Which law governs assets recorded on the blockchain? This question has long eluded legal academia and practice. Now, states have begun to enact hard and fast rules. This contribution compares legislative provisions of a number of states and a recently adopted text by UNIDROIT. The analysis of these rules shows the emergence of a new gulf in the conflict of laws. This gap must be overcome before the differences are further entrenched and reciprocated by other states which have not yet regulated the question. The means to do so is a uniform text of conflict of laws. An attempt will be made to distill an “ideal” conflicts rule for digital assets from the existing provisions. The proposal made here can serve as a blueprint for national legislation or case law. It is hoped that it will lead to a worldwide consensus in determining the law applicable to digital assets.

In China, algorithms have been increasingly used in many different sectors to facilitate analysis of massive data and optimise the decision-making process. While this approach brings significant benefits, the complex design of algorithmic models and the large scale of data involved pose serious challenges to the existing regulations. In response, China has gradually established a regulatory regime covering many areas of law, such as rules governing personal information protection and algorithm recommendation services, to oversee the development and use of algorithmic decision-making. However, China’s regulatory regime is not without its limitations. Drawing on the regulatory experience of overseas jurisdictions, including the EU, the US, the UK and Singapore, this paper makes some suggestions for improving Chinese regulations. It is worth considering formulating specific requirements for data used in algorithmic decision-making and complementing the existing regulatory regime with algorithmic audit mechanisms. China is also advised to strengthen private and public enforcement and incorporate the code of ethics into the governance structure of algorithmic decision-making.

This article seeks to further clarify the following issues on indefeasibility: (1) the availability of the remedy of specific performance in an LTA, s 47(3) situation; (2) the applicability of constructive trusts in post-registration fraudulent situations; and (3) the power of the courts to rectify the land-register under LTA, s 160. The discussion will attempt to provide a principled and just approach in resolving the conundrums posed by these loose ends.

The speed at which hyperlinks enable information to be disseminated poses challenges to legal regulation. In particular, major concerns arise over whether adherence to the Traditional Publication Rule would result in widespread liability. This paper explores how various jurisdictions have opted to tackle the issue of defamation via hyperlinks and highlights a shift towards a publisher-centric inquiry. This paper concludes by arguing that this shift is fundamentally at odds with the principles underlying the element of publication, and provides suggestions for how Singapore can consider approaching this issue moving forward.

The papers published in this special issue were initially presented at the inaugural meeting of The Research Forum on Basic Legal Positions held in Lisbon in September 2023. The Research Forum on Basic Legal Positions has been established as a joint venture by Lisbon Legal Theory (a research cluster within the Lisbon Public Law Research Centre in the University of Lisbon) and the Centre for Legal Theory (Faculty of Law in the National University of Singapore). Its aim is to promote the investigation of elements common to all legal systems at the level of individual legal positions, where a party’s conduct is normatively regulated by the law. The analysis of such positions clarifies practical legal problems, informs a scientific understanding of law, and illuminates normative controversies over the status individuals should enjoy under the law. The forum provides a collaborative environment in which civilian and common-law scholars can address theoretical issues of fundamental concern to all contemporary legal systems.

The idea of “inalienability” is normally thought of as providing the strongest level of protection that a right (and hence its right‑holder) can possibly enjoy. Whereas an “ordinary” fundamental right is supposed to be protected first of all against the State (“vertical” protection), and secondly also against other private citizens and entities in general (“horizontal” protection), some rights are supposed to be so important that they are protected, it seems, even against the choices and decisions of the very right‑holder. While the idea of an inalienable right is well known in legal, moral, and political philosophy, it is not entirely clear what it means for a right to be inalienable — and whether an inalienable right is really a right after all. By using a Hohfeldian conceptual framework, this essay tries to provide an analytical inquiry into the concept of an inalienable right, and to explore under what conditions it is conceptually possible to talk of inalienable rights.

Many theorists aim to argue for certain moral or human rights on the basis that they protect something of great value or a weighty interest. What I argue here is that this type of argument cannot justify the kind of right that its proponents often envisage, ie, a human right with a certain peremptory force. More specifically, I argue that, on this view, rights are not deontic relations between two parties that hold regardless of the circumstances; they are best seen as goals to be aimed at, which may or may not give rise to specified duties on others. Moreover, rights, on this view, cannot have the degree of peremptoriness required to distinguish them from mere reasons for action; cashing them out as exclusionary reasons may offer a distinctive account but it should be noted first, that this is at odds with the picture of rights as goals and second, with their grounding in (prudential) value. Given these implications of the argument, it becomes unclear why one might want to invoke rights in the first place rather than simply argue for the protection of interests.

In “Legal Reasons, Sources and Gaps”, Joseph Raz points out that statements of reasons – mainly, conclusive legal reasons – are the most basic category of legal analysis. The conceptual importance of statements of legal reason implies that legal philosophers must use them to explain other legal concepts. In this sense, Raz claims that conclusive reason is a useful analytical tool for dealing with a classic problem of legal philosophy: gaps in the law. Raz defends a particular form of indeterminacy of law, which are ordinary gaps produced by the imprecision of the concepts used in the formulation of legal norms (when the law speaks with an uncertain voice) or by specific conflicting legal reasons (when the law speaks with many voices). In such cases, judges have discretion to resolve legal disputes. However, he denies that the law can have genuine gaps (when the law is silent) and, in those cases, judges lack discretion. In this paper, I criticise Raz’s arguments for denying the existence of genuine gaps in the law and suggest an alternative which partially preserves Raz’s intuitions but does not compromise with their implausible consequences.

Unlike rights in personam, which are held against a limited number of people (paradigmatically, one), rights in rem are held against everyone else in the world. Among other things, “everyone” denotes a dynamic collection of persons. However, in Wesley Hohfeld’s analysis of rights, every right is a relation between exactly two people. For Hohfeld, a right in rem must therefore be analysed as an aggregate of rights, where each relation in the aggregate features the right-holder at one pole and one other person in the world at the other. Even for aficionados, this is one of the oddest aspects of Hohfeld’s account — which he crowns with a curious label to boot, “multital” right — and critics have had a field day with it. For example, Penner (2020) criticises Hohfeld’s multital analysis on the grounds that its information costs are too high. In this paper, I show how Hohfeld’s treatment of rights in rem can be amended to avoid Penner’s critique.

Assuming that the vocabulary of the so-called “legal positions” is, under certain circumstances, interchangeable with the normative vocabulary, this work reformulates the question of whether legal positions exist as the question of whether they are ontologically reducible to (dismissible and replaceable by) legal norms. Since there is no doubt that the so-called “legal positions” are part and parcel of the reality that is assumed as existent in specialized legal discourses, the question raised by this work is situated at the level of meta-legal theory. In Parts II and III two different answers to this question are reconstructed: the affirmative answer that seems to be dominant in legal theory, and the negative answer elaborated by Ross. In Part IV both answers previously reconstructed are translated into the language of reduction, where the question of whether legal positions exist is reformulated again, this time as the question of whether legal theory must consider them to exist or not. Building on the distinction between different types of reduction, the ultimate goal is to distil, refine or shape the dominant discourse of legal theory according to which legal positions must be accepted as existent.