New papers in the LSE Legal Studies Working Paper Series

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

Rachel Leow (WPS 6/2026) argues that the meaning of legal agency is less unified and more plural than we tend to believe, yet still carries genuine normative significance in the legal realm, and she offers a way to resolve its ambivalence by focusing on what she calls the agent's 'proxy power; Niamh Dunne (WPS 7/2026) examines the relationship between UK and EU competition law through the lens of the post-Brexit duties enacted by section 60A of the Competition Act 1998, and sets out the likely implications of this revised framework by studying the decisional practice of the Competition and Markets Authority and the case law of the Competition Appeal Tribunal; Stephen Humphreys (WPS 8/2026) in a contribution to an edited volume on strategic litigation, examines the ECtHR’s twin 2024 rulings on climate change - KlimaSeniorinnen and Duarte Agostinho - and argues that, of the two, the latter is the more significant if less celebrated. This is because it exposes how the choice of framing can inadvertently result in judgments that may have the effect of foreclosing future litigation avenues; Finn and Bathia (WPS 9/2026) trace the origins and doctrine of the horizontal application of rights in South Africa, arguing that while constitutional jurisprudence on this topic reflects the constitution’s transformative ambition, it has been marked by doctrinal inconsistency and lacks a coherent normative theory for extending rights into the ‘private sphere’ in a manner that accords with transformative constitutionalism; Michael Salib (WPS 10/2026) examines the place of the Bank of England within the UK’s constitutional order, arguing that the Bank occupies a distinctive position within the executive that reflects three defining features of the unwritten British constitution: long institutional continuity, change without rupture, and a balance of powers; Tarun Khaitan (WPS 11/2026) rebuts the idea that the public-private divide is the relevant distinction to determine what kind of legal personhood an entity has, and argues that the appropriate criterion is to ascertain whether the agent is natural or organised; Neil Duxbury (WPS 12/2026) unearths a difficulty pertaining to the validity of United States federal common law and considers its implications for recent scholarship sympathetically reassessing the concept of general law; Rachel Leow (WPS 13/2026) examines to what extent public policy can be used to invalidate express trusts and argues that instances where this is possible are rare and growing rarer as courts tend to focus on clarifying what qualifies, conceptually, as a trust rather than policing how express trusts are used; Devika Hovell (WPS 14/2026) examines theoretical approaches to collective security, including those influenced by realism, liberalism, constitutionalism, Marxism, feminism, TWAIL, and considers the value in asking the ‘wrong’ questions; and Michael A. Wilkinson (WPS 15/2026) examines the confluence of liberalism and authoritarianism through the lens of constitutional theory and history, showing how liberal constitutionalism’s differentiation between the political and economic realms shields the economy from democratic authority and control.