Extension: A Tale of Two Studies: Revisiting the Unintended Effects of Staggered Legal Changes

Objective: This research delves into the multifaceted realm of legal reform, aiming to dissect its complexities, identify influencing factors, and evaluate its impact on society. By conducting a comprehensive analysis, the objective is to provide a thorough understanding of how legal changes occur and their implications for various stakeholders. Specifically, the research seeks to explore the theoretical foundations of legal reform, scrutinize political, social, and economic factors shaping legal reform processes, assess challenges and consequences, and offer recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of legal reforms in Ukraine and beyond. Methods: To achieve the research objectives, a diverse range of research methods and materials are employed. These include an extensive review of existing literature, in-depth case studies, qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, quantitative analysis of sociopolitical and economic data, and comparative studies of legal reform dynamics across different contexts. This multifaceted approach ensures a comprehensive exploration of legal reform processes and their societal impact. Results: The research findings reveal the intricate nature of legal reform, shedding light on the role of political institutions and actors in shaping reform initiatives. It highlights the significance of political stability, ideological perspectives, and the presence of political will in determining the feasibility and success of legal changes. Moreover, the research underscores the crucial role of social factors, including public awareness, civil society engagement, and cultural values, in influencing the direction and priorities of legal reform. Economic factors are shown to be closely linked to legal reform, with economic development, property rights protection, and economic inequality influencing the outcomes of legal changes. The study also uncovers the challenges associated with legal reform, emphasizing the importance of coordination among branches of government, building institutional capacity, and mitigating unforeseen consequences and risks. Conclusions: In conclusion, this research underscores the complex and dynamic nature of legal reform processes, where political, social, and economic factors interact intricately. The study offers a series of recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of legal reforms. These include fostering political stability and commitment, increasing public awareness and participation, promoting the rule of law and anti-corruption measures, addressing socioeconomic inequality, and strengthening international cooperation. The research provides valuable insights into the multifaceted world of legal reform, serving as a guide for policymakers, legal experts, and researchers in Ukraine and beyond, ultimately contributing to the creation of a more just, transparent, and efficient legal system that aligns with the needs and aspirations of society.

Financial regulations often encourage or require market participants to hold particular types of financial assets. One unintended consequence of this form of regulation is that it can spur innovation to increase the effective supply of favored assets. This Article examines when and how changes in the law prompt the spread of “investor-driven financial innovations.” Weaving together theory, recent empirical findings, and illustrations, this Article provides an overview of why investors prefer certain types of financial assets to others, how markets respond, and how the spread of investor-driven innovations can transform the structure of the financial system. This examination suggests that investor-driven innovations can enhance efficiency and provide other benefits, but they can also increase complexity, interconnectedness, and rigidity in ways that render the financial system as a whole more fragile. This Article thus draws attention to a core mechanism through which legal changes affect the structure and resilience of the financial system. This Article provides a framework for identifying the regulatory changes most likely to trigger investor-driven innovation, a critical first step toward improving rulemaking to reduce the likelihood of unintended consequences. The framework focuses attention on the need to develop an appropriate baseline when assessing the impact of an intervention and the need to cover the costs of innovation. This frame reveals that the regulations often blamed for contributing to bad forms of innovation are probably less transformative than commonly believed. Meanwhile, interventions outside the current debate could have important systemic effects. The main policy implication is that, when the framework warrants, regulators should assess how a proposed rule change is likely to impact investor preferences, the types of innovations that might arise or spread in response, and how the intervention might otherwise affect the financial system structure. Focusing attention on a specific mechanism through which legal changes can inadvertently alter the structure of the financial system can help regulators develop the data, models, and mindset they need to assess the systemic ramifications of their actions.

Research examining the antecedents of recalls, instead of their consequences, is relatively sparse and has not considered whether firms’ likelihood to recall products is influenced by legal changes that could induce managerial opportunism, such as those reducing shareholder litigation risk. To examine this question, the authors exploit the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws across several U.S. states as a quasi-natural experiment. UD laws aim to prevent frivolous litigation from disrupting a firm's normal business operations by making it more difficult for shareholders to sue managers for neglecting their fiduciary duties and hold them personally liable. Although UD laws are well-intended, the reduced threat of shareholder litigation disciplining a firm's managers could have unintended negative consequences. Indeed, using a difference-in-differences analysis, the authors find that following the adoption of UD laws, affected firms become less likely to recall products. This effect is weaker in the presence of organizational mechanisms constraining managers’ self-interest-seeking behavior, such as a corporate culture focused on customer needs and interests or the exercise of normative control through monitoring by institutional investors. The authors do not find support for a potential alternative explanation of operational improvement and therefore higher product quality driving their findings.

This paper describes how widespread legal changes appear to have affected law enforcement practices concerning youth tobacco and alcohol use in the United States. We argue that the threat of criminalization was seldom addressed in scientific and public policy discussions of the drinking age, and only sporadically addressed in discussions of measures to regulate youth access to tobacco. We argue that unintended consequences are an important ethical issue for professionals involved in advocating, developing, implementing and evaluating public policy concerning substance abuse.

Additional funding and raft of legal changes will offer greater protection against female genital mutilation, but many of the measures could be hard to deliver and have unintended consequences, warn experts

The primary objectives of the study are to examine the role of a business using Thai nationals as nominee shareholders in foreign-controlled companies in the facilitation of the transnational criminal groups’ activities in the tourist destinations, and their social and economic impacts on the country. Nominee shareholder appointment in a legal entity has commonly been recognized as one of the techniques employed by criminal groups to launder and obscure the ownership of their illegal assets. However, this study points out that this type of company also performs other functions in providing resources and a platform for criminal groups to further their goals. The study used mixed methods by gathering qualitative data through conducting in-depth interviews and focus groups with 55 participants from relevant government agencies and private sectors, and by gathering quantitative data through conducting public surveys consisting of 1,160 participants from six provinces across five different regions in Thailand. The study concluded that there is a strong need for the country to improve monitoring mechanisms through legal changes, and collaborations among public, private and civil society as the practice of nominee shareholder appointment, although perceived as a normal practice in the global field of business, such a practice can invite unintended consequences, which can be a serious cause of concern due to the links with illegal activities operated under the umbrella of transnational organized crime.

Banks are unique in designing loan contracts. Contract design determines liquidation and continuation decisions of firms. Smaller firms are often the weaker party when interacting with their banks. We study a legal reform that aims to improve small firms’ bargaining position by altering the contractual environment. The new law gives small firms the right to prepay loans against a contractually specified penalty and requires banks to offer firms’ best-suited loan type. Using this quasi-natural experiment, we show that, while the legal reform increases overall credit availability, banks dampen the effect of the act by tilting their credit supply to loans that are unaffected by the legal change, i.e., credit lines. Using bank-firm-credit-type data, we show that banks reduce the supply of term loans by 0.7% while credit lines increase by 4%. This effect is more pronounced for borrowers with longer relationships. Our results show that reforms generate unintended consequences since banks strategically try to undo part of the regulation.

Individual malpractice insurance decisions revisited

Customary Law and the Nationalist Project in Spain and Peru

Communication by public authorities during a crisis situation is an essential and indispensable part of any response to a situation that may threaten both life and property. In the online connected world possibilities for such communication have grown further, in particular with the opportunity that social media presents. As a consequence, communication strategies have become a key plank of responses to crises ranging from epidemics to terrorism to natural disaster. Such strategies involve a range of innovative practices on social media. Whilst being able to bring about positive effects, they can also bring about a range of harmful unintended side effects. This include economic harms produced by incorrect information and a range of social harms that can be fuelled by myths and rumours, worsening negative phenomena such as stigmatisation and discrimination. Given the potential for such harms, one might expect that affected or potentially affected individuals would be able to challenge such measures before courts or administrative tribunals. As this paper demonstrates however this is not the case. More often than not seemingly applicable legal approaches are unlikely to be able to engage such methods. This is often because such measures represent activities that are purely expressive in nature and therefore not capable of imposing any binding legal or corporeal changes on individuals. Whilst some forms of soft law may pose requirements for public officials involved in such activities (e.g. codes of conduct or of professional ethics), they are not likely to offer potentially harmed individuals the chance to to challenge particular communication strategies before courts or legal tribunals. The result is that public authorities largely have a free reign to communicate how they wish and do not have to have to comply with a range of requirements (e.g. relating to form and substantive) content) that would in general apply to most forms of official administrative act.

This Article introduces a novel approach for improving and innovating upon the civil justice system, referred to as human-centered civil justice design. The approach synthesizes two interdisciplinary strands: human-centered design thinking and dispute system design. To begin, human-centered civil justice designers empathize with intended beneficiaries and stakeholders, surveying them, observing them, and interviewing them, immersing themselves to uncover their needs and experiences. Civil justice designers embrace and identify the needs of diverse stakeholders and court users (e.g., parties, lawyers, and judges), determining their interests and goals before narrowing the needs to be addressed. These designers ideate and brainstorm a range of human-centered options before winnowing them based upon technological feasibility and financial viability. Throughout this process, prototypes are harnessed to develop insight from stakeholders about the causes, conditions, and nature of problems. These prototypes are empirically tested with pilots and randomized-control trials to explore the many intended and unintended system-wide effects of a proposed intervention. Human-centered civil justice reflects the reality that the civil justice system seeks to reconcile and promote diverse process values, including efficiency and affording members of the public the ability to participate and human dignity.Further, human-centered civil justice draws on psychological and behavioral science on how members of the public experience the civil justice system and encounters with court officials, including psychological science on procedural justice. Decades of research reveal that procedural justice powerfully influences compliance with legal decrees, cooperation with legal authorities, and engagement in other pro-social and democratic participation. In his 2015 year-end report, the Chief Justice called for a legal culture turn toward efficient justice. This is highly consequential for federal judges now serve largely as managerial judges who manage pending cases. There are few explicit norms or standards that dictate how federal judges should manage cases, and despite the power of managerial judges to sculpt the scope of litigation and influence settlement, this discretion is virtually unreviewable. Legal culture shapes how managerial judges think, feel, and behave. Fundamentally, the Chief Justice’s call for legal culture change aims to alter the beliefs, values, and discourses of managerial judges. Troublingly the Chief Justice elaborated a monist theory of value, exalting the value of efficiency — reducing discovery costs and delays in civil justice — while procedural justice and the many process values that the federal civil justice system serves. In marked contrast, human-centered managerial judging would encourage federal judges to infuse their managerial practices beneficially with procedural justice to promote favorable experiences. By promoting these experiences, human-centered managerial judging advances the plural process aims that the federal civil justice system seeks to achieve. Rather than wishing tension between values away, human-centered managerial judging seeks to reconcile tension between efficient justice and procedural justice. Acknowledging this tension leads to precision. The Article then draws on the findings of the experiment and discusses human-centered civil justice design and rulemaking. Human-centered rulemaking would seek to infuse the rulemaking process with a human-centered ethos and a vision in which diverse stakeholders and court users experience the civil justice system as truly just. In this regard, formal and informal practices that grant the public procedural justice powerfully shape whether civil justice is perceived as fair and legitimate. When engaging in civil justice design, courts should empathize with court users and innovate solutions that meet the public’s need for a civil justice system experienced as just.Finally, human-centered civil justice design can also lead to innovations that address a pressing problem: access-to-justice in the United States. Human-centered access-to-justice innovations hold promise to serve the millions of low-income and middle-income Americans who face unmet legal needs that threaten their shelter, food, livelihood, physical safety, and their care of dependents.

In 1999, the first legal sex change operations were conducted in Japan. The fact that there were several hundred people waiting to undergo such treatments suggested that, for some individuals, the tensions between psychic identity, social expectations, cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity, and legal definitions of maleness and femaleness (as defined through biological characteristics) were too much to bear. For these individuals – some seeking to transform male bodies into female bodies, some seeking to transform female bodies into male bodies – only a gruelling physical transformation could resolve these tensions. For these individuals, however, the possibility of undertaking such radical treatment was determined by government legislation and the closely regulated practices of the medical profession. From the earliest days of modern Japan, governments had regulated individual bodies, limiting choices about reproduction, contraception, surgical abortion, and sterilisation procedures. In revision of the Eugenic Protection Act in 1996, some of the controls on sterilisation procedures had been relaxed. In a possibly unforeseen consequence, the restrictions on sex change operations were also removed. Such operations, which involve the modification of healthy reproductive organs, had been interpreted as a form of sterilisation, an operation which was only recognised for eugenic purposes. With the modification of regulations on sterilisation, sex change operations were recognised for the first time and started to be carried out once hospitals could set up the necessary counselling and training in gender appropriate behaviour for those undergoing this surgical treatment, and once the necessary ethical clearances had been obtained.

The Impact of Right-to-Work Laws on Union Organizing

On September 19, 1905, a Shelby County Criminal Court grand jury in Memphis, Tennessee, indicted Mary Morrison for violating state's recently enacted streetcar segregation statute. The indictment charged that ten days earlier, Morrison, an African American, had boarded a car of Memphis Street Railway Company and refused to take a seat designated for colored passengers. Her trial, four months later, attracted attention throughout state, with Tennessee's white press--which described Morrison as belonging to society element of her race--reporting that she had violated law to test its constitutionality. After court decided against Morrison and fined her $25 penalty provided by statute, she appealed. Though a number of whites feared her challenge would become streetcar segregation's undoing, her suit was unsuccessful. The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld new law in August 1906. Morrison's suit capped a seven-year period of legislative and judicial deliberation over streetcar segregation in Tennessee. After court's decision, racial separation on public conveyances outlasted streetcars as a fixture of life in state. Taken as a means to explore Jim Crow more generally, Morrison v. State (1906) suggests an orderly expansion of segregation in Tennessee. As they had for schools, hospitals, and railroads, state's white legislators came to see racial separation aboard streetcars as necessary for the comfort of public--an explanation state supreme court accepted in its review of law. Like those who participated in Morrison's action as parties, jurists, and witnesses, Tennesseans supported or opposed statute depending on their side of color line. And streetcar conductors, given authority under law to enforce statute, both could and dutifully did exercise that power. While court's opinion in Morrison might be taken as evidence of de jure segregation's linear spread, it obscures a counternarrative of suppressed knowledge, political and legal calculations, and feigned enforcement that marked this turn-of-the-twentieth-century segregation fight. The legislators who passed, jurists who upheld, and white public who came to insist on streetcar segregation did so despite acknowledging problems they foresaw--or experienced--with racial separation on street railways. White Tennesseans approved of streetcar segregation over objections of both street railway companies and African Americans, even as they admitted impossibility of complying with its strictures. They devised strategies to avoid its requirements and made political compromises to lessen of noncompliance. They also recognized poor fit between mainstream conceptions of bifurcated racial difference, on one hand, and range of faces they encountered daily, on other. The counternarrative lurking behind Morrison reveals a white public acting not in ignorance of Jim Crow's impracticality but in full knowledge of it, bringing into relief chasm between cultural knowledge and political consensus during period. The fissures in Tennesseans' embrace of racial separation aboard streetcars offer a window to consider what W. Fitzhugh Brundage has called exceptions, contradictions, and unintended consequences that underlay segregation. Historiographical attention to such matters is largely a development of last several decades. For nearly half a century, two questions drove study of post-Reconstruction South: when did region turn to Jim Crow, and did that pivot owe more to legal codification or to a culture of racial separation that predated legal change? While that debate demonstrated Jim Crow's contingency and continues to be productive, social and cultural historians in 1990s turned their attention elsewhere. They uncovered, among other things, relationship between sexual anxieties and Jim Crow's enforcement, contributions of black women in contesting segregation, and efforts of white elites to use segregation to shore up meaning of whiteness. These scholars also demonstrated that African Americans resisted racial separation in hitherto unacknowledged ways. What emerges from these studies is a complex, messy account in which competing motivations, timelines, and degrees... Language: en

Statement of Purpose Stolen firearms are commonly used in firearm assaults. The media have reported a recent increase in firearm thefts from vehicles, but there is little empirical evidence to determine underlying causes. We determined the association between the implementation of a 2014 Tennessee law allowing any citizen not prohibited from owning a firearm to carry a firearm in their vehicle on the rate of firearm thefts from vehicles. Methods/Approach We use monthly data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) between 2009 and 2018 on firearm thefts from a vehicle for Tennessee and 13 control states without such a law. We use a quasi-experimental design with multiple-group interrupted time-series analysis to estimate the effect of the Tennessee law on firearm theft from a vehicle. Results Comparison of thefts before and after the enactment of the 2014 Tennessee law show a significant increase in rates of firearm thefts from a vehicle: The average monthly rate was 1.99 per 100,000 before the implementation of the law and 3.26 per 100,000 after (Difference=1.27, t=15.105, p Conclusion While a law passed in Tennessee was intended to allow citizens to protect themselves against intruders in their vehicles, it was associated with a marked increase in firearm thefts from vehicles. Significance and Contributions to Injury and Violence Prevention Science Allowing anyone to carry firearms in their vehicles can have serious unintended consequences due to the increased supply of unsecured firearms in vehicles. This has resulted in thousands of additional firearms flowing from firearm owners in Tennessee into illegal markets, which in turn can increase the supply of weapons for violent crimes. Additional policies, vehicle secure storage innovations, and behavioral interventions are urgently needed to stem this source of illegally obtained firearms.