Law Commons^™

Use And Enjoyment Of Intangible Services: The German, Austrian, Danish And Estonian Vat Derogations, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

When the Czech Republic elected (effective January 1, 2009) to derogate from the standard rules for determining the place of supply for intangible services, pursuant to Article 58 of the Recast VAT Directive (RVD), it was following the lead of ten other Member States. This paper considers four of those other jurisdictions - Germany, Austria, Estonia, and Denmark - and compares their derogations with that of the Czech Republic.

In each instance a use and enjoyment standard determines the place of supply for certain intangible services. The affected transactions are (potentially) wide ranging. In each instance non-EU countries are on …

Use And Enjoyment Of Intangible Services: The Czech Republic's Vat Derogation, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

On January 1, 2009 a minor change in the Czech Republic VAT became effective. A use and enjoyment standard was added to modify the sourcing of certain service transactions. Traditional proxy-based rules, derived from Articles 43 and 56(1) of the Recast VAT Directive (RVD), are set aside by this modification when the customer receiving the services has a permanent establishment (PE) in the Czech Republic. The modification is authorized by RVD 58.

This change is a limited adoption of RVD 58(b), and functions like a full force of attraction principle in direct taxation. If caught by these rules, transactions that …

Quebec's Module D'Enregistrement Des Ventes (Mev): Fighting The Zapper, Phantomware And Tax Fraud With Technology, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

On January 28, 2008 the Quebec Minister of Revenue, Jean-Marc Fournier, announced that by late 2009 the MRQ will begin testing a device, the module d'enregistrement des ventes (MEV) that is projected to substantially reduce tax fraud in the restaurant sector. By 2010 or 2011 MEVs will be mandatory in all Quebec restaurants, where they will assure accuracy and retention of business records within electronic cash registers (ECRs).

This paper moves beyond a discussion of the variety of sales suppression programs in use - zappers and phantom-ware. The concern here is on enforcement efforts, particularly the MEV. The intent is …

The Universal Declaration And South African Constitutional Law: A Response To Justice Arthur Chaskalson, Peter E. Quint

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

60 Years Of The Basic Law And Its Interpretation: An American Perspective, Peter E. Quint

Faculty Scholarship

In commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the German Basic Law (Constitution) , the author discusses certain aspects of the Basic Law, in comparison with the Constitution of the United States, and examines important developments in the jurisprudence if the German Constitutional Court interpreting the Basic Law.

Participation In Governance From A Comparative Perspective: Citizen Involvement In Telecommunications And Electricity In The United Kingdom, France And Sweden, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Agency Accountability Strategies After Liberalization: Universal Service In The United Kingdom, France, And Sweden, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Cuotas Y Tasa Suplementaria En El Sector Lácteo En Cataluña [Quota And Super Levy In The Cow Milk Sector], Vanessa Casado-Pérez, Anna Ginès-Fabrellas, Patricia Gómez-González, Aroa Saiz-Jiménez

Faculty Scholarship

El Reglamento 856/84/CE instaura en el seno de la Unión Europea el régimen de cuotas lecheras y tasa suplementaria, con la finalidad de restringir la producción de leche de vaca. Dicha limitación al libre mercado ha afectado al precio de la leche y ha generado transformaciones importantes en la estructura productiva del sector ganadero catalán. Actualmente se debate la posibilidad de la supresión del régimen de cuotas lecheras y tasa suplementaria. La supresión de esta medida proteccionista conllevaría un aumento de la producción, una caída en el precio y una mayor intensificación de las explotaciones ganaderas. El objetivo de este …

Addressing Judicial Activism In The Indian Supreme Court: Towards An Evolved Debate, Madhav Khosla

Faculty Scholarship

The Indian Supreme Court has invited a great deal of interest for its alleged activism and the role that it has begun to play in Indian governance. Recent years have been witness to substantial debate on the Court's functioning, with scholars positing views and raising concerns with considerable passion. This paper analyzes the judicial activism discourse in the Indian Supreme Court by focusing on the contributions of Professor Upendra Baxi. It argues that, despite the attention the Court has received on the question of judicial activism, the debate in this area has, for the most part, failed to engage with …

On The Origins Of Originalism, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

For all its proponents' claims of its necessity as a means of constraining judges, originalism is remarkably unpopular outside the United States. Recommended responses to judicial activism in other countries more typically take the form of minimalism or textualism. This Article considers why. Ifocus particular attention on the political and constitutional histories of Canada and Australia, nations that, like the United States, have well-established traditions of judicial enforcement of a written constitution, and that share with the United States a common law adjudicative norm, but whose political and legal cultures less readily assimilate judicial restraint to constitutional historicism. I offer …

Islam’S Fourth Amendment: Search And Seizure In Islamic Doctrine And Muslim Practice, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

Modern scholars regularly assert that Islamic law contains privacy protections similar to those of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Two Quranic verses in particular - one that commands Muslims not to enter homes without permission, and one that commands them not to 'spy' - are held up, along with reports from the Traditions (Sunna) that repeat and embellish on these commands, as establishing rules that forbid warrantless searches and seizures by state actors and require the exclusion of evidence obtained in violation of these rules. This Article tests these assertions by: (1) presenting rules and doctrines Muslim jurists …

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 …

Extraterritorial Electioneering And The Globalization Of American Elections, Zephyr Teachout

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores a fascinating new truth: because of the Internet, governments, corporations, and citizens of other countries can now meaningfully participate in United States elections. They can phone bank, editorialize, and organize in ways that impact a candidate's image, the narrative structure of a campaign, and the mobilization of base support. Foreign governments can bankroll newspapers that will be read by millions of voters. Foreign companies can enlist employees in massive cross-continental email campaigns. Foreign activists can set up offline meetings and organize door-to-door campaigns in central Ohio. They can, in short, influence who wins and who loses. Depending …

Judicial Disciplinary Systems For Incorrectly Decided Cases: The Imperial Chinese Heritage Lives On, Carl F. Minzner

Faculty Scholarship

Local Chinese courts commonly use responsibility systems (mubiao guanli zeren zhi, zeren zhuijiu zhi) to evaluate and discipline judges. Judges receive sanctions under these systems for a wide range of behavior, such as illegal or unethical dealings with parties and lawyers, inappropriate courtroom behavior, and neglect of duty.

Many local court Chinese responsibility systems also discipline judges for simple legal error. Judges may face sanctions linked to the number of cases that are reversed on appeal, simply because the interpretation of law made by a higher court differs from that of the original trial judge. Sanctions include monetary fines and …

Riots And Cover-Ups: Counterproductive Control Of Local Agents In China, Carl F. Minzner

Faculty Scholarship

Chinese cadre responsibility systems are a core element of Chinese law and governance. These top-down personnel systems set concrete target goals linked to official salaries and career advancement. Judges and courts face annual targets for permissible numbers of mediated, reversed, and closed cases; Communist Party secretaries and government bureaus face similar targets for allowable numbers of protests, traffic accidents, and mine disasters. For many local Chinese officials, these targets have a much more direct impact on their behavior than do formal legal and regulatory norms.

This Article argues that Chinese authorities are dependent on responsibility systems, particularly their use of …

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 …

Dying To Dine: A Story Of The Suicidal Indian Farmers, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

The realities of the food crisis form the background to the discussion of India’s endeavor to tackle the issues relating to agriculture with special emphasis on the nation’s efforts to promote farmers’ rights under the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act, 2004 (PPVFA). The story of the PPVFA is interesting because the legislation represents India’s fulfillment of its international obligations by introducing breeders’ rights while simultaneously recognizing farmers’ traditional rights. Thus, Part I of this article outlines the steps India took to promote farmers’ rights as part of enacting a legislation to protect breeders’ rights to fulfill its …

The Impact Of Sovereign Wealth Funds On The Regulation Of Foreign Direct Investment In Strategic Industries: A Comparative View, Maya Steinitz, Michael Ingrassia

Faculty Scholarship

Investments by sovereign wealth funds ('SWFs') - pools of capital accumulated by and under the control of sovereign states, mostly from the Persian Gulf and East Asia - in European and North American companies have changed dramatically both in scope and in nature in the last few years. In terms of scope, SWFs are estimated to currently control USD$2-3 trillion in assets - more than all hedge funds and private equity funds combined - and within the next five years, they are expected to direct USD$6-10 trillion in assets.' In terms of the nature of the investments made, these funds …

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)

Restating The U.S. Law Of International Commercial Arbitration, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The American Law Institute's new Restatement of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration is only barely underway, and the reporters began with a chapter, on the recognition and enforcement of awards, that should represent for them a comfort zone of sorts within the overall project. Yet already a number of difficult, and to some extent unexpectedly difficult, questions have arisen. Some of the difficulties stem from the very nature of an ALl Restatement project. Others stem from the nature of arbitration itself and, more particularly, from the inherent tension between arbitral and judicial functions in the arbitration arena. Still …