Suchergebnisse

There are many ways of dealing with events that are perceived by a government as threats to the stability of the existing political system. Two contrasting ways will be discussed in this study of Mexico, and an attempt will be made to evaluate their relative efficacy in controlling activities regarded as subversive by the government in question. The first method to be discussed will be referred to as the legal approach to subversion. Focus will be on both the latent and manifest functions (in Mertonian terms) of the letter, intent, and implementation of the Mexican law.Theley de disolución social(law of social dissolution) forms part of the Mexican Federal Penal Code, which is applicable throughout the entire republic.

Recent work on political liberalism attempts to find ways to bring divergent cultural practices under a single rubric. This article examines one of the limits of the cultural commensurability of modern liberal legality. It argues that Western forms of evidentiary proof are not amenable to oral history testimony given by indigenous litigants. Current anthropological research on oral history and indigenous culture shows that oral history is not simply a "record" or "chronology" of events, but is a particular cultural practice that draws its members into the fold – and this is an event of its own. Western forms of evidence, however, traditionally treat testimony as "reporting" or as "creating a record" of a prior set of events in time. This article suggests that the distance between these two conceptions of "events" and "record" is significant enough to warrant rethinking the place of traditional trial practices in the treatment of oral history. It also suggests that the Western form of legality is grounded in an understanding of temporality that eschews any other way of thinking about events and their occurrence, a legality oriented against orality.

Previous research argues that law expresses social values and could, therefore, influence individual behavior independently of enforcement and penalization. Using three laboratory experiments on tax avoidance and evasion, we study how legality affects individuals' decisions. We find that, without any risk of negative financial consequences, the qualification of tax minimization as illegal versus legal reduces tax minimization considerably. Legislators can thus, in principle, affect subjects' decisions by defining the borderline between legality and illegality. However, once we introduce potential negative financial consequences, legality does not affect tax minimization. Only if we use moral priming to increase subjects' moral cost do we again find a legality effect on tax minimization. Overall, this demonstrates the limitations of the expressive function of law. Legality appears to be an important determinant of behavior only if we consider activities with no or low risk of negative financial consequences or if subjects are morally primed.

This comment discusses Hans Lindahl's central idea of a-legality. It begins by positioning the idea of a-legality in the literature on the constituent power of the people, showing how it ad-vances the discussion at hand. Having done that, it raises two questions regarding the conceptu-al and normative significance of the politics of a-legality. Is a-legality contingent on a certain form of consciousness, or a certain form of government? And, what is the basis of the normative recommendation that legal collectives ought to respond to a-legality with collective self-restraint? The aim of both questions is to identify what bounds Lindahl's idea of a-legality.