Law Commons^™

The Second Wave Of Comparative Law And Economics?, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Comment on a text by Gillian Hadfield, The Levers of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants of the Quality of Law, 36 Journal of Comparative Economics 43 (2008)

Global Legal Pluralism, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines---comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law---have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism---the definition of law, the role of the …

Comparative Law By Numbers? Legal Origins Thesis, Doing Business Reports, And The Silence Of Traditional Comparative Law, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The legal origins thesis -- the thesis that legal origin impacts economic growth and the common law is better for economic growth than the civil law -- has created hundreds of papers and citation numbers unheard of among comparative lawyers. The Doing Business reports -- cross-country comparisons including rankings on the attractiveness of different legal systems for doing business -- have the highest circulation numbers of all World Bank Publications; even critics admit that they have been successful at inciting legal reform in many countries in the world. Yet, traditional comparative lawyers have all but ignored these developments.

The first …

Comparative Law As A Bridge Between The Nation-State And The Global Economy: An Essay For Herbert Bernstein, Richard M. Buxbaum

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Richard M. Buxbaum delivered the Fourth Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2005 and this article is based on his remarks. The article is included in the inaugural volume of CICLOPs that collects the first six Bernstein lectures. In this paper, Richard Buxbaum is primarily concerned with the potential of comparative law as a method to bridge the disparities between the laws of nation-states and the needs of the globalized economy. Buxbaum investigates three separate roles for comparative law in closing this gap: First, he discusses the potential uses of comparative law with regard to …

Desperately Seeking Subsidiarity: Danish Private Law In The Scandinavian, European And Global Context, Joseph M. Lookofsky

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Lookofsky delivered the Sixth Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2007 and this article is based on his remarks. The article is included in the inaugural volume of CICLOPs that collects the first six Bernstein lectures. As the European Union draws closer together as a single legal community, the states that comprise the EU and their various local subdivisions struggle to come to terms with the unification and universalization of EU laws across borders. The imposition of civil code practices, particularly in the area of private law, on EU member states has caused great consternation …

‘The Federalist’ Abroad In The World, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

This paper traces the influence of The Federalist Papers on five continents. From 1787 to roughly 1850, The Federalist was widely read and highly influential, especially in Europe and Latin America. Federalist justifications for federalism as a solution to the problem of creating a continental republic or to provincial rivalries were widely accepted. So, too, was the presidency, at least in Latin America, and that region adopted judicial review later in the nineteenth century. Presidentialism and judicial review fared less well in Western Europe. Following World War II, judicial review slowly became part of the standard equipment of new and …

The New European Choice-Of-Law Revolution, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Conflict of laws in Europe was long viewed by outsiders as formalist, antiquated, and uninteresting. Now that the European Union has become more active in the field, things are changing, but most view these changes as a mere gradual evolution. This is untrue. Actually, and fascinatingly, we are observing a real European conflicts revolution—in importance, radicalness, and irreversibility comparable to the twentieth-century American conflicts revolution. European developments go beyond the federalization of choice-of-law rules in EU regulations. In addition, EU choice of law is being constitutionalized, in particular through the principles of mutual recognition and the country-of-origin principle, along with …

Property As Constitutional Myth: Utilities And Dangers, Laura S. Underkuffler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Many Uses Of Federalism, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

This paper forms part of a symposium on Sanford Levinson's Our Undemocratic Constitution. It points out that although almost no large state that is governed democratically is not a federation, there are only about 24 federations in the world and all but four of these antedate the Third Wave of Democratization, which began in 1974. Most new democracies have not found federalism attractive. Yet, for many such countries, devolution (or scaling-down) federalism, in contrast to the scaling-up federalism originally devised in 1787, has great potential to alleviate conflicts in severely divided societies. Many of these are small or medium-sized states. …

Constitution-Making: A Process Filled With Constraint, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutions are generally made by people with no previous experience in constitution making. The assistance they receive from outsiders is often less useful than it may appear. The most pertinent foreign experience may reside in distant countries, whose lessons are unknown or inaccessible. Moreover, although constitutions are intended to endure, they are often products of the particular crisis that forced their creation. Drafters are usually heavily affected by a desire to avoid repeating unpleasant historical experiences or to emulate what seem to be successful constitutional models. Theirs is a heavily constrained environment, made even more so by distrust and dissensus …

Agenda Control In The Bundestag, 1980-2002, William M. Chandler, Gary W. Cox, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

We find strong evidence of monopoly legislative agenda control by government parties in the Bundestag. First, the government parties have near-zero roll rates, while the opposition parties are often rolled over half the time. Second, only opposition parties’ (and not government parties’) roll rates increase with the distances of each party from the floor median. Third, almost all policy moves are towards the government coalition (the only exceptions occur during periods of divided government). Fourth, roll rates for government parties sky- rocket when they fall into the opposition and roll rates for opposition parties plummet when they enter government, while …

Trial By Jury Involving Persons Accused Of Terrorism Or Supporting Terrorism, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores issues in jury trials involving persons accused of committing acts of international terrorism or financially or otherwise supporting those who do or may commit such acts. The jury is a unique institution that draws upon laypersons to decide whether a person charged with a crime is guilty or innocent. Although the jury is instructed and guided by a trial judge and procedural rules shape what the jury is allowed to hear, ultimately the laypersons deliberate alone and render their verdict. A basic principle of the jury system is that at the start of trial the jurors should …

The Confused U.S. Framework For Foreign-Bank Insolvency: An Open Research Agenda, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Civil Rights And Civil Liberties: Whose “Rule Of Law”?, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Trouble With Global Constitutionalism, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Design: Proposals Versus Processes, Donald L. Horowitz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Protecting Member State Autonomy In The European Union: Some Cautionary Tales From American Federalism, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

The European Union's ongoing "Convention on the Future of Europe" must tackle a fundamental issue of federalism: the balance between central authority and Member State autonomy. In this article, Ernest Young explores two strategies for protecting federalism in America - imposing substantive limits on central power and relying on political and procedural safeguards - and considers their prospects in Europe. American experience suggests that European attempts to limit central power by enumerating substantive "competencies" for Union institutions are unlikely to hold up, and that other substantive strategies such as the concept of "subsidiarity" tend to work best as political imperatives …

Transatlantic Perspectives On Partnership Law: Risk And Instability, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Comparing Judicial Selection Systems, Lee Epstein, Jack Knight, Olga Shvetsova

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Privatautonomie Und Privatkodifikation – Zu Anwendbarkeit Und Geltung Allgemeiner Vertragsrechtsprinzipien, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Proprietary Norms In Corporate Law: An Essay On Reading Gambotto In The United States, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Politics, Institutions, And Outcomes: Electricity Regulation In Argentina And Chile, William B. Heller, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

Risk, whether market or political, is an important determinant of private investment decisions. One important risk, subject to control by the government, is the risk associated with the hold-up problem: governments can force utilities to shoulder burdensome taxes, to use input factors ineffectively, or to charge unprofitable rates for their service. To attract private investment governments must be able to make commitments to policies that are nonexpropriative (either to contracts that guarantee very high rates of return or to favorable regulatory policies). These commitments, of course, must be credible.

Judgments about the credibility of commitments to regulatory policies are based …

Apartheid And The South African Judiciary, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pure Comparative Law And Legal Science In A Mixed Legal System, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Property And Tort In Nuclear Law Today, Kazimierz Grzybowski, William Dobishinski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Court Reform In England, Kazimierz Grzybowski

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judicial Power, The “Political Question Doctrine,” And Foreign Relations, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

Reviewing Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Morality and the Law (1966)

Other Answers: Search And Seizure, Coerced Confession And Criminal Trial In Scotland, Paul Hardin Iii

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.