasingly shape climate governance through uneven but growing doctrinal innovation, strategic influence, and transnational judicial engagement; Carys Craig, Luke McDonagh & Daniela Simone (WPS 2/2026) analyse the undertheorized phenomenon of collaborative authorship in copyright law by comparing the co-ownership rules and threshold tests of the US, UK, Canadian, and Australian jurisdictions, and conclude by offering a new model for collaborative creativity that combines the UK's threshold and proportionality tests with the US approach to co-ownership; Tarun Khaitan (WPS 3/2026) offers a novel account of separation of powers, shifting the focus from institutional separation to agential power and showing how constitutions supply a grammar for domesticating political actors in pursuit of a variety of ideological and axiological ends; Suren Gomtsian & Femke Huisman (WPS 4/2026) argue that while the rapid adoption of ESG-linked executive compensation is explained by competing theories, such as optimal contracting, managerial rent extraction, and signalling existing empirical evidence remains inconclusive, leaving the rationale and effectiveness of ESG incentives uncertain; and Anna Lukina (WPS 5/2026) explains and reinforces St. Thomas Aquinas's conception of evil as privation of good, applying it to morally iniquitous law and arguing that Aquinas’s framework helps to illuminate, firstly, that evil law is parasitic on good law (primacy thesis), and, secondly, that good law’s coercive and coordinative functions risk it being misused and transformed into evil law (causality thesis).