Law Commons^™

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 Bernstein Memorial Lecture: The First Six Years, Ralf Michaels, Stephen Bornick, Jonathan Dalton White

Faculty Scholarship

CICLOPs, the Center for International & Comparative Law Occasional Papers, could not be launched with a better issue than one dedicated to Duke Law's named lecture series in the field, the Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law. Herbert Bernstein was Duke's much-beloved professor of comparative law. The lecture series, established in Prof. Bernstein’s honor after his sudden death in 2001, has drawn leading scholars from all around the world to speak at Duke Law School on comparative law. This first issue of CICLOPs contains the text of the first six lectures, some of them previously published in …

Civil Justice Systems In Europe And The United States, Hein Kötz

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Kötz delivered the inaugural Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2002 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 order to highlight the similarities and differences in legal regimes between Europe and the United States, Professor Hein Kötz analyzes the German and American civil legal systems and, to a minor extent, the British civil legal system. Specifically, Kötz focuses on one of the distinguishing features of the American legal system, the civil jury, and its impact on the …

Europeanization As A Process: Thoughts On The Europeanization Of Private Law, Christian Joerges

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Christian Joerges delivered the Second Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2003 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. Professor Joerges puts forth a three part thesis concerning the “Europeanization of Private Law”, the process by which the European Community influences the legal and political policies of its member states within a framework of transnational cooperation. Joerges first establishes the eroding importance of the idea that legal systems operating at the national level fulfill the goals of …

Constitutions For The 21st Century: Emerging Patterns-The Eu, Iraq, Afghanistan…, Chibli Mallat

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Mallat delivered the Third Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2004 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. Strong moments in constitution-making often result from traumas; the breakthroughs by the European Union and constitutional achievements by both Iraq and Afghanistan stand as modern examples. The traumas of Europe, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been typified by violent conflict over the past century, including two World Wars, the Cold War, and the ‘war on terrorism’. Efforts and successes at …

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 …

Political Parties In China’S Judiciary, Jonathan K. Ocko, Zhu Suli

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Suli delivered the Fifth Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2006 and this article is based on his remarks, with a foreword by Jonathan Ocko. The article is included in the inaugural volume of CICLOPs thatcollects the first six Bernstein lectures. In responding to Sending Law to the Countryside, Professor Frank Upham levied a number of criticisms against Professor Zhu Suli’s book. Of particular importance was Upham’s criticism concerning a lack of attention to the role of politics and political power in the Chinese legal system. Suli finds this criticism to be extremely important because …

Foreword: The Bernstein Memorial Lecture, The First Six Years, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

In the spring of 2009, the Duke Law Center for International & Comparative Law launched an occasional paper series - CICLOPs. Prof. Michaels' foreword to the inaugural issue describes the project and the articles included in this issue that comprise the first six lectures in The Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law.

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 …

‘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 …

Why The Chinese Public Prefer Administrative Petitioning Over Litigation, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the Chinese public, when facing disputes with government officials, have preferred a non-legal means of resolution, the Xinfang system, over litigation. Some scholars explain this by claiming that administrative litigation is less effective than Xinfang petitioning. Others argue that the Chinese have historically eschewed litigation and continue to do so habitually. This paper proposes a new explanation: Chinese have traditionally litigated administrative disputes, but only when legal procedure is not too adversarial and allows for the possibility of reconciliation through court-directed settlement. Since this possibility does not formally exist in modern Chinese administrative litigation, people tend to …

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)