Law Commons^™

Review Of South Sudan: A Slow Liberation, Laura Nyantung Beny

Reviews

This is a remarkable book. It offers a complex and nuanced analysis of South Sudan's prolonged and troubled march to political liberation—first from Anglo‐Egyptian colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then from hegemonic Arab rule in post‐independence Sudan [1956‐2011], and now from South Sudan's internal political and economic contradictions.

A Partial View Of China's Governance Trajectory, Nicholas Calcina Howson

Reviews

Minxin Pei’s new book China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay recites in detail the morass of corruption and collusion in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) party-state finds itself. Encyclopedic in scope, the book addresses corruption, extraction, and network formation in many of modern China’s formal settings—including in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the nomenklatura system, state institutions, enterprises, the investment sector, and the real property market, among others—but also in nonformal contexts such as the rise of the “local mafia state.” The book’s basic storyline is this: the PRC’s radical devolution of intertwined political power and …

Review Of The Making Of Tax Law: The Development Of The Swedish Tax System, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Reviews

Imagine that a single person had been responsible for all U.S. tax reforms enacted from 1974 to 2012. That was the position of Sven-Olof Lodin, the former president of the International Fiscal Association. For more than 40 years, professor Lodin was the most influential voice in Swedish tax policy. This was not in a single, official governmental capacity, but rather as a member of more than 20 government commissions and working parties on taxation, which were responsible for all the major changes in Swedish tax law in recent decades, including the "Tax Reform of the Century" in 1991. In this …

Review Of Understanding Labor And Employment Law In China, By Ronald C.Brown, Nicholas C. Howson

Reviews

Any attempt to analyze China’s comprehensive labor reform over the past three decades faces at least two dilemmas. First, the analyst must confront the task of describing how the Chinese state has dismantled the “work unit” (or danwei)- based “iron rice bowl” employment and entitlements system, replacing that comforting but low-production employment and social security scheme with formally-proclaimed legal rights and institutions apparently designed to protect employees in a functioning labor market. Second, the analyst must track how the state’s commitment (at all levels of government) to implementation of proclaimed legal and institutional protections has waxed and waned, based upon …

Review Of Trial Of Modernity: Judicial Reform In Early Twentieth Century China, 1901-37, By Xiaoqun Xu, Nicholas C. Howson

Reviews

Observing these significant legal-political debates in the Chinese press and academy in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we might think they concern battles started only in the last decade and a half of Reform-era China. Now Professor Xu Xiaoqun reminds us that these struggles have a much longer pedigree, stretching back to the end of the nineteenth century and China's first fraught encounter with "the West" and one idea of "modernity."

Review Of Napoleon And The British, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

Was he fascinating or repulsive? The bold courier of republican liberty under law or the scabrous carrier of lethal Jacobin corruption? Heaven-sent deliverer or providential scourge? Even his name was up for grabs: was it Bonaparte or Buonaparte? One need only dip into contemporary sources to realize that the British were obsessed with Napoleon. Stuart Semmel has done a first-rate job combing through those sources and using them to illuminate political culture. (Semmel does not offer the primary quotations I will use here. I offer them for fun, or to pile on with glee, and not at all to reproach …

Review Of Explaining The English Revolution: Hobbes And His Contemporaries, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

The explosion of primary texts from seven- teenth-century England continues to trigger an explosion of scholarly treatments today. For good reason, too: Lots of the primary texts are amazing, and not just those tired old warhors- es, Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise. As fun and challenging as the primary texts are, you are forgiven a touch of skepticism if you wonder just what the latest author has to add to our understanding. You might redouble your skepticism if you just glance at Mark Stephen Jendrysik's table of contents, offering chapters on Winstanley, Milton, Cromwell, Filmer, and Hobbes, and zeroing …

Revaluing Restitution: From The Talmud To Postsocialism, Michael A. Heller, Christopher Serkin

Reviews

Whatever happened to the study of restitution? Once a core private law subject along with property, torts, and contracts, restitution has receded from American legal scholarship. Few law professors teach the material, fewer still write in the area, and no one even agrees what the field comprises anymore. Hanoch Dagan's Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values threatens to reverse the tide and make restitution interesting again. The book takes commonplace words such as "value" and "gain" and shows how they embody a society's underlying normative principles. Variations across cultures in the law of unjust enrichment reflect …

Review Of Kingship, Law And Society: Criminal Justice In The Reign Of Henry V, Thomas A. Green

Reviews

Edward Powell's splendid study of Henry V's strategy for keeping peace among magnate and gentry factions represents an important contribution to the history of criminal justice. After providing a panoramic view of the machinery of criminal justice, Powell analyzes the extent to which that machinery was effective as between the Crown, at the center, and the upper echelons of society in the provinces. His conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the regular processes of common-law criminal administration could not easily be deployed at those levels. But Powell does not let the matter drop there. Kingship, Law, and Society presents a lucid …

Review Of Environmental Protection Policy, By E. Rehbinder And R. Stewart, James E. Krier

Reviews

Environmental problems have been on the agenda of the federal government in the United States for roughly a century now, about half of the government's life, and a dominant concern for the last two decades. The European Economic Community ("EEC"), itself a system perhaps on its way to some brand of federalism, presents a similar but much foreshortened picture. The EEC has been concerned with the environment for about the last half of its thirty year life. Environmental Protection Policy' ("EPP") is a richly detailed study of environmental policy in these two very different systems.

Review Of Culture And History In Medieval Iceland, William I. Miller

Reviews

It is a common dysfunction of scholars, particularly medieval historians, to fear grand syntheses and all-encompassing explanations. This is less frequently a disease among anthroplogists, and in fact in anthropologists of a structural bent there is no reticence whatsoever, but positive delight in the big, the general, the quasi- and the just plain theoretical. And in the best French tradition they often construct their models per ecartant les faits. Kirsten Hastrup is a structuralist more influenced by Levi-Strauss than Evans-Pritchard; she is also a trained anthropologist. This is both good and bad news. The Icelandic materials are as well suited …

Review Of The Justice Of The Western Consular Courts In Nineteenth Century Japan, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

Richard Chang attacks the generalization accepted by many historians that the Western consular tribunals in nineteenth-century Japan were so partial- toward West- erners and against Japanese-that they seldom rendered evenhanded justice. His study required two steps. First he tried to determine how many "mixed" cases came to trial-cases in which aJapanese brought a claim against a foreign resident in a consular court or was the complaining party in criminal proceedings against a foreigner. Between 1875 and 1895 there were five such cases that were widely reported and commented on at the time, and that have often been cited as examples. …

Review Of Njáls Saga: Rechtsproblematik Im Dienste Soziokultureller Deutung, William I. Miller

Reviews

There is little recommend this book. It is ill-conceived and poorly executed. The author's thesis is that the saga-writer intentionally distorted and varied his presentation of the law of the lawbooks in order to show a society being destroyed by uncontrolled egoism, pride, and envy, a society characterized by willful arbitrariness, disorder, and disarray, with few rules to respect and little respect for the few rules that were there. The validity of the thesis is never really tested because the law which the saga-writer distorts is not even minimally established, nor for that matter is the law the saga-writer does …

Review Of Wiltshire Gaol Delivery And Trailbaston Trials, 1275-1306, Thomas A. Green

Reviews

Ralph B. Pugh's handsome edition of Wiltshire gaol delivery and trailbaston trial rolls for the reign of Edward I provides a valuable resource for scholars of medieval crime and criminal law. The period covered bridges the era of the infrequent general eyres and that of the frequent circuits to try those being held on criminal charges. This transition period saw the development of various institutions and procedures designed to deal with a decline in social stability and an increase in criminal activity. To date, most scholarship has focused either on the workings of the mid-thirteenth- century eyre or on the …

Review Of Society And Homicide In Thirteenth-Century England, Thomas A. Green

Reviews

JAMES GIVEN has produced the first systematic book-length treatment of the sociology of medieval English crime. His work does not pretend to be comprehensive: it deals only with homicide. Nor does it cover more than a century, the thirteenth; the author has wisely left the earlier system of criminal law, based on private compensation, to other scholars, and he says just enough about late thirteenth- and early fourteenth- century social and legal change to suggest he believes that that period, too, must await its own interpretation. Still, the social history of homicide in the thirteenth century proves itself fascinating terrain, …

Review Of Contemporary Soviet Law: Essays In Honor Of John N. Hazard, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

This excellent collection of essays on Soviet Law was assembled to honor Professor John N. Hazard of Columbia University on the occasion of his sixty-fifth year, as well as the fortieth anniversary of his embarking on his study of the Soviet legal system. As an introduction to the contemporary essays, the editors happily chose to publish for the first time some of the letters Professor Hazard wrote to his sponsor in New York during his three years as a law student in Moscow, 1934-37. These excerpts are the jewel of the volume, and should certainly be read by anyone trying …

Review Of Encyclopedia Of Soviet Law, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

The publication of this work is an occasion for real celebration. At last there is a standard reference book to which both initiated scholar and interested neophyte can turn for an excellent introduction to almost any point of Soviet law. Professor F.J.M. Feldbrugge of the University of Leiden and his collaborators have produced a volume which will surely serve as the point of initial reference and departure for all subsequent scholarship on Soviet law.

Review Of The Judge In A Communist State: A View From Within, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

This is a rare book. It is full of real people and real life episodes. The author's almost incredible memory for the details of scores of cases and other legal incidents in Czechoslovakia in the 1950's makes this a remarkable contribution to the comparative-law literature. Those who are looking for theoretical controversy will not find it here, for this book is simply a generous slice of life in a communist country, as seen through the eyes of a remarkably perceptive, legally trained viewer. As the author says, it is "neither an indictment nor a glorification" (p. xi). The author is …

Review Of The King's Pardon For Homicide To A.D. 1307, Thomas A. Green

Reviews

NAOMI D. Hurnard's The King's Pardon for Homicide before AD 1307 is significant and instructive for both legal and social historians. The author has painstakingly pieced together the available evidence from a variety of classes of mediaeval English public records to achieve a clear statement of the law of excusable homicide, i.e., non-felonious but requiring a royal pardon. She has lucidly presented the procedure which marks out the legal life story of persons deserving pardon, from the pardonable slaying to the formal proclamation of the king's peace. But she has also accomplished much more. Through careful and generally sound use …

Review Of Contemporary Chinese Law: Research Problems And Perspectives, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

This excellent collection of studies deals with both the substance of the legal system of Communist China and the problems of its study. Contributions include an appraisal of Communist Chinese legal publications, discussions of refugee and survey interviewing techniques as methods of gathering information, a review of Communist Chinese attitudes toward international law, and a series of articles dealing with Chinese legal terminology in a number of fields which contain a substantial amount of substantive law in the interstices.

Review Of The Validity Of Sales Contracts: A Comparative Study, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

These 2 volumes are a slightly revised version of the substantive reports prepared by the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg (Director: Professor Konrad Zweigert) for the Rome Institute for the Unification of Private Law. They were designed to serve as a basis for the elaboration and discussion of a new uniform law on this subject matter, which would supplement the 1964 Hague conventions on a Uniform Law on the International Sale of Goods and Uniform Law on the Formation of Contract for the International Sale of Goods.

Review Of The Soviet Legal System And How Russia Is Ruled, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

Is there a legal system in the Soviet Union, and if so, what is its role in post-Stalin Soviet society? The Soviet Legal System for the first time makes it possible for a lawyer or law teacher to plunge directly into a very rich collection of translations of case decisions, statutes and doctrinal commentary. Even without a background in Soviet studies, the authors' valuable commentary and the reader's own legal training should make it possible for him to evaluate the material presented. With the help of the new edition of Fainsod's How Russia Is Ruled he can see the development …

Review Of A Bibliography On Foreign And Comparative Law, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

This volume is a most welcome addition to the author's first compilation of English language materials on this subject which covered the period to 1953. The present volume includes books and articles from April 1, 1953 through 1959 and a few articles of special importance after that date. It also includes a few earlier items not included in the first volume.

Review Of The Soviet System Of Government, Settling Disputes In Soviet Society, Government, Law And Courts In The Soviet Union And Eastern Europe, And The Law Of Inheritance In Eastern Europe And In The People's Republic Of China, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

Each of these four books makes a significant contribution to the rapidly growing body of literature on the communist legal systems. Together they provide an introduction to Soviet law and legal history and a basis for its comparison with the law of other countries within the communist bloc. Before examining the books individually a brief description of their contents may be in order.

Permanent Court Of International Justice, Edwin D. Dickinson

Reviews

"The author of this volume of collected papers and addresses is well known as the Bemis Professor of International Law in Harvard Law School, sometime member of the Legal Section of the Secretariat of the League of Nations, and the most efficient advocate of the new Permanent Court of International Justice in America. His enterprise as an advocate is sufficiently attested by the fourteen brilliant papers reproduced in this volume and the nine other titles of similar nature listed in the bibliography, all of them produced during the last three years....

"The exceptional timeliness of the book and the quality …