Legal Institutional Structure Research Articles

Теоретические воззрения на правовую природу и юридическую конструкцию договора морской перевозки грузов в научных трудах начала ХХ в.

The issues of determining the legal structure of legal institutions have always been acute in the doctrine. The article deals with the theoretical concepts of the contract for the carriage of goods by sea at the beginning of the 20th century. It is noted that all the studied positions of scientists have a certain value and signifi cance. According to the author, despite the fact that the main provisions of the contract in question were refl ected precisely in the civil legislation of that period, it represented an independent, unique, complex type of sui generis contract. The paper shows the importance of theoretical study of the contract for the carriage of goods by sea in a historical context and its infl uence on the evolution of domestic legislation.

Legal-Institutional Typology of the Subject of Economic Security

The article considers the problems of development of legal regulation in economic security. It evaluates the questions of formation of institutional factors, which define the system of legal prevention of threats to economic security.The study investigates the problems of transformation of economic security into one of the fundamental categories of the current right, which in turn defined the direction and depth of legal institutional structure of economic security at all levels. The factors impacting the growth of scientific and applied interest towards the conceptual, legal and institutional interpretations of economic security have been defined. Current legislation allowing to define the features of subject relations in the given sphere is being analysed.The research of acting Russian legislation, as well as the process of identifying the institutional and legal subjects of economic security, allow to construct the model of economic security with phenomenological method of thinking.Modern forms of institutionalization of legal support for economic security are based on the experience of leading regions across the world. The article points out that domestic legal science has significantly improved in conceptualizing the problems of economic security on the basis of classic examples of effective innovation activity.The article investigates the problems of legal institutionalization of the subjects of economic security, as well as carries out the search for effective measures to counteract the damaging tendencies in the economic sphere.

The illiberal trading state

Liberal systemic theory is built on the assumption that the system’s dominant configuration is a Kantian confederation of major powers. In addition to being a democratic cluster, the liberal core is also a capitalist club. This article pushes systemic and socialization theory forward by introducing the mechanism of economic competition as an important driver of socialization. The article develops a theory of system-level competition, arguing that it is a distinct and co-equal mechanism of socialization to the established mechanisms of persuasion, inducement, and coercion. The article proposes a three-staged model of socialization that explains how prominent rising powers such as Turkey, India, Brazil, and China are being socialized into the liberal system. At the first phase, competitive pressure, outsiders are led to orient themselves toward the core out of a fear of falling behind and a desire to access network benefits. At the second phase, rushing, outsiders behave in pro-norm ways and make significant concessions in order to gain inclusion in the core’s institutional complex. At the third phase, internalization, external norms become embedded in domestic legal institutional structures and a robust pro-norm domestic coalition emerges. The article uses the case of China to illustrate the model and lend it some initial empirical support in one hard case.

Emotion and the Law

The field of law and emotion draws from a range of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to shed light on the emotions that pervade the legal system. It utilizes insights from these disciplines to illuminate and assess the implicit and explicit assumptions about emotion that animate legal reasoning, legal doctrine, the behavior of legal actors, and the structure of legal institutions. In light of law's focus on influencing social norms and on structuring effective and just institutions, one development that holds enormous promise is the growing interdisciplinary interest in collective decision making and in the emotional dynamics of groups. Work in the affective sciences on how emotion and cognition interact is another rich vein for legal scholars interested in the assessment of responsibility and blame, the role of morality in law, and a host of other areas. Another important frontier is exploration of concrete solutions to the problems identified by law and emotion scholars.

A Second Look at the 2007-08 Food Price Crisis: Considering the Impact of Endogenous Dynamics on Food Prices

This paper offers an alternative to the conventional explanation of the 2007-08 food price crisis in terms of escalating demand or dwindling supply. Instead, its focus is on the legal-institutional structure of commodity futures markets, which has witnessed a drastic alteration in the role of speculators. These have transformed from “market makers” (that keep commodity futures markets liquid by arbitraging on price fluctuations) to breakers. Index speculation, in particular, has had the effect of muddling information about market fundamentals because of the need – brought about by commodity index swaps – for swap dealers to hedge the fluctuations of an index of commodity prices by opening and periodically rolling over long-only positions. This periodical rollover to comply with contractual obligations, rather than in response to anticipated fluctuations in the availability of a commodity in the future, can induce a contango bias in the commodity futures market that, in turn, might have given the wrong signals to market operators, leading to a condition of induced (rather than pre-existing) scarcity and to an increase in spot prices in the 2007-08 crisis.

ICMS ecológico: uma iniciativa dos governos estaduais para a preservação ambiental

The evidence that environmental imbalances represent a serious and imminent threat to the future of mankindhas prompted concrete actions in the environmental field. One of these actions has been the creation of the“Environmental Sales Tax (ICMS)”, which is the focus of this study. It is based on the premise that theresponsible protection and management of natural resources can reverse the current state of environmentaldegradation, reaching a level of sustainable economic development. As an alternative to conciliate economicgrowth without destroying the environment, several Brazilian states have created specially protected areas,named conservation units. In addition to augmenting their revenues, the cities fulfill their role in contributingfor the improvement in quality of life within their communities. Based on this context, this study aims topresent the criteria for forwarding the Environmental ICMS in the city of Maringá. Based as a descriptiveand exploratory research study, it verified that by using an environmental criterion, the law rewards citiesthat adopt a conservationist policy and host conservation units within their borders. The results demonstratedthat the city of Maringá has received this incentive since 1991 due to the parks that already exist in that city. Furthermore, this revenue can be raised by using policies of management and conservation of these areas,as well as by including the city’s Natural Heritage Private Reserves. It can be concluded that the EnvironmentalICMS is an economic tool for fiscal incentive that can be easily implemented, as it is perfectly adapted to theBrazilian legal institutional structure.

Accountability and Global Governance: The Case of Iraq

This article explores issues concerning accountability and global governance by looking at three cases involving Iraq: the economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council; the operation of the Oil for Food Program; and the US-led occupation authority and its management of Iraqi funds. In all three cases the problems that emerge are rooted only in part in criminal acts or failures to meet legal responsibilities. The failures of accountability that took place in these cases included also abuses of power and forms of corruption that had been legitimated within legal institutional structures. An examination of these cases helps to illustrate what accountability can demand, as well as the kinds of diverse institutional arrangements that can undermine it. In the Oil for Food Program, there was corruption despite elaborate structures of oversight. In the case of the US-led occupation authority's management of Iraqi funds, the corruption was tied to systematic procedures that eliminated structures of oversight. I argue that the abuses that occurred in these cases were not due to a lack of understanding about what might bring greater integrity to the processes involved. Rather, they illustrate how well the structures of accountability and integrity were already understood, as evidenced in the systematic efforts to evade and compromise those structures.

Privatization and the Courts: How Judicial Structures Shaped German Privatization

This article examines how legal institutional structures shaped the process of East German privatization by the Treuhandanstalt. It argues that the courts, as an important venue for oversight and accountability, were central to achieving the rapid and narrowly defined privatization carried out by the agency. Moreover, the experience of privatization after 1989 suggests the courts played a far more important role in shaping economic policy than one would have expected from traditional scholarship on public agencies, the courts, or the German legal system.

Constructing a Constitution for Trade in Services

HE NEED for some kind of international coordination and cooperation concerning trade in services across borders has become apparent. While there exists an international legal framework (albeit troubled and evolving) for trade in goods, there is very little such framework for trade in services, except in certain specific industries. Services make up a greater percentage of the gross national product (GNP) of major industrialized countries than the production of goods and they also comprise a significant percentage of world trade. These considerations were among those which led the contracting parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to include provisions for negotiating agreements on trade in services in the declaration issued after the special ministerial meeting, held in September 1986 at Punta del Este, that launched the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, the eighth such round in the forty-year history of the GATT. ’ Because of the great variety of service activities, because they often do not involve tangible property and because it is sometimes difficult or impossible to identify when a service ‘crosses a border’, the national or international regulation of service activities is very difficult. For similar reasons, it will be very difficult to develop a new legal framework for trade in services. The GATT model is often cited as a possible approach. Because of the great differences between trade in services and trade in goods, however, it is quite doubtful whether the GATT model could be followed very closely. The purpose of this article is to explore, in the context of the Uruguay Round negotiations, the possible legal-institutional structure which could be used to develop an international discipline on trade in services and to compare such a structure with the GATT model. The ideas and reflections expressed in the article stem partly from considerable discussion about trade in services with other scholars, government officials and policy makers. No special claim to originality for many of these ideas is made,