Suchergebnisse

Defence date: 13 June 2019 ; Examining Board: Professor Stefan Grundmann, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Claire Kilpatrick, European University Institute; Professor Peer Zumbansen, Osgoode Hall Law School; Professor Simon Deakin, Cambridge University ; Over the last forty years, legal theory and policy advice have come to draw heavily from an 'evolutionary' jurisprudence that explains legal transformation by drawing inspiration from the theoretical successes of Darwinian natural selection. This project seeks to enrich and critique this tradition using an analytical perspective that emphasizes the material consequences of concepts and ideas. Existing theories of legal evolution depend on a positivist epistemology that strictly distinguishes the objects of social life—interests, institutions, systems—from knowledge about those objects. My dissertation explores how knowledge, and especially non-legal expertise, acts as an independent site and locus of transformation, mediating the interaction between law and social phenomena and acting as a catalyst of legal innovation. Prior work by Simon Deakin has integrated insights from systems theory to show how the interaction between law and economic institutions can only be properly understood by attending to the epistemic frame law uses to interpret economic practice. Using a case study on the impact of 'law and finance' literature on World Bank policy advice and, consequentially, on legal reforms adopted by many developing countries between 2000 and the present, I show that such attention to legal knowledge is inadequate. The case points, first, to the contingency of the intellectual tools used to understand legal institutions. Rather than deploying a determinate rationality, private and public actors address legal, economic, and ethical problems using a variety of paradigms: viewpoints are not determined by realities. More fundamentally, the cases suggest that successful paradigms, rather than economic or political realities alone, shape the dynamics of socio-legal change. My conclusions address some normative questions that arise when researchers in a social scientific mode are implicated in the processes they seek to document.

AbstractIntensified global economic competition, economic liberalization, and the rise of EU governance have led some observers to argue that there has been a trend toward the "Americanization" of the European "way of law." This article addresses that contention, focusing on legal change in European member states. It first describes ways in which the American legal tradition has differed most sharply from the national legal systems of Western Europe (including Great Britain) and the political and economic factors that account for this "American legal distinctiveness." Similar political and economic factors currently are at work in Europe, the article acknowledges, creating incentives for legal convergence. But it also argues that European legal culture and the political organization of European national states generate path‐dependent forces that impede European movement toward American ways of law, and it discusses six important differences between European and American law that remain entrenched and are unlikely to disappear.

AbstractOver the period of mass criminalization, social scientists have developed rigorous theories concerning the perspectives and struggles of people and communities subject to criminal legal control. While this scholarship has long noted differences across racial groups, it has yet to fully examine how racism and criminalization interrelate in the making of criminalized people's perspectives and their visions for transforming the legal system. This article engages with Du Boisian sociology to advance a theory of subjectivity that is attuned to the way criminalization reproduces the subjective racial order and that aims to uncover subaltern strategies and visions for transforming the structure of the law and broader society. Through a critical review of interpretive scholarship across the social sciences and an original analysis of interviews with a diverse sample of criminal defendants conducted in the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, I illustrate how a Du Boisian approach coheres existing theories of criminalized subjectivities, clarifies the place of White supremacy and racism, and provides a theory of legal change rooted in ordinary people's experiences and needs. I introduce the concept oflegal envisioning, defined as a social process whereby criminalized people and communities imagine and build alternative futures within and beyond the current legal system. Du Boisian sociology, I conclude, provides the methodological and theoretical tools necessary to systematically assess legal envisioning's content and to explain its contradictions, solidarities, and possibilities in overlooked yet potentially emancipatory ways.

This paper analyses changes in the legal protection of shareholder and creditor rights in 24 transition economies from 1990 to 1998. It documents differences in the initial conditions and a tendency towards convergence of formal legal rules as the result of extensive legal reforms. Convergence seems to be primarily the result of foreign technical assistance programs as well as of harmonisation requirements for countries wishing to join the European Union. The external supply of legal rules not withstanding, the pattern of legal reforms suggests that law reform has been primarily responsive, or lagging, rather than leading economic development. In comparison, the pre-socialist heritage of transition economies has little explanatory power for the observed patterns of legal change. However, countries with German legal heritage seem to favour creditor over shareholder protection and display substantially better creditor protection than other transition economies. The paper discusses the implications of the response pattern of legal change with externally supplied legal solutions for the prospects of effective law enforcement and compliance with the law in transition economies.

Reformers had high hopes that the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union would lead to significant improvements in legal institutions and the role of law in public administration. However, the cumulative experience of 25 years of legal change since communism has been mixed, marked by achievements and failures, advances and moves backward. This special issue of the journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies documents the nuances of this process and starts the process of explaining them. This introductory essay draws on the findings of the articles in this issue to explore the impact of three potential explanatory factors: regime type, international influences, and legal (or political) culture. Regime type matters, but allows for considerable variation within authoritarian and democratic states alike and the possibility of reversals. The influence of international organizations (like the European Union) is also far from predictable, especially once states have joined the organization. Finally, legal cultures and political traditions play a large role in explaining developments in individual countries, but there is nothing inevitable about their impact.

The Interdisciplinary Program in Law and Religion and the Comparative and International Law Institute co-sponsored a lecture titled, "Criminal Law Reform: Ethical and Legal Changes in Austrian Society." In light of the recent terrorist activities in the European Union, the Austrian government has focused on hate speech legislation and hate crimes. Dr. Christian Pilnacek, Director General for Criminal Matters in the Federal Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Austria discussed recent Austrian legislation that criminalized hate speech that has a likelilhood of inciting violence. Following Pilnacek's presentation, Dr. Wolfgang Brandstetter, Federal Minister of Justice of the Republic of Austria, discussed how the Austrian government is reforming the penal law system. A summary of the event is available here.

The Supreme Court in the last few years has resolved some of the most divisive and consequential cases before it by employing the same maneuver: construing statutes to avoid constitutional difficulty. Although the Court generally justifies the avoidance canon as a form of judicial restraint, these recent decisions have used the canon to camouflage acts of judicial aggression in both the statutory and constitutional spheres. In particular, the Court has adopted dubious readings of federal statutes that would have been unthinkable in the canon's absence. We call this move the "rewriting power." The canon has also been used to articulate new constitutional norms and significant breaks from settled doctrine. We call this move "generative avoidance." Both practices are facets of the broader phenomenon of "active avoidance," which is the use of the avoidance canon to usher in legal change. This Article defines and critiques active avoidance by analyzing in detail two recent instances — Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One v. Holder and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (NFIB) — as well as providing a briefer analysis of Bond v. United States. In Northwest Austin, the Court rewrote the bailout provision of the Voting Rights Act and gave birth to the "equal sovereignty" doctrine. In NFIB, the Court construed away a constitutional problem with the individual mandate and gave birth to what we call the "antinovelty doctrine": the principle that statutes without historical precedent are constitutionally suspect. The Article demonstrates that the rewriting power can have a countermajoritarian effect equal to — or even greater than — outright invalidation, because of certain features of our legislative process. And it shows how generative avoidance, by undermining some of the structural guarantors of judicial restraint, may encourage the Court to spearhead constitutional change. For these reasons, this Article sounds a cautionary note about the recent judicial temptation to use the ...

The transformative and regulatory accommodation model addresses practical challenges to accommodate religious laws and courts in the secular and democratic regimes. There is a strong evidence against the jurisdictional competition between secular and religious courts under defined conditions. There is no concern regarding the Shariah courts in the non-Muslim democracies, as majority of the country’s ethno-religious groups control the civil and rabbinical courts. In this regard, there is a need to mitigate the negative impact of Muslim Family Laws (MFLs) by the civil courts in non-Muslim majority countries because MFLs imply certain disabilities and limitations upon the displayed rights of women and children. To address these issues, the present study aims to discuss the possibilities and challenges faced by the multicultural and pluri-legal accommodations by focusing on the Islamic law and institutions within the non-Muslim democracies. The results have shown that the reformation of rules and procedures internalize certain principles and discourses due to increased compliance of religious courts with the high court rulings. Increase in the number of Muslim judges on civil courts would help to overcome lack of legitimacy in the perspectives of the Muslim minority that is the main reason of shortcomings of both ex post and ex ante oversight mechanisms.

This dissertation is a study of the development of property rights in the coal industry as defined by Federal legislation. Previous analyses have argued that property rights develop efficiently and have employed a neoclassical model to study this development in the political market. This study asserts that the neoclassical model is inappropriate for analyzing the political market. This study concentrates on the coal industry, analyzing the historical events surrounding development of the property rights structure. A price theoretic approach is employed to determine whether changes in the property rights structure results in greater efficiency for the coal industry. The evidence provided in the study does not support use of the neoclassical model. The model is too constrained and does not allow the inclusion of nonmarket factors in the analysis. ; Ph. D.