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Street Space and Taxis During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The taxi or black cab has from time immemorial has been part of the London transport scene. They are permitted to use all available road space, including bus lanes. The current pandemic has motivated the Mayor of London and Transport for London (TfL) to create a policy resulting in traffic plan and traffic orders limiting the amount of road space available for vehicles. The result of these orders has been to restrict taxis from using road space (including bus lanes) in two areas of central London that were previously available to them.

Malta: how the rule of law has been challenged by murder and corruption allegations

April 13, 2021 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

John Stanton

When 11 people face court in Valletta, Malta, in coming weeks, the rule of law on the Mediterranean island will also be on trial. The defendants, who are facing charges relating to allegations of corrupt dealings, include Keith Schembri, the former chief of staff to the ex-prime minister, Joseph Muscat. Schembri was arrested and detained on March 20 on charges of corruption, money-laundering and “engaging in lucrative underhand business dealings”, according to press reports. His fellow defendants include various prominent business figures.

Lessons from the Satan Shoes Legal Fight: Balancing Trademark Protection and Free Speech

April 11, 2021 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

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.

UK Accession to the CPTPP: Setting a Precedent for New Members?

March 22, 2021 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

David Collins

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.

Work in progress: The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement as a “platform” for shaping future trade relationships

March 15, 2021 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

Giulio Kowalski

After four years of turbulent discussions and 1,400 pages of complex provisions, the EU and the UK (the “Parties”) signed the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) on 24 December 2020. Now that the much-feared risk of a no-deal Brexit seems to have been avoided, it could be high time to start digging into the details of the TCA and critically assess whether it is an effective and all-encompassing regulation or just a “platform” created in view of future negotiations and developments in the EU/UK (trading) relationships.

Post-Brexit UK-EU Parliamentary Cooperation: Whose representation?

March 9, 2021 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

Isabella Mancini

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 EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) as a building block of an ever-evolving relationship

February 5, 2021 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

Eva Pander Maat

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.

Justice and Profit in Health Care Law: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and United Kingdom

February 2, 2021 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

Sabrina Germain

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?

Private ordering in the history of English marine insurance

January 20, 2021 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

Jeffrey Thomson

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.

Networked technologies in the car industry, standard essential patents and refusal to license: the CJEU will soon shed light in Nokia v Daimler

December 18, 2020 / City Law Forum / 0 Comments

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.