Enrico Bonadio and Magali Contardi
The legal battle between Nike and conceptual art collective MSCHF around their infamous Satan Shoes has been finally settled. After the recent decision of a New York judge ordering to temporarily halt the sales of the shoes, MSCHF has agreed to recall the shoes from the market to end the dispute.
The Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is a comprehensive free trade agreement which went into force in December 2018. Its membership consists of 11 Pacific Rim countries: Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia and Peru, together comprising roughly 13 per cent of the world’s GDP. Despite having no geographical presence in the Pacific (unless you include the British Overseas Territory the Pitcairn Islands), the UK submitted formal notice to join the CPTPP in February 2021, a centrepiece of its ‘Global Britain’ trade strategy.
The deal between the UK and the EU has not put an end to their talks. As negotiations will continue on a number of fronts, UK-EU parliamentary cooperation will be essential to ensure that citizens’ interests are taken into account. The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) sets out that the European Parliament and the UK Parliament may establish a Parliamentary Partnership Assembly (PPA) that would provide a forum for exchanges of views. It is still unclear whether and when a PPA will be created. As the TCA suggests, its establishment appears to be voluntary and at the discretion of the legislatures from both sides. So far, the parliamentary dimension within the overarching governance of the TCA has remained at an embryonic stage, leaving many questions unanswered. Yet the PPA would not be the only channel for parliamentary cooperation and other formats could develop.
The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), concluded on Christmas Eve 2020 between the EU and the UK, is a unique trade agreement in that its objective is divergence, instead of convergence. It represents the culmination, but by no means the end of four years of Brexit turmoil. To what extent such turmoil will continue to dominate EU-UK relations will partly depend on the extent to which Parties use the TCA as a floor or a ceiling.
To help comprehend the 1,400 page Agreement, five experts provided their guidance to the TCA in the Webinar ‘The UK & the EU Relationship: What Next?’ on January 27, 2021. This event was the first in a promising cooperation between the Jean Monnet Chair in EU Law, City, University of London and the Senior European Experts Group (SEE). The event was moderated by Sir Alan Dashwood, barrister and Professor Emeritus of European Law at University of Cambridge and Professor Emeritus of Law at City, University of London. This blog post revisits key points raised during the Webinar and summarizes its conclusions. Drawing on the expertise and experience of the experts, the blog post discusses five different aspects of the TCA: respectively, the legal aspects, trade and internal market regulation, agriculture and fisheries, the EU perspective and the political dimension.
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided us with yet another example of the moral significance of health care resources in our societies. The indisputable seriousness of health care needs makes the distribution of health care resources stand out from any other good and mandates that it follows principles of justice. Unfortunately, even before the public health crisis generated by the spread of COVID-19, available resources were already out of sync with modern societies’ needs. Even though political philosophers had developed multiple models to justly allocate scarce resources, problems of availability and access to care remained major challenges. One may ask whether it was a mismatch between the theory and the practice of law making that was responsible for failing health care systems; or was it that ideas of justice did not informed the decisions of actors involved in the crafting of health care laws?
In the recently published Research Handbook on International Commercial Contracts (Andrew Hutchison and Franziska Myburgh (eds), Edward Elgar 2020), my chapter makes an immodest attempt to sketch a concise history of the law of marine and commercial insurance contracts in England, from its earliest days in the fifteenth century to the legislative reforms of the twenty-first.
Enrico Bonadio (City, University of London) – Luke McDonagh (London School of Economics)
Thanks to cutting-edge digital technology, cars are increasingly like “smartphones on wheels”. Therefore, manufacturers’ access to the latest 4G and 5G technologies is essential to navigation and communications. Notably however, such technologies are often protected by patents. These so-called standard essential patents (SEPs) frequently raise serious competition issues. In particular, we have witnessed an explosion in disputes over the appropriate remuneration to be paid to SEP-holders by those wishing to implement the patented technology in their products.
The UK signed two more free trade agreements (FTAs) this past week, adding to the already impressive total of 57 and nearly £200 billion worth of trade that many sceptics had felt would be impossible once outside the EU’s protective sphere. By making further ground in Asia (after the success with Japan) the UK is in a strong position to help establish global rules in the vitally important sphere of digital trade, now one of the focal points of economic activity in many sectors.
‘Sustainable finance’ and ‘green finance’ are terms used, often interchangeably, to cover a plethora of financial products aimed at supporting green and sustainable projects and activities. The dominant focus of green finance over the last two decades has been the mobilisation of funds for clean energy and low-emission land transportation, yet the Covid-19 pandemic is steering the focus away from environmental issues to the social and economic pillars of the sustainable development triage. Momentum for ‘sustainable finance’, covering a much wider range of environmental and social governance (ESG) factors, has been propelled in 2020 in what has been described a ‘watershed’ year for ESG investing. This is largely due to the rise of ‘woke’ millennial investors coupled with steady returns on ESG investments which are holding up strongly during the pandemic. The European Union has also been paying attention to the growing surge in ESG investments and has aligned climate change objectives with its post-pandemic recovery plan. The European Union is set to sell 225 billion euros of green bonds as part of its pandemic recovery fund, whilst its 100 billion euros SURE unemployment scheme is set to be fully funded by social bonds. However, sustainable finance is not without its own set of criticisms. From a legal perspective, sustainable or green finance presents both regulatory issues and resultant challenges for private law implementation and enforcement.
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