Amicus Curiae

Consumer Protection in Transition

Ling Zhou — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores consumer protection issues in today’s China, focusing on the evolving regulatory framework for safeguarding consumer rights. It emphasizes the 2024 Implementing Regulations for the Consumer Protection Law and highlights China’s changing consumer welfare framework in its transition from a planned economy to a consumer-centric market economy, with rising rights awareness and the growth of e-commerce. Despite the 2013 amendments to the law, various challenges have persisted, including false advertising affecting elderly people, online gaming risks for youth, and strategic claims by so-called “professional consumers”. Other problems include price discrimination enabled by big data, excessive data collection, live-stream commerce, and uneven enforcement. The 2024 Implementing Regulations introduce clearer enforcement mechanisms, enhanced digital protections, stricter limits on professional consumers, and improved dispute resolution. The article evaluates these reforms in protecting consumers and regulating businesses, while reflecting on the continued importance of state control and the influence of socialist values.

Keywords: consumer protection; implementing regulations; professional consumers.

Addressing the Legal Challenges of Unregulated Surrogacy in Ghana

Justice Sir Dennis Adjei, Samuel Addo Otoo — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the legal and ethical issues posed by unregulated surrogacy in Ghana. Surrogacy is an arrangement where a woman (the surrogate) carries and delivers a child for an intended parent or parents. The egg and sperm used may originate from the intended parent(s), or may be obtained by donation or purchase. The article highlights the potential legal and ethical complications arising from the absence of comprehensive legislation governing such arrangements. The core problem is the lack of legal frameworks to address parentage, rights, and responsibilities in scenarios involving donated gametes and surrogate motherhood. This deficiency leaves children, intended parents, and surrogates vulnerable to disputes, exploitation, and legal ambiguity.

The article explores the complexities of surrogacy, including instances where intended parents utilize donated eggs or sperm, or where same-sex couples seek parenthood. It emphasizes the risk of parental repudiation due to a lack of biological connection, a scenario with severe consequences for the child’s wellbeing. By comparing surrogacy regulations in other jurisdictions, the study underscores the urgent need for Ghana to enact specific laws. Key findings reveal that Ghana’s current legal framework only addresses birth certificate modifications through High Court orders, leaving broader surrogacy issues unaddressed. The article concludes that the absence of dedicated legislation creates a legal vacuum, necessitating the immediate development and implementation of comprehensive surrogacy laws to protect all parties involved.

Keywords: surrogacy regulation; assisted reproductive technology; Ghana; reproductive tourism; the Casablanca Declaration; commodification of children; Ghanaian law.

Partnerships and Trusts as Legal Persons … What about the Tax?

Chris Thorpe — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An English partnership, for tax purposes, is transparent, meaning that the partners are subject to tax on the income and capital profits; however, in many respects a partnership is an express trust—which is not transparent for tax purposes. There has already been some consideration from a legal perspective as to the personality of a partnership and for the potential tax status of a limited liability partnership, but how does this tie into the tax treatment of trusts if the two structures are so similar? The Law Commission and Scottish Law Commission joint report of 2003 recommended that partnerships be treated as a “sui generis”—a unique legal person in law—to reflect commercial reality and encourage continuity, but not to become a body corporate. It also suggested that limited partnerships might have the option to avoid legal personalities. A trust is arguably a sui generis legal person as well as an “opaque” entity for tax purposes, so if the Law Commissions’ recommendation could ever be carried out to bring trusts and partnerships into line from a legal and commercial perspective, could the tax treatment not be brought into line too?

Keywords: partnership; trusts; sui generis; personality; beneficial ownership.

Asian Parties and the Property (Relationships) Act 1976

Mai Chen, Alice Strang — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article analyses the unique challenges and issues Asian parties experience under the Property (Relationships) Act 1976 (PRA) in New Zealand. Drawing on demographic data, case law, and interviews with expert and experienced practitioners in property relationship issues, the article highlights how cultural practices, language barriers, and differing understandings of legal norms complicate relationship property disputes in court. Issues include the treatment of family transfers—whether a transfer is a gift or a loan, interpretation and translation of evidence, discovery and disclosure, limited documentation and lack of expert cultural and language evidence. The analysis emphasizes the need for cultural competence within the Family Court, when cultural issues may be relevant to adjudicative issues, and recommends changes to ensure equal access to justice as the PRA enters its 50th year.

Keywords: Property (Relationships) Act; Asian parties; filial piety; cultural competence; family transfers; loans; gifts; language barriers; access to justice; superdiversity; contracting-out and compromise agreements; interpretation and translation; intergenerational support.

Is Shareholder Profit Maximization Efficient? Improving the Societal Efficiency of Corporations

Say H Goo — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article fundamentally challenges the dominant corporate social responsibility (CSR) paradigm by arguing that structural governance reform (stakeholder boards) is necessary because voluntary CSR, disclosure requirements, and external regulation cannot adequately internalize externalities when boards are legally bound to prioritize shareholder interests. It fundamentally reframes CSR from a voluntary ethical choice or matter of “enlightened” management discretion to a structural governance problem. It challenges the dominant assumption that shareholder profit maximization maximizes societal efficiency. It demonstrates formally that when externalities can be externalized, shareholder profit (M) diverges from societal efficiency (E), sometimes dramatically. Current corporate law compounds this problem by legally obligating directors to pursue the misleading profit figure rather than genuine social value. The proposed solution offered is that stakeholder board representation offers a more direct and potentially more efficient mechanism for internalizing costs than relying on external regulation alone. Voluntary environment, social and governance reporting, stakeholder consultation, and investor pressure all fail because they leave intact the fundamental board structure that creates incentives to externalize. Stakeholder representation addresses the root cause.

Keywords: stakeholder board; shareholder profit maximization; societal efficiency; corporate social responsibility; stakeholderism.

The Jurisprudence of the Threshold

Michael Murphy — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article advances Relational Legal Pluralism (RLP), arguing that the foundational crisis in contemporary jurisprudence stems from a temporal-ontological bias, the “temporal cage”, which prioritizes what law is over the urgent ethical demand of what law does. This fixation renders conventional law conceptually mute and actively complicit in a mobile mode of governance: the Jurisprudence of Foreclosure, that operates by producing spatial abandonment and legitimized harm. This failure is sustained by Relational Hegemony, a power that structurally enforces institutional deafness and shatters “knowledge parity” by retreating into “closed epistemic resources”.

RLP offers a spatial-ethical inversion, grounding law’s genesis not in sovereign decree, but in the accusative demand: the juris-generative “wound” that emerges from relational harm. Drawing on Watsuji Tetsurō’s conceptual triad, fūdō, aidagara, and kū (emptiness as reflexive negation), RLP translates this ethical demand into a methodology, “Law in the Accusative,” designed to diagnose injustice and articulate a symmetrical counter-praxis: Relational Repair.

Relational Repair is a contested political project that insists on cultivating institutional “receptivity” and procedural rigour (Reason Test), while the philosophy of kū functions as the critical safeguard, perpetually opening the framework to the decolonial politics of refusal. Positioned as a “jurisprudence of the threshold”, RLP does not seek to resolve law’s fractures, but to transform jurisprudence into a global method for the creative, ongoing practice of mending our wounded relations.

Keywords: Relational Legal Pluralism (RLP); jurisprudence of foreclosure; relational hegemony; abyssal thinking; temporal cage; Relational Repair.

Full issue

Amy Kellam — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

News and Events

Eliza Boudier — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Editorial

Rob Wilks — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Untapped Potential? Incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Sign Language Justice

Bronagh Byrne — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the extent to which making the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (2006) part of domestic law, that is, incorporation, can act as a supportive mechanism in the pursuit of sign language justice. Despite parallel developments in incorporation of human rights treaties and sign language recognition, these legal processes have largely been explored in isolation of each other. Using Northern Ireland as a case study, the article argues that making the CRPD part of domestic law, in some form, provides a strategic vehicle to hold states parties to account in their actions around sign language rights.

Keywords: sign language recognition; UNCRPD; incorporation; language justice; rights.

Easier Said than Done

Joni Oyserman — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since its legal recognition in 2021, the implementation of Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Dutch Sign Language, NGT) in administrative and legal contexts has been monitored, particularly regarding sign language interpreters in criminal proceedings. Despite the legal entitlement for their use, these interpreters are often not employed in practice. Based on a report funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, this article investigates the implementation of the Wet Erkenning Nederlandse Gebarentaal (the NGT Recognition Act) by way of a literature review, personal correspondence and semi-structured interviews conducted in 2023. Findings reveal a gap between legal provisions and actual practice, attributed to a lack of awareness of Deaf culture, interpreter positioning, legislative omissions, and the insufficient participation of deaf individuals. Recommendations for legislative and policy improvements are provided.

Keywords: sign language; deaf; empirical; socio-legal; doctrine; interpreters.

Direito Linguístico (Linguistic Law) and the Regulation of Libras

Hanna Beer — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines how Brazilian federal law regulates Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) through the articulation of linguistic rights and duties linked to fundamental rights. Grounded in Direito Linguístico (Linguistic Law), it maps federal legislation enacted after the legal recognition of Libras in 2002, focusing on labour, political participation, and healthcare. The analysis shows that linguistic regulation is largely structured through accessibility norms and sector-specific legal instruments, alongside language-specific policy. While this framework establishes binding obligations, persistent failures derive not from normative insufficiency, but from institutional practices and prevailing conceptions of language and deafness that remain misaligned with Deaf communities’ claims to linguistic agency and self-determination.

Keywords: Linguistic Law; Brazilian Sign Language (Libras); linguistic rights and duties; linguistic regulation; Deaf rights.

Domestic Abuse, Deafness and the Problem of Legal Access in England and Wales

Abigail Gorman — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines Deaf survivors’ access to domestic abuse protection in England through a socio-legal analysis combining doctrinal frameworks (European Convention on Human Rights, Equality Act 2010, the Public Sector Equality Duty, and the Domestic Abuse Act 2021) with a national mapping of provision. It demonstrates how hearing-normative system design, interpreter-dependent access, and fragmented commissioning produce patterned and foreseeable exclusion, constituting institutional legal harm. By contrasting these systemic failures with Deaf-led, BSL-first services, the article shows that rights become exercisable when accessibility is embedded by design rather than delivered through reactive adjustment. It conceptualizes this recognition–realization gap as the Deaf Legal Illusion: formal recognition without reliable, substantive access in practice. The article concludes by identifying system-level reforms necessary to make equality exercisable and accountability enforceable.

Keywords: Deaf Legal Studies; domestic abuse; British Sign Language (BSL); Equality Act 2010; Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED); access to justice; institutional legal harm; socio-legal research; commissioning; interpreter-dependent systems.

Patrick Birkinshaw: 5 March 1951-23 November 2025

Yseult Marique — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Democracy’s Defender: The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law by Jonathan Sumption

Patrick Birkinshaw — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Language of Comparative Constitutional Law: Questioning Hegemonies edited by Erika Arban, Maartje De Visser and Jeong-In Yun

Mai Anh Nguyen — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Taiwan and the Cause of Democratisation in China: Inspiration and Support edited by Chen Jie

Jean-Pierre Cabestan — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Absolute

Gavin Keeney, Amy Kellam — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Editor's introduction

Amy kellam — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000