New ebooks purchased in March & April 2023

A selection of  law ebook titles were purchased in March and April, in association with the ebooks@cambridge team. These are all available through iDiscover, and include:

Family Life, Family Law, and Family Justice: Tying the Knot, by Marsha Garrison (Routledge, 2023) 

Family Life, Family Law, and Family Justice: Tying the Knot combines history, social science, and legal analysis to chart the evolution and interdependence of family life and family law, portray current trends in family life, explain the pressing policy challenges these trends have produced, and analyze the changes in family law that are essential to meeting these challenges.

Intellectual Property and Sports: Essays in Honour of P. Bernt Hugenholtz, edited by Martin Senftleben, Joost Poort, Mireille van Eechoud, Stef van Gompel, Natalie Helberger (Wolters Kluwer, 2021) 

Intellectual Property and Sports celebrates the enormous achievements of Professor Bernt Hugenholtz in the field of intellectual property and information law. Renowned intellectual property law expert Bernt Hugenholtz once warned, chiding the voracity of copyright, that reducing the subject matter test to mere originality and personal stamp might lead to ‘infinite expansion of the concept of the work of authorship. Anything touched by human hand, including for instance sports performances, would be deemed a work’. Focus on sports-related intellectual property issues offers an ideal starting point for exploring core questions on information law. Legal rules in sports and intellectual property evolve in a climate pervaded by powerful lobby pressures with new technologies that have a profound impact on developments in the sports arena. Indeed, the applicability of copyright law on sports events and players’ moves is one of the many topics discussed in this volume, which spans issues from those related to players and their performances and achievements, via those relevant to sports event organisers and clubs, to questions concerning event reporting and data and the growing role of AI technologies in sports.

Landmark Cases in Privacy Law, edited by Paul Wragg and Peter Coe (Hart Publishing, 2022) 

This new addition to Hart's acclaimed Landmark Cases series is a diverse and engaging edited collection bringing together eminent commentators from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, to analyse cases of enduring significance to privacy law. The book tackles the conceptual nature of privacy in its various guises, from data protection, to misuse of private information, and intrusion into seclusion. It explores the practical issues arising from questions about the threshold of actionability, the function of remedies, and the nature of damages.

The Legal Theory of Carl Schmitt, by Mariano Croce and Andrea Salvatore (Routledge, 2013)

The Legal Theory of Carl Schmitt provides a detailed analysis of Schmitt’s institutional theory of law, mainly developed in the books published between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. By reading Schmitt’s overall work through the lens of his institutional turn, the authors offer a strikingly different interpretation of Schmitt’s theory of politics, law and the relation between these two domains. The book argues that Schmitt’s adhesion to legal institutionalism was a key theoretical achievement, based on serious reconsideration of the main flaws of his own decisionist paradigm, in the light of the French and Italian institutional theories of law. In so doing, the authors elucidate how Schmitt was able to unravel many of the impasses that affected his previous conceptual framework. The authors also make comparisons between Schmitt and other leading legal theorists (H. Kelsen, M. Hauriou, S. Romano and C. Mortati) and explain why the current legal debate should take into serious account his legacy.

Research Handbook on Gender, Sexuality and the Law, edited by Chris Ashford and Alexander Maine (Edward Elgar, 2020)

This innovative and thought-provoking Research Handbook explores not only current debates in the area of gender, sexuality and the law but also points the way for future socio-legal research and scholarship. It presents wide-ranging insights and debates from across the globe, including Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Australia, with contributions from leading scholars and activists alongside exciting emergent voices.

Sustainable Property Law: Reckoning, Resilience and Reform, by Bram Akkermans (Eleven International Publishing, 2022)

The law of property provides the building blocks for our market economy and is a manifestation of our post French and American Revolution thinking on how we want to organise ourselves. That organisational structure has not always been fair or equal around the world. European property law systems have been exported around the globe, yet outside of Europe things have been possible, such as owning another person (slavery) or extracting wealth from land at all costs. This was unthinkable on the European continent. These differences have led to an increasingly unequal division of property between people, countries and even continents. Some can extract a lot of wealth and pollute the planet from their property, whilst others have nothing. An unsustainable use of the planet's resources where we live outside of our planetary boundaries is the result. This short book argues that this is not the way forward. Our law must be resilient in a transformative manner and European systems need to accept their role in how this has come to be. Based on that, we need to rethink how we can reform our law of property so that it allows us to live within our planetary boundaries.

All of these ebooks are available to current University of Cambridge staff and students with a Raven password. A full list of ebook platforms can be viewed via the ebooks@cambridge LibGuide.