Since the enactment of Criminal Justice Act 2003, Sched. 21, the average minimum term for murder in England and Wales has risen by more than 60 per cent. Very lengthy determinate terms are now the norm, subject only, in effect, to the Secretary of State’s discretion to release on compassionate grounds. This article asks whether there should be a mechanism for revisiting such terms, and, if so, on what principles. Although Hutchinson v United Kingdom holds lengthy minimum terms compatible with European Convention on Human Rights, art. 3, it is argued that the principles animating the court’s jurisprudence – shifting penological justifications, the centrality of rehabilitation across Europe and legal clarity – sit uneasily with domestic law. Taking Canada’s former “faint hope” clause as an institutional model, the article imagines a judicial mechanism for late tariff review, separate from parole and calibrated to the gravity of murder.

Comparative trust scholarship has long recognised that ‘ownership’ is an unstable comparator across civilian and common law systems, yet it has not supplied an affirmative replacement independent of any one tradition’s doctrinal vocabulary. This article proposes a three-axis framework — control, administration and benefit — as an alternative unit of comparison. The axes distinguish functional capacities without first deciding who holds ownership or title. The legal vesting of title is then considered separately as part of each system’s doctrinal implementation of that allocation. The framework is applied to the civilian bewind in its South African, Dutch and Belgian forms, to the Quebec and French fiducies and to the common law trust. The bewind is used not as an analogy or a normative model, but as a diagnostic contrast: its allocation of control and administration to the administrator, while locating benefit with the beneficiary, exposes the different combination of legal title, control and administration in the common law trustee. On this account, the trustee’s indemnity-backed lien, priority disputes and related insolvency and third-party liability problems are reconstituted as consequences of a structural allocation rather than as isolated doctrinal anomalies. The article situates structural contrast within the functional tradition and alongside the formants and transplant approaches. Its claim is methodological rather than reformist: structural allocation, not ownership, is the proper unit of comparison.

Legal comparatists have attempted to conceptually grasp the traveling of laws since the field’s institutional inception. Tellingly, one finds ubiquitously undergirding such intellectual efforts—and the resistance thereto—a range of what Hans Blumenberg has once dubbed as “background metaphors,” such as: transplants, grafting, cross-fertilization, migration, translation, reception, transfer, among others. There is not a single investigation on the subject matter pursued under the auspices of metaphorology. This contribution addresses this gap. Harkening back to Blumenberg’s proposal, whose fundamental appreciation underscores the fact that metaphors carry a history in a more radical sense than concepts, but also harvesting from the embrace and revisitation of Blumenberg’s claims by the literature on cultural techniques, this argument focuses on the metaphor of traveling laws. As it explores how the curve of this metaphor’s history provides us with key insights into the radical multiplicity of laws and their movement, it grounds this excavatory enterprise in a concrete undertaking: the pursuit of a case study concerning the traveling of environmental laws between Brazil and Germany.

This article examines the justiciability of climate litigation invoking the Paris Agreement before domestic courts from a comparative law perspective. Although conceived as an instrument of intergovernmental cooperation, the Paris Agreement is increasingly relied upon by claimants — notably, on the grounds that alleged governmental inaction or insufficient climate policies result in human rights violations. The article documents indirect barriers to invoking this treaty, primarily stemming from constitutional rules that limit judicial competence over issues perceived as political. It further analyzes how courts, by adjusting the intensity of their review, condition their intervention on the existence of clear legal standards and the nature of the contested acts.

We stand at a curious moment in the history of law and technology. Nations around the world are scrambling to regulate or deregulate artificial intelligence, each convinced they are in a “race”—for dominance, for values, for the future itself. Brussels votes on comprehensive AI Acts. Beijing issues the world’s first copyright ruling on AI-generated content. Washington debates whether chatbots should have First Amendment rights. The underlying premise of this volume is that this framing as a zero-sum competition fundamentally misunderstands both the nature of AI and the task before us. The truth is more sobering and more hopeful: We are not racing against each other but experimenting together, trying to govern technologies that respect neither borders nor traditional legal categories. The real question is not who will “win” the AI race, but how we can learn from each other’s experiments fast enough to keep pace with systems that evolve by the microsecond. This Special Issue of the German Law Journal brings together fifteen contributions that demonstrate why comparative law has never been more essential—or more challenging. The authors span continents and legal traditions, from Beijing to Brussels, from Silicon Valley to Sydney.

This article examines the new provisions on contract interpretation and characterisation in Book 5 of the Belgian Civil Code, which entered into force on 1 January 2023. The reform preserves Belgium’s traditional subjective approach to interpretation, prioritising the parties’ common intention over literal textual meaning, contrasting with the objective or mixed approaches adopted by French law and international instruments. Regarding characterisation, Belgium introduces innovative provisions explicitly addressing contract classification and mixed contracts, filling gaps left by other legal systems. These aspects of the Belgian reform are put intto perspective with comparative observations drawn mostly from French, German, and Dutch law.

This article concerns the ‘rule in Gibbs’: a controversial principle of English private international law which provides that a debt is only discharged in a foreign insolvency proceeding if the contract is governed by the law of that proceeding. Critics of the rule consider that it undermines the foundation of corporate insolvency as a unitary process in which individual collection efforts are replaced by a collective proceeding for all creditors. This article offers a qualified defence of the rule. It suggests that it could be abandoned in ‘true’ insolvency cases, in which the company’s assets are sold to a third party and the proceeds distributed to its creditors, but only if the rule is replaced with a cross-border insolvency law framework. It also suggests, however, that Gibbs is the ‘right’ rule in a cross-border corporate restructuring, in which only some of the company’s creditors stay with the firm to benefit from any future upside that the third party would otherwise capture in a sale. It argues that European Union private international law adopts this approach to a restructuring and that the Gibbs rule is, therefore, not nearly as exceptional as it is sometimes made out to be.

This article compares the 20 canons promulgated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 with the canons of the Church of England today. The author identifies a degree of consistency between the two sets of canons, especially when it comes to their treatment of diocesan episcopacy, synodality, metropolitical authority, primatial honour, and supra-metropolitical authority.