Completed projects

The Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling funds empirical policy research by Leon Y. Xiao looking into whether legal and industry self-regulatory measures intended to reduce the potential harms of gambling-like video game loot boxes have been effective. Leon found that many companies did not comply with the Belgian Gaming Commission’s ‘ban’ of loot boxes. This finding has been reported in popular media, including NME (New Musical Express) and GamesIndustry.biz. The Belgian Minister of Justice has accepted the results, and companies have reportedly consequently taken compliance action. The study was also referenced in the House of Lords by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to argue in favour of the current UK regulatory approach. A further study in China is underway. To conduct fieldwork, Leon visited the Belgian Gam(e)(a)ble project.

This Project, administered by Queen Mary University of London Centre for Commercial Law Studies, is funded by the ESRC under the Macro-Economic Finance Hub of 'Rebuilding Macroeconomics,' a large collaborative Project at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

The research group comprised of Principal Investigator Professor Rosa Lastra (Sir John Lubbock Chair in Banking Law, Queen Mary) and Co-Investigators Dr Jason Grant Allen (Senior Fellow, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society), Dr David Andolfatto (Senior Vice President, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank), Mr Simon Gleeson (Partner, Clifford Chance), Dr Michael Kumhof (Senior Research Advisor, Bank of England), and Professor Saule T. Omarova (Beth & Marc Goldberg Professor of Law, Cornell University).

A joint seminar with the IMF held on 3-4 December 2020 discusses the results of the project. The IMF Working Paper, “Legal Aspects of Central Bank Digital Currency: Central Bank and Monetary Law Considerations”, is the first publication that focuses on the central bank and monetary law aspects of CBDC. It concludes that most central bank laws will require amendments to authorize the issuance of CBDC and questions whether CBDC can be legally labelled as currency. The Working Paper, “Central Bank Money: Liability, Asset, or Equity of the Nation?”, challenges the conventional accounting and economic treatment of central bank money and concludes that it is not a liability of the central bank.

This project is concerned with the impact of technological changes on trade governance. Multilateral trade rules were originally designed to facilitate trade in goods in the 1940s and last updated to cover trade in services in the early 1990s.

New digital technologies are changing the means for trading, the content of trade and the traders themselves. Data localisation measures and internet access restrictions are replacing tariffs and quotas as the new barriers to trade. The aim of the project is to assess the extent to which current trade rules are suitable for securing an open and non-discriminatory, but also safe and trustworthy digital market.

A combination of desk research, qualitative interviews with relevant stakeholders and doctrinal analysis of relevant literature on trade governance, will be used to (a) identify policy measures affecting digital trade; (b) compare rules for digital trade included in recent Trade Agreements; and (c) find international rules and standards other than trade rules relevant for the governance of digital trade.

The project is led by Dr Gabriel Gari and will be undertaken with the support of the UK Department of International Trade, Queen Mary’s CASE partner for this project, giving the researcher access to a wealth of knowledge and practical experience on the negotiation of trade rules for the digital economy.

Dr Ruth Fletcher has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a project called ‘Ordering Time: periodic abortion law, gestational labour and reproductive justice’.

Ordering Time notices how time limits have come to play a key role in managing the terms on which reproductive labour may become free, and wonders what the time limits of abortion law could tell us about reproducing law otherwise.  Building on Fletcher’s existing work, the project asks what Ireland’s 2018 move to a periodic abortion law, with its 12 week time limit for abortion’s lawfulness and exceptional grounds-based access thereafter, has to contribute to knowledge of the gestational time limit as a global legal form that values reproductive labour in particular ways. Ordering Time aims to develop 1) critical analysis of time as a multi-dimensional category of reproductive justice, 2) witnessing with ‘time-utensils’ as a collection of methods for (re)working legal orders, and 3) an account of abortion law as a site of timely social reproduction.

Dr Camillia Kong is a Co-Investigator on the Voicing Loss: Meanings and implications of participation by bereaved people in inquests project that is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and explores bereaved family members' understandings, expectations and experiences of coroners' investigations and inquests, and the legal and policy framework within which coroners' courts operate. Close family of the deceased can attend an inquest as 'interested persons’ which grants them certain rights, including the right to question witnesses and to ask to see evidence in advance of the inquest hearing. However, existing research evidence suggests that, in practice, bereaved people have an uncertain and ambiguous role and status in the inquest, and receive highly variable treatment. This is despite an explicit policy commitment to place bereaved families 'at the heart of' the coronial process – described as the ‘main aim’ of the coronial reforms encompassed by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.

The interdisciplinary project utilises legal, empirical, and philosophical analyses to interrogate the apparent gap between policy goals and practical realities, particularly in relation to what it means for bereaved people to be 'at the heart of' inquest proceedings.  The Principal Investigator of the project is Professor Jessica Jacobson of the Institute for Crime & Policy Research (ICPR) of Birkbeck College. The project involves the expertise and partnership of other colleagues at ICPR as well as the Centre for Death & Society (CDAS) at the University of Bath.

Professor Duncan Matthews has been selected for £100,000 funding from the British Academy to support ground-breaking work on the role of intellectual property (IP) in COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing and supply. 

The project 'Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic for IP Licensing Practices in Vaccine Production' will draw lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic by analysing the role of IP licensing practices in the production and supply of COVID-19 vaccines, with a particular focus on patents, know-how, trade secrets and regulatory data.

By examining the impact of these practices on vaccine production and supply, the research aims to contribute positively to the ongoing policy debate about pandemic preparedness and response, both at the G7 and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Collaborators: Lilian Moncrieff (PI), Neil Georgeson, Bruce Ross.  

In the Company of Dada: Countering 'Business as Usual' in the Era of Climate Change is a law-arts collaboration. It goes looking for dada through the streets, galleries and law-giving sites of three cities in Europe (Zurich, Paris and Berlin) for the remnants of the unconventional art movement that arose in negative reaction to the first world war, over 100 years ago. We follow the collaborators as they look around the three cities for elusive hints at the lasting meaning of dada, after dada sought to counter (in prefigurative art, parody and performance) a dangerous conventionalism, which once again has the planet in its grip - another case of ‘business as usual’. Contractual aspirations are traced, constitutional manifestos read (out loud), and the meandering journeys of the sometimes exhausted (physically, spiritually) participants of dada are mapped and grafted onto sources, historical and contemporary, which unmask corporakratia (ie, the power of corporates and economic convention over the public good).

The collaboration will present a (multimedia) paper at the Law and Society Association annual meeting in Chicago in Spring 2025, and has plans for a performance.

Image: Jean Arp (artist)
Link to image on Digital Collections
Licence: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication ("CCO 1.0 Dedication")

In 2024-25 Eva Nanopoulos will be working on a new book project, A Decolonial Legal History of Sanctions, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. What are known as ‘economic sanctions’ are generally treated as coercive but ultimately ‘peaceful’ (i.e., non-violent) instruments by international law. As a result, sanctions are frequently deployed by states and other international actors during ‘peace-time’ to pursue a variety of objectives. Yet, the legal concept and practice of ‘peaceful sanctions’ is ridden with contradictions. Prior to the twentieth century, international law viewed sanctions as a violent form of warfare that is illegal outside active hostilities. Conceptually, they conflict with the dominant liberal ideology that only the free market and economic freedom can deliver peace. And in practice, many sanctions are cast in official legal and political discourse as instances of aggression or economic warfare. The project’s premise is that understanding the legal evolution and contemporary status of sanctions requires such contradictions to be taken seriously as symptoms of the entangled histories of international law, capitalism, and imperialism.

Against this background, the project will be the first a) to historicise and theorise the emergence ‘economic’ coercion as an independence source of violence that no longer relies exclusively on military force; b) to draw the connections between the history of sanctions under international law and the histories of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism; c) to understand the role of international law in enabling and legitimising new forms of non-armed imperial violence.

The project intends to examine whether the Jewish Chronicle and The Telegraph, which spearhead many unfounded antisemitism accusations (conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel) are discriminatory because they disproportionately target women of colour.