Law Commons^™

The Shari'a Factor In International Commercial Arbitration, Faisal M. Kutty

ExpressO

The world has witnessed a phenomenal growth in commercial disputes transcending national borders due to our increasingly interrelated and globalized world economy. In addition to issues in interpretation of commercial agreements and practices, differences in custom, language, culture and religion will continue to fuel conflicts and disagreements between commercial players. Over the last few decades there have been growing commercial interaction between Western companies and their Middle Eastern counterparts. Given this interaction and the great geo-political and economic importance of this region, it is imperative that Western lawyers and dispute resolution professionals have a reasonable grasp of the general principles …

Va Savoir! - The Adage "Jura Novit Curia" In Contemporary France, Douglas Brooker

ExpressO

The Civilian adage jura novit curia – the court knows the law – for all that it is well recognised in France does not receive much scrutiny. This is unusual first because some claim it expresses a fundamental principle of French law and secondly because rules and practices associated with jura novit curia are controversial. The paper remedies the scholarly deficit, scrutinising seven definitions of jura novit curia to catalogue for the first time the divergent meanings associated with the adage and to analyse their status in French law and legal culture. While many meanings are attributed to jura novit …

Harmonizing Business Laws In Africa: Ohada Calls The Tune, Claire M. Dickerson

ExpressO

OHADA (in English, “Organization for Harmonization in Africa of Business Laws”) is a system of business laws and implementing institutions. Sixteen West African nations adopted this regime in order to increase their attractiveness to foreign investment. Because most of the member-states are former French colonies, the OHADA laws are based on the French legal system. Despite certain economists’ recent, well-publicized assertions that any French-based legal system is incompatible with development, other studies challenge those claims and in doing so outline characteristics that a pro-development system of business laws should possess. A review of selected provisions from OHADA’s corporate law and …

Blocking Legal Evolution And Paying The Price: Property And Conflict In The Nigerian Highlands, Karol C. Boudreaux

ExpressO

This article examines current high levels of violent conflict in Plateau State in central Nigeria using an economic property-rights analysis that draws on the work of Harold Demsetz, Robert Cooter, Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney.

The thesis of the article is that this wide-spread violent conflict over resource use/access is tied, in important ways, to the passage of federal legislation in Nigeria that nationalized land. This legislation, I contend, blocked the continued evolution of customary land-law norms that had evolved to meet a variety of land-use needs and that had a relatively low-cost and transparent indigenous dispute resolution mechanism.

The …

Global Credit Card Use And Debt: Policy Issues And Regulatory Responses, Ronald J. Mann

ExpressO

The rise of card-based payments has transformed the landscape of payments in the last half century, from one dominated by government-supported paper-based payments to one dominated by wholly private systems. The rise of those payments presents a number of policy problems, the most serious of which is the empirically demonstrable likelihood that use of the cards contributes to an undue level of consumer credit and that borrowing on the cards contributes to a rise in the level of consumer bankruptcy. Although the existing pattern shows great variation from country to country, regulators should take no solace in those variations. Building …