Stay ConnectedThe Faculty of Law has a thriving calendar of lectures and seminars spanning the entire gamut of legal, political and philosophical topics. Regular programmes are run by many of the Faculty’s Research Centres, and a number of high-profile speakers who are leaders in their fields often speak at the Faculty on other occasions as well.
Audio recordings from such events are published in our various podcast collections. Video recordings are available via YouTube.
Copyright: © 2019
Professor Jens Frankenreiter (Washington University in St Louis) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Cleaning of Corporate Governance" on 22 February 2022 as a guest of 3CL (The Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law). Abstract: Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced. We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding eighty percent in the G-Index, the most widely used proxy for “good governance” in law and finance. Correcting these errors substantially weakens one of the most well-known results in law and finance, which associates good governance with higher investment returns. Second, we make our corpus freely available to others, in hope of providing a long-overdue resource for traditional scholars as well as those exploring new frontiers in corporate governance, ranging from machine learning to stakeholder governance to the effects of common ownership. Third, and more broadly, our analysis exposes twin cautionary tales about the critical role of lawyers in empirical research, and the dubious practice of throttling public access to public records. Bio: Jens Frankenreiter is a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of business law, contract law, and comparative law. His work draws on methods from economics, statistics, and data science to improve our understanding of contracting, private and public lawmaking, and legal institutions. A particular focus of his work is on the use of large amounts of texts and other forms of big data. His writing has appeared in leading academic journals, among them the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Jens holds a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Before coming to Washington University, he was a Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Bonn, a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, and a Post-Doc at the Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership. 3CL Seminars are kindly supported by Travers Smith. For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website at http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/
There have been several recent egregious examples of private prosecutions, including the case of the Post Office prosecuting numerous Postmasters for losses caused by a faulty IT system. Professor John Spencer discusses these cases, the evolution of the system of private prosecutions, and the considerations involved in regulating such actions.
Professor Spencer is Professor Emeritus of Law and Honorary President of the European Criminal Law Association. He has written extensively on criminal justice matters and has been involved in a number of law reform projects.
For more information about Professor Spencer, please refer to his profile at https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/jr-spencer/79
Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.
This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.
On 16 November 2021 Lady Dame Sarah Falk delivered the 2021 Cambridge Freshfields Lecture entitled "Modern Judging".
The Honourable Mrs Justice Falk DBE spoke about modern judging, her experience as a High Court judge having followed an unconventional path to the High Court bench, the selection of judges, and some lessons learned from the pandemic for the conduct of proceedings.
Dame Sarah Falk studied law at the University of Cambridge before starting her professional career at Freshfields. She was a partner at Freshfields between 1994 and 2013 and subsequently worked as a consultant. While at Freshfields she was involved in graduate recruitment as well as holding managerial roles. She became a High Court judge in October 2018, sitting in the Chancery Division, and was appointed to the Judicial Appointments Commission as the High Court representative in October 2019.
The Cambridge Freshfields Lecture is an annual address delivered by a guest of the Cambridge Private Law Centre, and the event is sponsored by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
More information about this lecture, including photographs from the event, is available from the Private Law Centre website:
http://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/events/past-events
An online event held by Cambridge Pro Bono Project and Action on Armed Violence.
Over the course of its military involvement in the Syrian conflict, the UK Government has claimed that since 2014, some 1,700 British air strikes have only caused 1 known civilian death. Just last week, it was revealed that British forces are linked to the deaths of 86 children and more than 200 adult civilians during the Afghanistan conflict.
The use of airborne explosive weapons by the United Kingdom in recent armed conflicts has created a risk that civilians might be the victims or unintended targets of the UK’s air strikes. By virtue of their operational characteristics and largely indiscriminate area-effects once detonated, airborne explosive weapons have been documented to have a greater potential to cause civilian death and injury than other conventional weapons.
In a report written by Cambridge Pro Bono Project researchers for the London-based NGO Action on Armed Violence, the UK’s obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law as well as domestic public law to investigate, record and report civilian casualties have been examined.
For its first CPP Speaker Series event of this academic year, the CPP in cooperation with Iain Overton, Executive Director of Action on Armed Violence, will discuss the findings of this report together with experts Georgia Edwards, UK Advocacy Officer and Conflict Researcher at Airwars, and Gavin Crowden, Executive Director at Every Casualty Counts.
For more information see: https://www.cpp.law.cam.ac.uk/
Baron Cornelius Ver Heyden de Lancey (1889-1984) was a wealthy and public-spirited Dutchman who at different times in his life was a dentist, doctor, surgeon, barrister and art historian. In 1970 he created the De Lancey and De La Hanty Foundation, to promote studies in medico-legal topics. The Foundation generously gave Cambridge the Ver Heyden de Lancey Fund, which since 1996 has funded occasional public lectures on medico-legal issues of current interest.
The 2021 Baron Ver Heyden de Lancey Lecture on Medico-Legal Studies was delivered by Dr Silvia Camporesi of King's College London on 20 March 2021, and was entitled "Law, Hormones, and Sport: a level playing field?".
For more information about the Baron Ver Heyden de Lancey Lecture series, please see http://www.lml.law.cam.ac.uk/events/vhdl-events
This is an interview with the thirty-third entrant in the Eminent Scholars Archive. John Spencer was Lecturer and Professor in Law at Selwyn College from 1973 to 2013. He is Hon QC, CBE, and was Faculty Chairman 1995-97. The interview was recorded online from Professor Spencer’s home in Norfolk.
The interviews were recorded, and the audio version is available on this website with transcripts of those recordings:
- First Interview (20 November 2020): Early Life and Career
- Second Interview (15 January 2021): University Career and Retirement
- Third Interview (26 February 2021): Scholarly works
For more information, see the Squire website at https://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive
This is an interview with the thirty-third entrant in the Eminent Scholars Archive. John Spencer was Lecturer and Professor in Law at Selwyn College from 1973 to 2013. He is Hon QC, CBE, and was Faculty Chairman 1995-97. The interview was recorded online from Professor Spencer’s home in Norfolk.
The interviews were recorded, and the audio version is available on this website with transcripts of those recordings:
- First Interview (20 November 2020): Early Life and Career
- Second Interview (15 January 2021): University Career and Retirement
- Third Interview (26 February 2021): Scholarly works
For more information, see the Squire website at https://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive
This is an interview with the thirty-third entrant in the Eminent Scholars Archive. John Spencer was Lecturer and Professor in Law at Selwyn College from 1973 to 2013. He is Hon QC, CBE, and was Faculty Chairman 1995-97. The interview was recorded online from Professor Spencer’s home in Norfolk.
The interviews were recorded, and the audio version is available on this website with transcripts of those recordings:
- First Interview (20 November 2020): Early Life and Career
- Second Interview (15 January 2021): University Career and Retirement
- Third Interview (26 February 2021): Scholarly works
For more information, see the Squire website at https://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive
The Cambridge Pro Bono Project (CPP) was delighted to welcome Pablo Gonzalez, Lawyer at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to speak on the topic 'Pro Bono Work at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights' on 9 March 2021.
For more information about the Cambridge Pro Bono Project, see https://www.cpp.law.cam.ac.uk/
A BBC World Service programme broadcast on 29 August 1991. What is Civil Law, and why does the legal system of ancient Rome still matter? This second of five programmes looks at how many countries' legal systems can trace part of their legal history back to Rome. Programme information is available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03m0hxr Provided courtesy of the BBC.
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