Legal Institutions Research Articles

Economic analysis of institutional factors influencing the entrepreneurial level of young adults in Poland. Evidence from conjoint experiment

PurposeThis article aims at contributing to the literature using conjoint experiment methods for political economic problems. The author measures the stated willingness of young adults to start an enterprise in hypothetical realities described by different levels of six institutional factors pertaining to the business environment.Design/methodology/approachThe author conducts the “forced-choice” conjoint experiment on a sample of 200 young Polish students. This analysis allows for the verification of the expectations concerning the differences in the respondents' stated preferences relating to the potential obstacles to their entrepreneurial inclinations. The author estimates the average marginal component effects (AMCEs) and the marginal means (MMs).FindingsEvidence is provided that the institutional factors are not similarly significant to the stated entrepreneurial preferences of Polish young adults. Legal certainty and economic freedom are the attributes of the most notable effect on respondents' feelings about perceived entrepreneurial barriers; however, the results vary across the subgroups.Practical implicationsThe study results provide a tentative perspective on the Polish young adults' feelings about institutions as a potential obstacle to their entrepreneurial inclinations. The employment of conjoint methodology lays the groundwork for scholars studying the entrepreneurial environment, legal institutions and current public mood of different social groups.Originality/valueThis study is a unique attempt to answer political economic questions concerning entrepreneurial institutions in Poland through the implementation of a comprehensive market research method. In addition, the author indicates a specific set of six institutional factors as well as define a distinct group of young adults.

Why Military Conditioning Violates the Human Dignity of Soldiers

Abstract This article argues that military conditioning (MC) systematically violates the human dignity of soldiers. The argument relies on an absolute deontologist account of human dignity understood as a claim-right to live in self-respect, which is a right to decide on one’s own behalf about, and to be in control of, essential aspects of one’s own life. The article claims that MC violates soldiers’ dignity so understood because the largely automatic physical killing reflex that MC instills aims to remove their freedom of choice to kill or not to kill, while the MC practices that rationalize the killing of opponents aim to subvert soldiers’ moral deliberation in relation to this behavior. MC thus aims to take away soldiers’ control over a very essential aspect of human life: the decision whether to take life in war. Thereby, MC systematically violates their human dignity. The article concludes with a proposal for an amendment to international law that would allow legal institutions to do more justice to soldiers’ dignity.

AN ISLAMIC ASSESMENT OF INTER-MARRIAGE BETWEEN TANGALE-WAJA AND HAUSA-FULANI COMMUNITIES IN GOMBE STATE, NIGERIA

Marriage as the only legitimate institution that guarantee procreation, play a vital role in promoting strong mutual and cordial relationship between ethnic groups. Gombe State originated from the fusion of two distinct large groups of the Gombe Emirate in the North and the ethnic grouping in the South, known as Tangale-Waja. Therefore, the paper is an Islamic assessment of inter-marriage between Tangale-Waja and Hausa-Fulani communities in Gombe State. It gives a brief account of the Tangale-Waja and Hausa-Fulani communities of Gombe State, their marriage rites and practices, impact and challenges of Inter-marriage between them were also discussed. Qualitative methodology was adopted for the research because of its suitability. Interview was used as instrument for obtaining primary data. The research found out that some families among the Tangale-Waja Tribes and the Hausa-Fulani Communities of Gombe State still frown at inter-ethnic marriages because of the challenges that occur frequently even though could be eradicated with time with the rising number of inter-marriages among them nowadays. To this end, the research concludes that Islam does not in any way make any tribe to be a sign of elevation or prestige and Islam came in order to level all distinctions and does not limit marriage relationship to tribe. Marriage should be based on love, sympathy and affection between the couple.

Comparative analysis of the legal regulation of relations on the provision of fee-based services

Relevance. The relevance of the problem stated in the paper is conditioned upon the fact that relations for the provision of fee-based services are in great demand and occupy an important place in the global economic arena: starting with trade and ending with the satisfaction of specific needs of people.Purpose. The purpose of the paper is a comparative legal analysis of legal structures regulating these specific legal relations and their comparison with foreign models.Methodology. The leading method to study this problem is the method of comparison and analysis, which allows considering this problem as a purposeful and organised process in historical and legal retrospect, as well as the evolutionary path of a contract for the provision of fee-based services, a contract and an employment contract in various legal systems.Results. The study was conducted in three stages: analysis of the categories "service" and "result" in theoretical and practical aspects, study of the model of the historical development of a particular legal institution, completion of comparative legal work, clarification of theoretical and practical conclusions, generalisation and systematisation of the results obtained.Conclusions. The significance of the studied results is demonstrated by the following: the study of legal structures led to conclusions, namely, the need to clearly distinguish between contracts for the provision of fee-based services and a contract; secondly, to make a comparative analysis of the terms of an employment contract with models of legal relations for the provision of fee-based services; thirdly, to qualify legal structures of national legislation and legislation of foreign countries. This study helps to better understand the structure of relations for the provision of fee-based services not only in the Republic of Kazakhstan but also in such states as the Federal Republic of Germany, the USA, England.

The Comparative Constitutional of Democratic Backsliding: A Report on the State of the Field

There has been a crisis in the modal forms of liberal constitutionalism that emerged as a default design choices for political systems across Europe and North America in the wake of World War II. Central to the crisis have been institutionalized assaults on democratic institutions, often conducted with legal tools. This article reviews the extensive literature in American comparative constitutional law on the role that legal institutions play in the process of democratic backsliding. Drawing on a range of comparative experience, it draws attention to questions of constitutional amendment rules; entrenched protection for rights of free speech and association; term limits and other protections of election integrity; and the constitutional viability of an autonomous bureaucracy and ‘fourth branch’ institutions designed to check the abuse of executive power.

Women’s Empowerment in Madura Villages: Examining Female Resistance within the Patriarchal Power Structure and Political Dynasties

The position of village head (klebun) in Madura is predominantly held by men, suggesting patriarchal power and political dynasties. This study explores how women klebuns responded to the situation by empowering themselves and other women. The analysis uses qualitative descriptive methods and Foucault’s theory of power and legitimacy. Data was collected from observations of 11 women klebuns and in-depth interviews with four of them. The findings reveal that female klebuns face a choice between being extensions of their male relatives or being leaders themselves. To challenge the patriarchal constructs, they strategically use political influence, establish relationships with officials, and seek support from legal aid institutions. These efforts were made to address the issue of village security centering around the Madurese people in order to regain public trust. The study unveils the complexity of women’s empowerment in Madura’s male-dominated political landscape. This encouraged female klebuns to strive and transform the social and political dynamics, advocating for gender equality and challenging existing power structures. This research offers insights into promoting women’s political empowerment at the village level, and fostering gender equity in local governance, inspiring change in Madura and beyond.

Weak central government, strong legal rights: the origins of divergent legal institutions in 18th-century Chinese and Japanese rice markets

This paper examines the formation of legal institutions in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan with a focus on the rice market. In both countries in the 18th century, rice was the most important commodity. By the end of 18th century, Japan offered strong legal rights to rice market participants, while China managed the rice market with weak legal institutions. We develop a subversive regime game model to explain some of the social and political reasons behind this divergence. Supported by historical evidence from Qing China and Tokugawa Japan, we find that with lower suppression capacity and high risks of domestic threats to power, Edo Japan’s central government (Bakufu) was more likely to enforce legal rights than Qing China’s central government (Imperial Court). Japan’s institutional configuration facilitated the growth of rice markets such as the Doujima market in Osaka, because participants did not need to invest as much in informal protections for their own rights. Moreover, our analysis suggests that a state’s relative strength matters the most in determining its attitude toward legal rights, which further influences the state’s stability and longevity.

The widow and the notary: death, gender, and legal culture in the Jewish and Christian communities of medieval Catalonia

ABSTRACT When men died in medieval Catalonia, their widows went to the notaries. This article traces the ways in which Jewish and Christian women negotiated legal culture in response to their husbands’ deaths in Catalan cities between 1250 and 1350. Death required deeply practical responses as well as emotional ones: the administration of the estate of the deceased was often a pressing concern. Both Jewish and Christian women relied on a variety of legal institutions to safeguard their own and (in some cases) their children’s financial futures as they entered widowhood. Through a combination of Latin notarial documentation and Hebrew responsa literature, this article compares Jewish and Christian women’s legal responses to the deaths of their husbands. Jews navigated Christian legal institutions and sometimes adapted Christian customs. Yet they also maintained distinct practices, and Jewish widows and their families maneuvered between Christian notaries and Jewish rabbinic authorities as they shaped their individual legal responses to the life-changing deaths of their husbands.

Horror in the Halls of Law: Pluralising Legal Stories in Once Upon a Time in Australia

ABSTRACT In 2021, the Me Too movement took prominence in Australia following incidents which exposed gendered violence in the nation’s chief political, and legal institutions. The authors, teachers and students at one of the leading law schools in Australia took a range of actions, culminating in writing a graphic novel called Once Upon a Time in Australia: Conversations about how our Me Too movement exposed the troubles of Truth in Law (Counterpress, 2014). In this article, the authors write about their methodology and offer auto-critiques of their work, in a process they describe as critical performative iterations. This method facilitates speaking out thoughts and lived perspectives into knowledge which aligns with feminist standpoint theory, while also resisting their voices from asserting new essentialised truths. These critiques consider the limitations of the authors’ standpoints. They also consider the genre of horror, the insider/outside trope, and the politics of citation in Law.

Pioneer Chinese Law Students in the United States from 1878 to 1911

ABSTRACT This article employs the method of prosopography to reach a deeper understanding of a group of 53 trailblazing Chinese students who were the first to enrol in American law schools between 1878 and 1911, during the waning years of the Qing era. Most of them contributed greatly to the subsequent development of China’s legal and diplomatic institutions, playing instrumental roles in legal education, diplomacy, government and the judiciary. Given these accomplishments, this group of students is worthy of detailed study and research, and this article examines their characteristics, background, subsequent contributions and other key pieces of information.

ФОРМУВАННЯ СУЧАСНОГО ПРАВОВОГО ТЕРМІНОЛОГІЧНОГО АПАРАТУ В ІВРИТІ: СПОСОБИ ТА ВПЛИВ ІНШИХ ПРАВОВИХ СИСТЕМ

The article is dedicated to the peculiarities of the legal terminology formation, which took place in the process of the restoration of the Hebrew language and its becoming the official state language of the modern Israel. The legal system of Israel has been created during XX century, after near two-thousand-year period of its existence without own state, being limited to the small community’s common and religious law in different languages only. Thus, creation of the own state has demanded not only to adapt the legal institutes, but to develop new actual terminology in the new official state language. But the terminology complex of the Hebrew was based on the ancient language sources, so creation or adapting of the classic Hebrew words for the definition of the modern legal terms became a great scientific challenge. In the article we conclude, that new lexemes were not created in the process of the Israel legal terminology formation, but the old texts words were chosen, usually with some rethinking and reinterpretation of its meanings. This approach provides the possibility to avoid direct borrowing of the terms, which is a typical process in the reception of law in other states. Despite the fact that, in addition to the English Common Law, the formation of Israel’s legal system was influenced by the Ottoman and Romano-Germanic law, concepts from the English legal system were taken as the basis for the selection of many basic terms. The terms creation was not limited to formal denomination only. Often the process becomes more substantive, noticing the etymology, the content of the legal institute and the mechanisms of the practical law-enforcements. After this deep scientific work of the linguists and lawyers Hebrew terminology of the Israel legal system fully expresses the content and the scope of the concepts of the relevant legal institutes.

Российский конституционализм 30 лет спустя

Introduction. The actualization of the processes of improving constitutional prescriptions in modern Russia necessitates the search for the theoretical foundations of constitutional reforms. The reason for writing the article was the anniversary date – the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Any anniversary is always an occasion to reflect, analyze, return to the times when everything began. As the purpose of the analysis of the evolution of Russian constitutionalism, it is possible to define a rethinking of approaches to models, methods and tools for changing the legal reality. Materials and Methods. The transformation of the constitutional model of the state as a subject of scientific research in this work is based on the analysis of the transformations of the Constitution over three decades, the study of domestic experience in the legal regulation of public relations, the interpretation of constitutional provisions and institutions. Analysis. The Constitution of the Russian Federation defines the structure and principles of the organization of public power, the rights and obligations of citizens and much more. However, despite its importance, the Constitution of the Russian Federation, as well as the basic laws of other countries, does not always correspond to the realities of life and needs constant updating and improvement. Results. The article is devoted to the study of constitutional transformations in the aspect of retrospective and comparative legal analysis of some constitutional and legal institutions – federalism, public power, special attention is paid to the evolution of constitutional guarantees of the realization of human rights and freedoms.

The Prosecutor v Dominic Ongwen case before the International Criminal Court: A Twail-er’s perspective

This paper explores whether the International Criminal Court (ICC or ‘the court’) has lived up to the expectation of being an effective and universal mechanism of international criminal justice and accountability, by using the judgment of the Prosecutor v Dominic Ongwen as a case study. Ongwen was convicted by the court’s Trial Chamber (TC) IX in February 2021, on 61 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated in Northern Uganda between July 2002 and December 2005, and sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. The Appeals Chamber (AC) confirmed both the conviction and sentence in a judgment rendered on 15 December 2022. It will be argued from a Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) perspective, that the court missed an opportunity to improve its institutional legitimacy, considering the legitimacy deficit stemming from claims by African states that the ICC is biased against Africa. The paper will also argue that the court missed an opportunity to improve its own decision-making by expanding its source material to include sources from the Global South.

The Post-Racial Deception of the Roberts Court

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard/UNC (SFFA) is a post-racial deception unmoored from precedent and societal reality. SFFA deceives the polity and signals an all out assault on anti-discrimination law. To preserve its institutional legitimacy, the Roberts Court promotes doctrinal and conceptual distortions—post-racial deceptions of cognizable injuries advanced through reverse discrimination claims of white plaintiffs; racial proxy claims of discrimination proffered by Asian-Americans; and the fairness rationale of the Court’s circular post-racial edict that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion discards the anti-subordination principle of the Fourteenth Amendment and replaces it with a post-racial anti-differentiation principle: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Expanding the circularity of Chief Justice Roberts’s post-racialism even further, Justice Thomas’s concurrence offers an ostensibly originalist reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that erases the race-conscious history of the Reconstruction Amendments and reframes it as the codification of the Declaration of Independence. Rejecting this post-racial deception, Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, in dissent, foreground the anti-subordination principle as the essential doctrinal core of the Fourteenth Amendment and offer a rebuke of the Court’s facile post-racialism with a comprehensive discussion of systemic racism, structural inequality, and the present-day effects of past discrimination. The Court’s post-racial constitutionalism is a post-racial deception which must be discredited and rejected if we are to ever achieve the multi-racial democracy promised by the Second Founding.

Судебный штраф как проблемный институт уголовно-процессуального права

Interest in the subject of the study is caused by the relative novelty of the intersectoral – criminal and criminal procedure legal institution of a judicial fine competing with other forms of relief from criminal liability in terms of both grounds and procedure. It is highly demanded in practice, but ambiguously understood in theory due to the contradictory and inconsistent legal regulation. The purpose of the study is, based on the most complete identification and systematization of defects in the legal regulation of the procedure for terminating a criminal case with the judicial fine imposition, to determine promising directions for its development. The paper considers in detail the grounds and conditions for the termination of a criminal case with the judicial fine imposition as a complex intersectoral legal institution. The author indicates the shortcomings of contradictory and inconsistent legal regulation, which destroy the integrity and consistency of criminal procedure law, complicate understanding and reduce the effectiveness of its application. The results of the study confirmed the hypothesis about the extreme illogicality of the legal regulation of the procedure for terminating a criminal case with the judicial fine imposition, about the imperfection of wording used in Art. 251, Cap. 511 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, which makes understanding difficult and reduces the effectiveness of applying the rules of law. The author proposes to define more clearly in Art. 251 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation the grounds for terminating a criminal case and delimit them from the grounds for terminating a criminal case in connection with the mediation by the parties; eliminate the defective legal formulations; exclude the possibility of terminating unfinished proceedings in a criminal case by an unusual for the preliminary investigation body petition addressed to the court, as well as the procedure for its consideration not defined by law but recommended by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation according to the rules of Art. 108 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation.

Assessment of the influence of environmental factors on the efficiency of enterprise management

The article examines the theoretical aspects of the concept of external environment. In modern conditions, the external environment is considered as part of the business environment that forms the context of enterprises' activities. The success and efficiency of enterprises largely depend on their external environment and the ability of enterprises to adapt to changing environmental conditions. The article examines the definition of the concept of external environment and provides its definition. Two categories into which the external environment can be divided are researched: microenvironment (environment of direct influence) and macroenvironment (environment of indirect influence). The external environment factors affecting the activities of enterprises and their impact on these activities are studied. The importance of assessing the impact of the external environment and the impact of its factors on the activities of an enterprise is described. The following factors of the microenvironment are identified: customers, competitors, suppliers, intermediaries, financial and credit institutions, legal institutions, laws and government agencies. For the macro environment, such factors as: political and legal, economic, scientific and technological, socio-cultural, and environmental are identified. The article analyzes the definitions of the concept of efficiency of enterprise management provided by the authors of the studied publications and provides its own formulation of this concept. The article also presents three popular methods for assessing the impact of environmental factors: Porter's Five Competitive Forces, PEST-analysis, SWOT-analysis and demonstrates the results of using two of them: SWOT analysis and PEST analysis, based on a real company. The article also presents the results of calculating the coefficient of influence of macroeconomic factors on the functioning of an enterprise, which was calculated on the basis of the results of the PEST analysis. The article determines that in order to determine a broader picture of the impact of environmental factors on enterprises, a combined approach can be achieved by using a SWOT and PEST analysis. The article also indicates that due to the variability of the external environment, it is necessary to conduct regular monitoring.

АНАЛИЗ МЕЖДУНАРОДНОГО ОПЫТА И ПУТИ ВНЕДРЕНИЯ МОДЕЛИ ПРАВОВОГО РЕГУЛИРОВАНИЯ КОРПОРАТИВНЫХ ОТНОШЕНИЙ В СТРУКТУРУ ГРАЖДАНСКОГО КОДЕКСА РЕСПУБЛИКИ КАЗАХСТАН

The article discusses the issues and prospects of introducing a model of legal regulation of corporate relations into the structure of the Civil Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The positive international experience of corporate law in a number of foreign countries is analyzed. It should be emphasized that the path of a market economy followed by modern Kazakhstan requires the formation and fullfledged legislative consolidation of corporate law institutions, the norms of which will regulate corporate activities. Corporate relations are analyzed and, accordingly, regulated as an object of corporate law. At the same time, corporate law acts as a branch of civil law. There is no doubt about the well-known fact that such a legal institution as the regulation of the activities of legal entities follows from the effectively functioning Civil Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and a possible feature that may be related to the organizational and legal form remains to be regulated by the norms of special Legislative acts of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Attention is focused on the fact that the process of integration of Kazakhstan, which is currently taking place, poses new tasks to the legislator, one of which is to develop a uniform approach to the legal regulation of corporate relations, including through the improvement of Kazakh legislation. In turn, full-fledged legal regulation of corporate legal relations, which are a structural element of market relations, improvement of national legislation in this direction will have a direct impact on improving the investment climate in Kazakhstan and increasing the attractiveness of the Republic of Kazakhstan, including for foreign investors. This, in turn, can affect the expansion of Kazakhstani business, increase financial flows to the country, create jobs, etc., and as a positive result – increase the welfare of the people.

Cultural foundations of the educational system and legal upbringing in the conditions of contemporary political and legal reality transformation

The article focusses on the special nature of system structural changes occurring in modern Russian society, which directly reflect large-scale changes associated with internal and external aspects of integration of social, political, and legal institutions in the modern political and legal reality of the state, which significantly expands the instrumental sphere in the system of legal regulation, both in the general social context and in the strategic directions of the functioning of the Russian state. The authors have defined educational and legal-educational environment special spheres of modern state-legal space as the object of research because the most important system elements of the modern state function in the conditions of transformational changes in socio-economic, political-legal and socio-cultural plan. The aim of the work is the necessity to actualise a new concept of education in general, and higher education in particular, since in the modern world the institution of higher education is considered to be the most important factor in the development of human resources, in view of the fact that the factor of education in the future will be considered almost the main criterion for sustainable and successful development of any state. The methodological context of this paper is based on a combination of classical general scientific methodology and special techniques and means of scientific knowledge: comparative-legal, historical-legal, and concrete-sociological study of the problems posed in the paper.

Изменение социального облика финансового права на рубеже ХХ–ХХI веков

The consolidation of the Russian state as a social state in the Constitution of the Russian Federation required significant changes both in the system of domestic law and in the system of its individual branches. One of the leading industries that bore a significant “burden” to implement the corresponding transformation is financial law, which by that time, as scientists put it, occupied a “modest place” among other industries. The fulfillment of the assigned mission significantly contributed to changing not only the content, but also the role of financial law in the life of society, the state, and the individual. In essence, the social appearance of financial law has changed, which, although it should be social at its core, is not always clearly socially “coloured”. In this regard, the purpose of this study, based on the thesis about the change in the social image of financial law at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, is to argue for the presence of a social vector in the development of this branch of law as one of the special branches of the Russian legal system. Using historical, logical methods, as well as methods of comparative legal research and system analysis, the basic prerequisites and conditions for the corresponding transformation, as well as its features, are identified using the example of individual sub-sectors and institutions of financial law. The thesis about the implementation in the norms of financial law of the state’s targets for the implementation of plans and forecasts of socio-economic development is substantiated, it is proven that not only traditional financial and legal institutions (budgetary and legal, tax and legal) are involved in the implementation of the social tasks of the state, but also other (institutions of public banking law, money issue). The current financial legislation and individual acts of strategic planning are analyzed, which made it possible to argue the hypothesis that in the last three decades the social appearance of financial law has changed significantly: not only the socialization of financial law itself has occurred (external aspect), but its content has also changed, including changes the composition of its principles, system, subjects (intra-industry aspect).

A Different Alignment Problem: AI, the Rule of Law, and Outdated A Different Alignment Problem: AI, the Rule of Law, and Outdated Legal Institutions and Practices Legal Institutions and Practices

A Different Alignment Problem: AI, the Rule of Law, and Outdated A Different Alignment Problem: AI, the Rule of Law, and Outdated Legal Institutions and Practices Legal Institutions and Practices