Friday, January 22, 2010

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Future of Law and Development Symposium Recap

The Future of Law and Development Symposium was our first online blog venture in the world of symposia. I think it was a great success. Thank you to all of our participants and the staff of the Northwestern Law Review Colloquy.

To find the various postings (which are also available via westlaw and lexis) see the following:

Part I
Tom Ginsburg (Chicago), Salil Mehra (Temple), Katharina Pistor (Columbia), & Anna Gelpern (American)
Part II
Mariana Prado (Toronto), Susan D. Franck (Washington & Lee), & John Cioffi (UC Riverside)
Part III
Kevin Davis (NYU), Adam Feibelman (Carolina), Brian Z. Tamanaha (Wash U), & Yuka Kaneko (Kobe)
Part IV
D. Daniel Sokol (Florida) & Daniel Kaufmann (Brookings)

Monday, January 11, 2010

Symposium: The Future of Law and Development, Part IV

The final part of the Future of Law and Development is up on the Northwestern Law Review website, availabloe here. The final set of contributions come from Daniel Sokol (University of Florida) and Daniel Kaufmann (Brookings Institution).

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Marketing and Selling Transnational ‘Judges’ and Global ‘Experts’: Building the Credibility of (Quasi)Judicial Regulation

There is a new piece out worth reading on Marketing and Selling Transnational ‘Judges’ and Global ‘Experts’: Building the Credibility of (Quasi)Judicial Regulation by Yves M. Dezalay, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)Bryant Garth, Southwestern Law School, American Bar Foundation.

ABSTRACT: Drawing on examples from the fields of international commercial arbitration and international human rights, in particular, and also on trade, intellectual property and governance, this article explores the processes through which transnational norms are created and legitimated. The article rejects approaches that presume an international consensus around norms or simply the imposition of Northern norms and technologies on the South, showing instead how the fields are developed, the advantages that favour ideas and approaches that are credible in the North, and also how limited openings to individuals from the South subtly modify the norms - which in turn reinforces their legitimacy. The article also shows that legal processes, courts and court-like approaches serve to capture both the hierarchies of the field and the processes that can allow a slow evolution that produces some change-but no challenge to the basic orientation.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Law and Development in Antitrust - the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law

Over at the Antitrust and Competition Policy Blog, Wentong Zheng (Buffalo Law) has a series of great posts analyzing the first year of the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law.



Post 1
Post 2

Post 3
Post 4

Post 5

Friday, January 1, 2010

An Important New article on Legal Origins - Specifically Legal Origins in Roman Law

A fun article to read this break has been Ulrike Malmendier's "Law and Finance "at the Origin"." Journal of Economic Literature, 47(4): 1076–1108 (2009). It is in the current issue.

ABSTRACT: What are the key determinants of financial development and growth? A large literature debates the relative importance of countries' legal and political environment. In this paper, I present evidence from ancient Rome, where an early form of shareholder company, the societas publicanorum, developed. I show that the societas publicanorum flourished in a legally underdeveloped but politically supportive environment (Roman Republic) and disappeared when Roman law reached its height of legal sophistication but the political environment grew less supportive (Roman Empire). In the Roman case, legal development appears to have mattered little as long as the law as practiced was flexible and adapted to economic needs. The "law as practiced," in turn, reflected prevalent political interests. After discussing parallels in more recent history, I provide a brief overview of the literature on law and finance and on politics and finance. The historical evidence suggests that legal systems may be less of a technological constraint for growth than previously thought -- at least "at the origin."