We have, this year, again enjoyed casting light on a vast range of comparative law research and materials. We had, less than a month ago, a full room for our Annual Seminar in person at Oxford Brookes, following our last in-person gathering in … October 2019(!). We hope to return to making our Annual Seminar an important in-person event for the BACL community, alongside our thriving online seminars and blog publications – on which, more below. We would like to thank our reps for their enthusiasm and commitment to promote Comparative law; we look forward to seeing more of you more often next year, whether online or in person!

Dr Sirko Harder, Professor Yseult Marique, Professor Claudina Richards, and Dr Sophie Turenne (BACL Committee)

WELCOME

We say goodbye to Professeur Claudina Richards in her capacity of Secretary. We will miss Claudina’s lucidity, good humour and extraordinary knowledge of BACL. We warmly welcome Dr Mary Guy as as her successor! Mary in a Senior Lecturer in EU and Public Law at LJMU, and Co-Convenor of the EU Health Governance research network. She has research interests in comparative law and policy, especially in the healthcare context, as well as EU law and health law. Her first monograph took a comparative approach to competition reforms in Dutch and English healthcare, and she is currently leading a project comparing public/private healthcare interaction across the countries of the UK.

We welcome Bo Wang who became the new rep for University of Sheffield, Eghosa Ekhator at Derby, and Koldo Casla at Essex. In addition, Solene Rowan has become one of the reps for KCL.

NEWS FROM THE INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF COMPARATIVE LAW

The next General Congress will take place in Berlin in 2026. It is not often that the IACL General Congress takes place in Europe and we strongly encourage our reps to apply to act as ‘rapporteur général’ or ‘rapporteur national’! We will circulate any updates that we receive.

ACTIVITIES 2022-23

Annual Seminar 2022

The 2022 Annual Seminar was dedicated to ‘Comparative Torts – Liability for AI’. It took place online on 6 September 2022, before the opening of the Society of Legal Scholars’ Conference at King’s College London.

Chair: Professor TT Arvind (York University)

Speakers:

Professor Bernhard Koch (University of Innsbruck)
Professor Ugo Pagallo (University of Turin)
Professor Simon Chesterman (University of Singapore)

The summary of the discussions is available here and the seminar video recording is available here.

Annual Seminar 2023

We had, unusually, two Annual Seminars in the same academic year, following the two Society of Legal Scholars’ Annual Conferences. The 2023 Annual Seminar was dedicated to ‘Constitutional Legacies and Emancipation in a Comparative Perspective’, and took place in person on 27 June 2023, before the opening of the Society of Legal Scholars’ Conference at Oxford Brookes University.

Chair: Dr Sophie Turenne (Cambridge University)

Speakers:

Dr Derek O’Brien (Oxford Brookes University) ‘The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Constitutional Interpretation and Same Sex Marriage’
Dr Anashri Pillay (Durham University) ‘The paradoxes of transformative constitutionalism: examining the role of international human rights in shaping SOGI and social rights protection in South Africa’
Professor Martin Lodge (LSE) and Lindsay Stirton (Sussex University)’Colonial law, repression and emancipation’

We are grateful to Francesca Ramadan, new Intersentia publisher, for sponsoring the Seminar.

PhD workshop

“ I had a fabulous time presenting my #PhD work at this year BACL PGR.”

PhD Student Workshop 2023

We are much indebted to Professor Jackie Hodgson and Dr Daniel Matthews, from Warwick University, for the outstanding organization and generous hosting of our first in-person PhD Workshop since 2019, following two online PhD Workshops in 2021 and 2022. The Workshop took place on 2-3 May 2023 at Warwick University, and Dr Alex Schwartz (Glasgow University) gave us the honour of a keynote speech on ‘Comparison in Empirical and Computational Legal Studies’

The workshop was very well attended, with parallel sessions to accommodate talks on a wide range of comparative law topics. German law in particular was the subject of various comparisons, whether to suggest reform of US liability for negligent healthcare clinical risk management (Mindy Nunez Duffourc), as a point of reference for Polish inheritance law (Krzysztof Grzegorczyk), or as a source of ideas for cryptomining in English law (Hannah Deters). Factors influencing the circulation of ideas and their reception were discussed, including in relation to transplanting English marine insurance law in China (Jia Wang), and in presenting lessons from the UK when regulating experimental equity to finance markets for SMEs in China (Panpan Sun). Also within private law, a conceptualisation of ‘abstract damages’ was proposed as a remedy for the infringement of legal rights in German law (Jonathan Friedrichs), and the boundaries of Italian compensation on Mesne profits were analysed (Riccardo Serafin).

“It was a true honor to present my research at this year’s @BritAssoCompLaw Postgraduate Research Workshop ! Many thanks to @Warwick_law for hosting such a great conference and for the stimulating discussions”

PhD Student Workshop 2023

Legal reasoning, the construction of the legal discourse and the symbolism of court architecture were also considered, in relation to the construction of Supreme Court judgments in India (Shivangi Gangwar), through a comparative meta-doctrinal study of legal analytics technologies (Camille Bordere); and with a comparison of the rhetorical ensemble and the construction history of the US Supreme Court of Justice’s and the German Federal Constitutional Court’s seats of power (Ricardo Spindola Diniz).

Comparisons under the umbrella of European Union law and European Human Rights law were made on topics such as the implementation of the EU Blocking Regulation in the EU and the UK (Khashayar Biria); the positive obligation of the state under Article 8 ECHR in the context of private debt collection in Belgium, Sweden and the UK (Heleen Goubert). Presentations also included a proposal towards a comparative understanding of human rights in the 21^st century (Mohammed Alam), and a comparative study of the EU and US regimes on intersectional discrimination by clinical algorithms (Malwina A. Wójcik).

Finally, the interactions between comparative law, conflict of laws and international law featured in a number of presentations. These included discussions on comparative methodologies in the adoption of conventions on Hague Conference on private international law in the case of Vietnam (Le Xuan Tung); on the conceptualisation of the requirements for granting interim measures in international commercial arbitration (Daria Efimova); and a discussion on compensatory remedies for torture victims under civil actions in Nigeria, India and South Africa (Christian Ezeigwe). Regional comparisons extended to the use of social media as a tool for reforming laws discriminating against women in Morocco and Tunisia (Oumaima Derfoufi).

Publishing in Comparative Law: Q&A with the ICLQ

BACL held a Q&A session on 11 May 2023 on how to publish comparative research in the ICLQ, with Professor Paula Giliker (ICLQ editorial board member) and Anna Riddel (ICLQ managing editor) kindly presenting and answering questions.

We are grateful for their enthusiasm and the many tips and insights they have provided into the submission and publication process with the ICLQ.

The seminar recording is available here.

Online book discussion

On 16 March 2023, in collaboration with the Essex Constitutional and Administrative Justice Initiative, BACL organised a discussion of the book Contemporary Administrative Law by John Bell and François Lichère (CUP 2022 – available in open access by clicking here). The speakers were invited to consider to which extent a Europeanisation of French administrative law had happened.

Speakers were: Professor John Bell (UK – Cambridge), Professor François Lichère (FR – Lyon 3), Professor Giacinto della Cananea (IT – Bocconi), Professor Peter Lindseth (USA – Connecticut University), Professor Anne Jacquemet-Gauché (FR – Clermont-Auvergne), Professor Rob Widdershoven (NL – Utrecht), Professor Karl-Peter Sommermann (DE – Speyer), all experts in comparative and/or European administrative law.

Their written contributions are available by clicking here.

Blog posts

The blog received more than 40 contributions this year on a wide range of topics. Notable blog posts include contributions to our series on Interwar Dialogue (click here for accessing the 10 pieces and the conclusions).

Various other posts received attention from our readers, such as Marco Cappelletti’s Justifying Strict Liability: A Comparative Perspective; Johannes Ungerer’s A Bidirectional Anglo-German Comparison of Consideration in Contract Law; Matt Dyson’s Explaining Tort and Crime; Ernesto Vargas Weil’s Comparative Law & Economics: The Map is Not the Territory; Paula Giliker’s Vicarious Liability in the Common Law World; Stefan Vogenauer’s Mapping out the contract laws of Asia

WATCH THIS SPACE!

Reforming the law of obligations in Europe: comparative perspectives

This workshop will take place on 27 June 2024 at King’s College London – more information to follow.

2024 Annual Seminar

The 2024 Annual Seminar will take place on 3 September 2024 in the morning at Bristol University, before the opening of the Society of Legal Scholars Conference there on 3-5 September. More information to follow in December 2023.

2024 PhD workshop in Oxford

The 2024 PhD Workshop will take place at the University of Oxford, and we are grateful to Professor Matt Dyson for hosting it on behalf of the Institute of European and Comparative Law. More information will follow in early 2024.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Our Next Annual Meeting is scheduled in December 2023 (date to follow).

BACL also welcomes expressions of interests from reps to organise the PhD Workshop in 2026 and onwards.

As ever, any suggestions to contribute a blog post or a blog series are gratefully received. Please email your suggestions to Dr Sirko Harder (S.Harder[@]sussex.ac.uk).

In particular consider submitting a piece for our Interwar Dialogue (more information on the call is available here). Do not hesitate to contact the series editors, Yseult Marique (ymarique@essex.ac.uk) and Radosveta Vassileva (r.vassileva@mdx.ac.uk).

BACL committee is calling for any colleague who may have memories about activities (meetings, Annual Seminar, PG workshop), publications and/or membership of BACL since its inception (under its current name or its former one – the UK National Committee for Comparative Law). If you have fond memories, stories, and/or picture, we would love to hear from you! Please do contact Dr Sophie Turenne (st325[@]cam.ac.uk).

Please do consider following the blog by clicking here. You will then be able to follow all our events and will receive approximatively one email per week during term time about comparative law developments among a wide range of areas of the law. An excellent way to provide comparative law illustrations for any modules you might be teaching!

ENJOY THE SUMMER BREAK

Warwick 2023 – BACL PGR workshop