Law Commons^™

The Impact Of Judicial Reform On Crime Victimization And Trust In Institutions In Mexico, Luisa Blanco

Luisa Blanco

This article studies the impact of judicial reform in Mexico. It does so using a survey about crime victimization and perceptions of insecurity (Encuesta Nacional Sobre la Inseguridad [ENSI]) between 2005, 2008, and 2009 in 11 Mexican cities, 3 of which implemented the reform in 2007 and 2008. This analysis shows that judicial reform not only reduces victimization but also lowers perceptions of security. Although we find that judicial reform has a negative effect on trust in the local and federal police, judicial reform reduces the probability of being asked by the transit police for a bribe.

Governance Of Intellectual Resources And Disintegration Of Intellectual Property In The Digital Age, Peter S. Menell

Peter Menell

The Supreme Court's decision in eBay v. MercExchange brought into focus whether intellectual property policy should follow reflexively in the wake of tangible property doctrines or instead look to the distinctive market failures and institutional features of intellectual resources. Professor Richard Epstein argues in a recent article that `virtually all of the current malaise in dealing with both tangible and intellectual property stems from the failure to keep to the coherent rules of acquisition, exclusion, alienation, regulation, and condemnation that are called for by the classical liberal system ... .' Professor Epstein purports to validate what he calls the `carryover …

The Map Is Not The Volcano: Thoughts About International Scholarship, Synesthesia, And Law, John Brigham

John Brigham

This paper examines the epistemological significance of the map, first as an adolescent trope in my high school and ultimately as a meme in the semiotics of law that calls attention to how our understandings constitute the world. The perspective expands to synesthesia through attention to the way in which consumption and desire challenge the most sophisticated understanding of law by altering our idea of sophistication.

Law And Development: The Way Forward Or Just Stuck In The Same Place?, D. Daniel Sokol

D. Daniel Sokol

This Essay does three things. First, it provides an overview of Law and Development issues. Second, it responds to other pieces in the symposium "The Future of Law and Development". Third, it suggests that to measure success, Law and Development needs clearer goals.

Designing Antitrust Agencies For More Effective Outcomes: What Antitrust Can Learn From Restaurant Guides, D. Daniel Sokol

D. Daniel Sokol

Antitrust policy should be concerned with the quality and effectiveness of the antitrust system. Some efforts at agency effectiveness include self-study of antitrust agencies to determine the factors that lead to improving agency quality. Such studies, however, often focus only on enforcement decisions and other agency initiatives such as competition advocacy. They do not reflect at least one other part of the equation: what do non-government users of the antitrust system think about the quality of antitrust agencies? This Symposium Essay advocates the use of a ratings guide by antitrust practitioners for antitrust agencies to add to the tools in …

Institutional Autonomy And Constitutional Structure, Randy J. Kozel

Randy J Kozel

This Review makes two claims. The first is that Paul Horwitz’s excellent book, "First Amendment Institutions," depicts the institutionalist movement in robust and provocative form. The second is that it would be a mistake to assume from its immersion in First Amendment jurisprudence (not to mention its title) that the book's implications are limited to the First Amendment. Professor Horwitz presents First Amendment institutionalism as a wide-ranging theory of constitutional structure whose focus is as much on constraining the authority of political government as it is on facilitating expression. These are the terms on which the book's argument — and, …

Closing The Gaps: Building Capacity In Pacific Fisheries Governance And Institutions, Quentin Hanich, Feleti Teo, Ben Tsamenyi

Quentin Hanich

Governance and institutions must function effectively if sustainable development and growth are to occur within the Pacific Islands region. In 2007, the FFA and the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), supported by funding from AusAID, contracted Quentin Hanich, Feleti Teo and Professor Martin Tsamenyi to research governance and institutional gaps within the region that undermine the effective management and development of the region's fish stocks. Following an intensive round of interviews throughout the Pacific islands region by all three consultants, Mr Hanich authored a comprehensive report that discussed relevant governance and institutional gaps and recommended a number …

Constitutions As Coordinating Devices, Gillian K. Hadfield, Barry R. Weingast

Gillian K Hadfield

Why do successful constitutions have the attributes characteristically associated with the rule of law? Why do constitutions involve public reasoning? And, how is such a system sustained as an equilibrium? In this paper, we adapt the framework in our previous work on “what is law?” to the problem of constitutions and their enforcement (see Hadfield and Weingast 2012, 2013a,b). We present an account of constitutional law characterized by two features: a system of distinctive reasoning and process that is grounded in economic and political functionality; and a set of legal attributes such as generality, stability, publicity, clarity, non-contradictoriness, and consistency. …

Closing The Gaps: Building Capacity In Pacific Fisheries Governance And Institutions, Quentin Hanich, Feleti Teo, Ben Tsamenyi

Professor Ben M Tsamenyi

Governance and institutions must function effectively if sustainable development and growth are to occur within the Pacific Islands region. In 2007, the FFA and the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), supported by funding from AusAID, contracted Quentin Hanich, Feleti Teo and Professor Martin Tsamenyi to research governance and institutional gaps within the region that undermine the effective management and development of the region's fish stocks. Following an intensive round of interviews throughout the Pacific islands region by all three consultants, Mr Hanich authored a comprehensive report that discussed relevant governance and institutional gaps and recommended a number …

Patents And The University, Peter Lee

Peter Lee

This Article advances two novel claims about the internalization of academic science within patent law and the concomitant evolution of “academic exceptionalism.” Historically, relations between patent law and the university were characterized by mutual exclusion, based in part on normative conflicts between academia and exclusive rights. These normative distinctions informed “academic exceptionalism”—the notion that the patent system should exclude the fruits of academic science or treat academic entities differently than other actors—in patent doctrine. As universities began to embrace patents, however, academic science has become internalized within the traditional commercial narrative of patent protection. Contemporary courts frequently invoke universities’ commercial …

American Finance And American Democracy: Towards An Institutionalist "Law And Economics", Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

This article reconsiders the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009 and the present debate about the regulation of finance in the light of a vision of how finance can better serve the American economy and American Democracy. The central claim is that regulation as conventionally understood cannot adequately redress the problems, and seize the opportunities, revealed by the crisis. We should approach financial regulation as the first step in a series of institutional innovations designed to put finance more effectively at the service of the real economy (financial deepening) while broadening economic opportunity in the country (financial democratization). I develop …

Local Rules And A Global Economy: An Economic Policy Perspective, Dan Danielsen

Dan Danielsen

This article explores the growing significance and theoretical implications of ‘local rules’—such as Chinese labour standards, US financial regulation and Swiss bank secrecy rules—in the global economy. In particular, the argument developed is that Ronald Coase’s framework for analysing the effects of legal rules on economic welfare can help to reveal important weaknesses in current international legal approaches to analysing the transnational impact of local rules as well as contribute to a ‘global economic policy perspective’ better attuned to problems of power in the global regulatory order. Such a perspective will help us to see the effects of power differences …

Policy Choice For Sustainability: Marketization, Law And Institutions, Stephen Dovers, Warwick Gullett

Warwick Gullett

No abstract provided.

Corruption As Institution Among Small Businesses In Africa, Thomas A. Kelley Iii

Thomas A Kelley III

Suddenly it seems that US-funded international aid programs are all about building rational, predictable institutions to stimulate business in poor countries. The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a relatively new and increasingly important US aid organization, and the more venerable United States Agency for International Development (USAID), are initiating programs in poor countries around the world based on the assumption that their future stability and prosperity depends on unleashing and guiding the entrepreneurial spirit of small and medium-sized enterprises, and that this can be accomplished by improving the institutions – most particularly the laws and legal enforcement mechanisms – that regulate …

Análisis Económico De La Contratación Pública En Colombia: El Régimen De Contratación Estatal En Colombia Como Herramienta Para La Satisfacción Simultanea De Intereses Particulares Y Colectivos., Daniel Monroy

Daniel A Monroy C

El objetivo principal de este trabajo es evaluar si el actual estatuto de contratación pública en Colombia (Ley 80 de 1993), representa un marco regulatorio adecuado para lograr simultáneamente los fines estatales, así como para satisfacer los interés de los particulares que contratan con las diferentes entidades públicas. Se propone que la coexistencia entre los fines propios del Estado y aquellos estrechamente vinculados con el interés individual es viable, sin embargo, esta hipótesis difícilmente se puede sustentar desde la perspectiva de la economía neoclásica (la Escuela de Chicago), contrario a ello, un enfoque alternativo (v.g. el propio de la Nueva …

Corruption As Institution In Niger's Business Sector, Thomas A. Kelley Iii

Thomas A Kelley III

Suddenly it seems that US-funded international aid programs are all about building rational, predictable institutions to stimulate business in poor countries. The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a relatively new and increasingly important US aid organization, and the more venerable United States Agency for International Development (USAID), are initiating programs in poor countries around the world based on the assumption that their future stability and prosperity depends on unleashing and guiding the entrepreneurial spirit of small and medium-sized enterprises, and that this can be accomplished by improving the institutions – most particularly the laws and legal enforcement mechanisms – that regulate …

A New Name For An Old And Discredited Metaphor, Luis M. Dickson

Luis M. Dickson

This Article engages Paul Horwitz's recent Churches as First Amendment Institutions: Of Sovereignty and Spheres, arguing that the Kuyperian approach invoked by Horwitz is functionally indistinguishable from 'separate spheres' ideology long cited as justification for discrimination against women and blacks.

Instituições, Trabalho E Pessoas, Paulo Ferreira Da Cunha

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

Os especialistas em doenças terminais sabem que ninguém tem saudades, quando abandona a vida, do trabalho que não fez. Tem saudades sim do tempo que não passou com familiares e amigos. A sociedade contemporânea, e algumas instituições "totais" estão a potenciar até ao expoente demencial a exploração e a despersonalização dos trabalhadores, designadamente proletarizando técnicos superiores e técnicos pensantes que, sem ócio criativo, deixarão de criar. É uma crise civilizacional, nada menos.

Vultures, Hyenas, And African Debt: Private Equity And Zambia (Private Equity Symposium), Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

A 2007 U.K. court case involving Donegal, a private equity fund, and the Republic of Zambia, has contributed to an ongoing debate about the operation of so-called vulture funds in African and other developing countries. Donegal sued Zambia for more than fifty-five million U.S. dollars in connection with a debt owed by Zambia to Romania for Zambia’s acquisition of agricultural machinery from Romania pursuant to a credit agreement dated April 17, 1979. Donegal acquired the Zambian debt from Romania in 1999 at some eleven percent of face value. Although the Donegal court explicitly limited its scrutiny to the legal questions …

Constituting Vanuatu: Societal, Legal And Local Perspectives,, Benedict Sheehy, Jackson Maogoto

Benedict Sheehy

Governance in Vanuatu has been a source of concern for Australia as it forms part of Australia’s ‘Arc of Instability.’ Vanuatu has adopted a modified Westminster system as that system is often advocated as the model for constitutions and governance around the world. In various former colonies local populations were expected to simply absorb its liberal democratic principles apparently on some assumption that such principles were an innate part of human nature. Most readings of history would come to a different conclusion. Vanuatu illustrates this error and the complexities of a society that not only creates a broad challenge for …

The Levers Of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants Of The Quality Of Law, Gillian K. Hadfield

Gillian K Hadfield

In the past decade a comparative law and economics literature has emerged that is largely organized around an effort to explain differences in country economic performance in terms of differences between common law and civil code systems. Assumptions about differences between common law and civil code regimes and the correspondence between legal regimes and judicial behavior are, however, still only weakly based in real institutional features of modern legal systems. In this paper, I examine the institutional determinants of the quality of law developed by a legal regime, drawing on a model from Hadfield (2006) which identifies five key parameters …

Mutual Funds, Hedge Funds, And The Public-Private Dichotomy In A Macrosociological Framework For Law, Larry D. Barnett

Larry D Barnett

Macrosociology considers law to be one of the institutions of society and, hence, a fundamental component of a social system. Four macrosociological propositions underlie the instant paper: (i) the institutions comprising a social system are, in the long term, compatible with one another; (ii) the compatibility of institutions involves, inter alia, concepts that are similar or identical across at least some institutions; (iii) the concepts and doctrines of the institution of law manifest the properties, including the central values, of the social system; and (iv) the properties of the social system are fashioned by system-level forces. Because the propositions are …

Three Faces Of Deference, Paul Horwitz

Paul Horwitz

Deference – the substitution by a decision maker of someone else’s judgment for its own – is a pervasive tool of constitutional doctrine. But although it has been studied at more abstract levels of jurisprudence and at very specific doctrinal levels, it has received surprisingly little general attention in constitutional scholarship. This Article aims to fill that gap.

This Article makes three primary contributions to the literature. First, it provides a careful examination of deference as a doctrinal tool in constitutional law, and offers a taxonomy of deference. In particular, it suggests that deference can best be understood as relying …

The Effects Of Property Titling In Langa Township, South Africa, Karol C. Boudreaux

Karol C. Boudreaux

This paper explores the role titling programs play in alleviating poverty in a township outside Cape Town, South Africa. Successive South African government have worked to provide secure title to formerly disenfranchised citizens. Today, most non-shack dwelling in Langa Township have registered titles. Has this effort resulted in economic growth? The answer is a qualified yes. Titleholders engage in incremental improvements but make little use of titles as collateral for commercial credit. Reasons for the general relutance among homeonwers in this township to use their titles as collateral are examined.