Research

Benjamin Chen

The Expressiveness of Regulatory Trade-Offs

Trade-offs between a sacred value — like human life — against a secular one — like money — are described as taboo. People are supposed to be offended by such trade-offs and to punish those who contemplate it. Yet, the last decades have witnessed the rise of the cost-benefit state. Most of the major rules promulgated today undergo a regulatory impact analysis…

March 1, 2021

Liu Zhuang and Li Xueyao

How do judges use large language models? Evidence from Shenzhen

This article reports on the systematic use of a large language model by a court in China to generate judicial opinions-arguably the first instance of this in the world. Based on this case study, we outline the interaction pattern between judges and generative artificial intelligence (AI) in real-world scenarios, namely: 1) judges make initial decisions; 2) the large language model generates reasoning…

January 2, 2025

Thomas Cheng

The Patent-Competition Interface in Developing Countries

About the book: Proposes a development stage-specific approach to the patent-competition interface in developing countries, taking into account their technological capacity Offers a detailed illustration of the approach with a wide range of patent exploitation practices, including analysis of the relevant theoretical issues and a survey of the relevant case law from the US, the EU, and select developing countries Provides an…

March 16, 2022

誰令你出局？

A piece of writing by Anne Cheung published on Ming Pao in May 2023.

May 25, 2023

Benjamin Chen, Alexander Stremitzer and Kevin Tobia

Having Your Day in Robot Court

Should machines be judges? Some say “no,” arguing that citizens would see robot-led legal proceedings as procedurally unfair because the idea of “having your day in court” is thought to refer to having another human adjudicate one’s claims. Prior research established that people obey the law in part because they see it as procedurally just. The introduction of “robot judges” powered by…

October 20, 2022

Timothy Chan and Kelvin Low

Post-Scam Crypto Recovery: Final Clarity or Deceptive Simplicity?

In Jones v Persons Unknown [2022] EWHC 2543 (Comm), Nigel Cooper QC handed down the first final judgment on a claim to recover cryptoassets following a scam. While both the result and the reasoning may seem straightforward at first glance, a deeper analysis of the judgment reveals a concealed plethora of legal complications. This note critiques certain aspects of the court’s reasoning…

March 30, 2023

Ryan Whalen

The What, Why, and How of Automated Patent Decision-making

The patent system is slow, expensive, and inaccurate. So much so that some refer to it as “broken.” Meanwhile, patent applications are increasing in number and complexity. Examiners are overworked, which leads them to make more incorrect decisions. This has led some to advocate for increased use of technologies, and in particular patentability classifiers, at patent offices.   This essay provides an…

May 9, 2022

Mingruo Yuan, Ben Kao, Tien-Hsuan Wu, Michael M. K. Cheung, Henry W. H. Chan, Anne S. Y. Cheung, Felix W. H. Chan, Yongxi Chen

Bringing Legal Knowledge to the Public by Constructing a Legal Question Bank Using Large-scale Pre-trained Language Model

Access to legal information is fundamental to access to justice. Yet accessibility refers not only to making legal documents available to the public, but also rendering legal information comprehensible to them. A vexing problem in bringing legal information to the public is how to turn formal legal documents such as legislation and judgments, which are often highly technical, to easily navigable and…

July 6, 2023

Benjamin Chen and Yin Xiaohan

Data Still Needs Theory: Collider Bias in Empirical Legal Research

Big data is characterised not only by the amount but also the kinds of information that can be created, stored, and processed. This explosion of data, accompanied by the capacity to analyse them, has catalyzed large n, quantitative approaches to the study of law and legal institutions.  But neither size nor quality guarantees the validity of causal inferences drawn from observational data.…

December 31, 2023

Timothy Chan and Kelvin Low

DeFi Common Sense: Crypto-backed Lending in Janesh s/o Rajkumar v Unknown Person (‘CHEFPIERRE’)

One of the selling points of cryptoassets has been the ability to subject them to so-called ‘smart contracts’ embedded upon blockchains; yet, despite numerous common law decisions accepting cryptoassets as property, until Janesh s/o Rajkumar v Unknown Person (‘CHEFPIERRE’) no courts have had the occasion to consider how such property (in this case, an NFT) interact with these ‘smart contracts’. The case…

March 29, 2023