So-called Law Research Articles

Towards a More Reasoned Application of the Robinson-Patman Act

We take an economic perspective to analyze the recurring criticisms of the Robinson-Patman Act as being anticompetitive or inefficient. We determine that the legislative history of the Act identifies economically rational objectives that are consistent with the efficiency concerns of so-called modern antitrust law. Further, we reject (as unnecessary and inconsistent with the Act’s clear goals and legislative intent) recent attempts to narrow the Act’s applications through judicial interpretation of provisions such as the cost justification defense, the “like grade and quality” requirement, and the competitive injury element.

When corporate social responsibility meets the challenges of rising globalisation risks

Global firms are facing great difficulties in containing new risks along their supply chains: reputation risks, contestation risks, safety risks and markets risks, as well as the risk of having to deal with new laws and more binding norms. The lack of internal control on these Global Value Chains is revealed through different social or environmental crises. Mass media are mobilised by NGOs and citizens as a means of pressure, which undermines the reputation of firms and therefore their immaterial assets. These crises show that the codes of conduct and the so-called soft law instruments fail to control the supply chain, but at the same time, these instruments begin to set new standards to face these new risks. This paper discusses this evolutionary institutional process, and stresses how CSR is not only a fiction but starts having real effects by creating new institutions to respond to risks. We will focus on reputation risks and markets risks to show that, even though CSR might not have led to a completely new system of rules, the institutional process under study has a meaningful impact on the regulatory framework.

The Foundations of Private Law in a Multilevel Structure: Balancing, Distribution of Lawmaking Power, and Other Constitutional Issues

This contribution is, first of all, a reflection on the distribution of power in relation to private law in the context of multilevel government, on the one hand, and relativization of this power by a so-called law market, on the other hand. It is also a reflection on the notion that law is a balancing activity (balancing values or interests). The author argues in favour of maintaining a normative perspective instead of recognizing as law everything that pretends to be law. He also argues in favour of the classical separation of powers and discusses the legitimacy of lawmaking by the different branches of power. Notions like pluralism and diversity tend to hide political choices that undermine classical values as equality before the law and the application of the law of the land. After an analysis of the arguments in favour of or against a centralization of lawmaking power on the European level, the author argues in favour of a reversal of the actual principles of division of power between the European Union and the Member States and thus in favour of a European Civil Code (ECC) that may be amended by the Member States.

Analyzing Sierra Leone's water reform efforts: law, environment, and sociocultural justice issues

Sierra Leone is in the process of reforming its water sector as part of its economic growth and development agenda, thereby providing an opportunity to formulate a coherent vision for water governance. Similar to other African countries with a British colonial legacy, Sierra Leone has a dual governance system in which Western statutes co-exist with and supersede so-called customary laws. Cultural differences exist in the two approaches to natural resource governance with implications for environmental and sociocultural justice. This legal dualism is further complicated in the postcolonial period by World Bank-led neoliberal water policy reforms. I analyze the extent to which Sierra Leone water law reform incorporates environmental, sociocultural, and human rights provisions embodied in selected African regional legal instruments and the global neoliberal agenda of water as an economic good. The findings for Sierra Leone have value for other postcolonial African countries with similar historical, political, economic, and sociocultural patterns.

Adequate Judicial Protectionn and Effective Application of EU Law in the Context of National Enforcement, Remedies and Compensation

EU law on judicial protection before Member State courts plays an essential role as to practical significance of EU law. This essay studies the so-called procedural autonomy case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, focusing on requirements for national remedial and procedural law and for national judgments. Judicial protection and related Member State obligations are manifold issues in EU law. In addition to the conundrum relating to the principle of and right to efficient judicial protection and their relationship to ‘Member State procedural autonomy’ principles of effectiveness and equivalence, nuances are visible in procedural autonomy reasoning itself. Aiming for effective application of EU law appears to lead to full effect-focused demands for national treatment so that interventions by the Court of Justice cannot be fully explained by the basic wordings of the principles of effectiveness and equivalence. A requirement of ‘adequate judicial protection’, which at times seems to be a facet of, especially, the principle of effectiveness but which may also ‘extend’ the twin principles, renders EU law on national enforcement complex. Instances where more stringent demands for national systems are relevant, as well as the detailed effects, are difficult to discern. This results in lack of clarity as to how national courts must treat future cases.

La parità di genere "assistita"

Over the past few years, a conspicuous number of countries has begun coping with the issue of gender inequality trying to delineate possible solutions. Concerns have been raised by the scarce share – and in many case lack – of women active in the legislative assemblies at different levels of government and in the decisional contexts where the fundamental and the most influential decisions spilling over the different life areas of a country are normally taken. Italy has been characterized by an underlining situation of backwardness in the last years, keeping still while the rest of the world was issuing laws to sustain a gender balance in the political scene. The approval of the 2015/2012 law was the turning point. This law transferred on the municipal level some of the mechanisms protecting the gender balance already in place at the regional level, in particular the double gender preference and the minimum gender threshold needed to form the electoral rolls. Starting with the adoption of this law, the Italian legislator showed the will of introducing at all governing levels instruments aimed at guaranteeing fair and equal opportunities of accessing the local political institutions for both men and women. This paper aims at demonstrating the positive impact unfolded by the 215/2012 law and the first article, paragraph 137 of the so-called Delrio's law on the equilibrium of gender of candidates, elected and appointed people during the municipal elections of May 2014. The research upon which the article is based has been conducted on a sample of 25 cities analysing and comparing the electoral results of the 2014 with the results of the previous elections (when no instruments of gender quality were applied).

Christelike etiek vanuit die perspektief van naasteliefde: Rudolf Bultmann en Stoïsynse etiek

Christian ethics from the perspective of neighbourly love: Rudolf Bultmann and Stoic ethics. This article consists of various sections. The first concerns a cultural-sensitive explanation of the meaning of the term ‘neighbour’. The second exemplifies Rudolf Bultmann’s understanding of the meaning of the love commandment which is found in the Jesus tradition and in the New Testament. This explanation represents a paraphrase of Bultmann’s reflection on the notion ’neighbourly love’ in Afrikaans. The article elaborates on Bultmann’s interpretation by means of expanded exegetical comments. The article also endorses Bultmann’s juxtaposition of Christian ethics with Greek Stoic ethics. This Greek heritage is described in an expanded way. The article discusses Bultmann’s understanding of neighbourly love within the context of the core values of his hermeneutics. The results are made relevant for the present-day Christian ethical perspective on the adherence to the so-called natural law, applied to the South African sociopolitical situation.

This Biosphere Which Is Not One: Towards Weird Essentialism

This essay uses the thought of Luce Irigaray as a very powerful way to imagine what ecological beings such as meadows and whales are like. For reasons given yet implicit in Irigaray's work, it is possible to extend what she argues about woman to include any being whatsoever. In particular, it is shown that to exist is to defy the so-called law of noncontradiction. Various paradoxes demonstrate that in order to care for beings that we consider to be ecological, such as meadows, we had better relax our adherence to this “law.” Ecological beings are, like Irigaray's woman, not one and not two. They cannot be thought as constantly, presently themselves, or as decomposable into other beings – not without violence. A side effect of the argument is that we can now use Irigaray to think a multiplicity of sexualities and gender identities.

Una revisión analítica sobre el papel de la tierra en la teoría económica de David Ricardo

<p>Este artículo tiene como objetivo central analizar el papel del recurso tierra en la teoría económica de David Ricardo como primer acercamiento al análisis económico de los recursos naturales. Esto se realiza mediante una revisión bibliográfica analítica de la obra de Ricardo y de otros autores en torno a la misma. En este sentido, se examina el concepto de renta de la tierra, así como los planteamientos en torno a la llamada ley de los rendimientos decrecientes. Asimismo, se establecen algunas reflexiones críticas con relación al enfoque de la renta de la tierra. Un resultado importante del trabajo es que en el análisis de la renta de Ricardo está ausente el concepto de costo de oportunidad, lo cual implica una reconsideración del concepto de renta para abordar el análisis económico de recursos naturales.</p>

A Stable Self-Similar Singularity of Evaporating Drops: Ellipsoidal Collapse to a Point

We study the problem of evaporating drops contracting to a point. Going back to Maxwell and Langmuir, the existence of a spherical solution for which evaporating drops collapse to a point in a self-similar manner is well established in the physical literature. The diameter of the drop follows the so-called D2 law: the second power of the drop-diameter decays linearly in time. In this study we provide a complete mathematical proof of this classical law. We prove that evaporating drops which are initially small perturbations of a sphere collapse to a point and the shape of the drop converges to a self-similar ellipsoid whose center, orientation, and semi-axes are determined by the initial shape.

Action Flow in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Rituals: a model based on Extended Synergetics and a Comment on the 4th Law

The flow of actions in rituals of obsessive individuals is discussed from a nonlinear physics perspective. An amplitude equation model based on extended synergetics is studied. The amplitude dynamics describes both the behavioral actions and the experienced emotions during obsessive-compulsive disorder rituals. The model suggests that in addition to the behavioral and emotional levels that are accessible to external observation and self-reports there are hidden levels captured by parameter dynamics that determine the action flow in obsessive-compulsive disorder rituals. The model can also be used to discuss on the mechanistic and behavioral levels differences between purposeful and purposeless rituals. While purposeful rituals involve a continuous control of the emotional level over the behavioral level, purposeless rituals do not exhibit such a continuous control mechanism. Finally, it is argued that the selection principle determining the action flow in obsessive-compulsive disorder rituals is consistent with the so-called 4th law of non-equilibrium phase transitions in animate and inanimate systems

Do Concealed Gun Permits Deter Crime? New Results from a Dynamic Model

In 1997, Lott and Mustard (1977) set off an ongoing controversy by famously contending that so-called shall-issue laws (SILs) -- state laws providing for the liberal issue of concealed gun permits -- deterred violent crime. They argued that these laws increase the probability that a would-be perpetrator's crime will fail because he is more likely to be threatened with a gun or shot by his intended victim. In this controversy the weapon of choice has been the diff-in-diff estimator applied to state and county panel data spanning various intervals of time and different investigators have come to different conclusions spanning from "more guns less crime" to "more guns more crime." This study brings to bear more general methods, a cohort panel data model (CPDM). Treating violent crime as a career, we interpret their deterrence hypothesis in the context of forward looking choices to enter and exit this career and estimate the corresponding cohort panel data model (CPDM). Our model distinguishes among three key parameters or effects of SILs, (i) a direct effect on entry decisions, (ii) a surprise effect on exit decisions by individuals who entered criminal careers prior to the passage of SILs, and (iiI) a selection effect on exit decisions on those how entered after the passage of SILs. Entry into a criminal career is confined to youth's "entry window." Thus, the evolution of crime rates depend on the evolution of the shares of the population in entry and exit windows and when these shares are covered by SILs. Applying generalized least squares with autocorrelated errors to state-panel data on changes in violent crime rates, our preliminary results strongly reject the deterrence hypotheses. Moreover, as the CPDM nests the diff-in-diff model, we reject the restrictions that reduce the CPDM to the diff-in-diff. Thirdly, we expect that future draft of this paper will shed light on the way the reliance on diff-in-diff estimator estimates has fueled the controversy. We can show that the diff-in-diff estimator is a weighted sum of the three key CPDM parameters and the weights depend on the span of years covered by the sample. Thus, for example, early investigators used samples that ended shortly after the initial wave of the adoption of SILs. Correspondingly, it seems likely that their estimated diff-in-diff parameters put heavy weight on (ii), the surprise effect. In contrast later investigators used longer sample periods covering more years since SILs were adopted and, we expect to show that their estimated diff-in-diff parameters were more a mix of the three effects and averaged out to no effect.

The Preference of Models over Laws of Nature in Chemistry

Although the notion of God as the legislator of nature was already known in the Jewish-Christian tradition, the modern concept of laws of nature was established only in the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy of nature, particularly by Descartes and Newton, and remained largely confined to that tradition before it became seriously questioned in quantum mechanics. After a brief historical survey, I first discuss various examples of so-called laws of nature in chemistry and physical chemistry proposed in the nineteenth century to conclude that none of them really correspond to the original concept, but that they rather comprise a variety of epistemologically different statements. More recent philosophical approaches to extend the concept of laws, so as to cover chemical cases, all result in inacceptable consequences. The deeper reason of the comparatively little importance of natural laws, I finally argue, is that chemistry as the original epitome of the experimental or Baconian science has largely followed methodological pluralism in which a variety of models to be chosen from for pragmatic reasons are preferred over universal laws of nature as in mathematical physics.

Transnational Law, Evolving

This chapter is the substantively revised and expanded version of the original contribution to the first edition of the Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law (J.Smits, ed. 2006, 738-754). It reviews and discusses the theoretical scholarship of transnational law, going back to Philip Jessup’s introduction of the term in the 1950s and tracing it to the present day. The chapter highlights the relevance and potential of transnational law – as a method of law and legal theory rather than as distinct or even new ‘field’ of law. It is therefore appropriate to investigate the processes and forms of transnationalization as they have changed important areas of law. The chapter focuses, in particular, on commercial law with an emphasis on the so-called law merchant, or the lex mercatoria, on corporate law and corporate governance regulation, international human rights law and transnational human rights litigation, comparative and transnational constitutionalism, transnational legal anthropology as well as the more recent emergence of ‘global administrative law’. It closes with a few reflections on the impact of this transformation of law on current attempts of curriculum reform and law school competition.

Market Implications of Miniaturized Satellites: High-Performance Microsats and the Oversupply in Launchers' Attributes Set the Conditions for Market Disruption

Abstract Microsatellite performance is rapidly evolving. Key performance indicators (resolution, downlink rate, etc.) improve more than an order of magnitude per decade approximating the so-called Moore's law, a phenomenon identified in the semiconductor industry. This is empowering microsatellites to perform increasingly challenging missions beyond technology demonstrations. Despite the increasing demand for light launch opportunities, launch providers are ignoring this trend and putting all their efforts on heavy launchers. The clear oversupply in launch capacity makes microsatellites sacrifice key attributes such as orbit selection or launch date definition hindering their operability. This article aims at understanding how microsatellites and the advent of a dedicated microsatellite launcher could disrupt the satellite industry. To analyze this disrupting innovation, Clayton M. Christensen's perspective is applied. This framework helps in understanding the value a dedicated launcher would bring to the...

Violencia y política colombiana

El presente artículo de reflexión comienza con un breve recorrido por el contexto político del país, en el que surgen los dos principales partidos políticos colombianos. En segundo lugar, abordamos los diferentes enfoques y estudios que se han realizado en el país sobre la Violencia, lo cual implica referirnos al conflicto interno que vive el país. En tercer lugar, reseñamos el inicio de la guerrilla, el nacimiento de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), el Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) y el Movimiento 19 de abril (M-19). Finalmente, tratamos los inicios y desarrollos de lo que se ha denominado paramilitarismo, su vinculación con el narcotráfico y la clase política hasta llegar a la expedición de la llamada Ley de Justicia y Paz.

Optional Law in Property: Theoretical and Empirical Critiques

Since Calabresi & Melamed’s seminal article on property rules and liability rules, numerous law and economic articles have debated the efficiency of these two rules. Many of the follow-up articles contend that Calabresi & Melamed are wrong in arguing that property rules are more efficient when transaction costs are low. Put-option liability rules and other sub-types of liability rules have been developed, and they are claimed to be superior to property rules. As several property scholars have pointed out, however, the shadow examples in this so-called optional law literature are not property laws, and they have contended that property rules should be the default in property law. Built on this line of literature, this article argues that Calabresi & Melamed are actually correct — property rules are indeed more efficient than liability rules in property law in a low transaction-cost setting, because property rules better harness private information. In addition, this article develops a theory as to when call-option liability rules might be more efficient. This article also argues that Rules 3 and 4 are either unnecessary concepts or inefficient entitlement protection rules in the area of property, and that put-option liability rules are less efficient than call-option liability rules in property, because calls utilize private information better than puts. Finally, this article contends that liability rules are intrinsically different from financial options and legal options; thus, the option analogy is better avoided.

Smoking ban policies in Italy and the impact of the so-called Sirchia law: state of the art eight years after

Background Currently, smokers in Italy are around 11 million: of them 43.5% are women. From January 2005 is into force the Law No 3 of January 2003 (the so called Sirchia Law named after the Health Ministry who promoted it) that banned smoking in all indoor public places. The aim of the present work is to describe the state of the art of tobacco habits in Italy, eight years after the law was introduced. Methods Based on a national survey conducted by the National …

The social perceptual salience effect.

Affective processes appraise the salience of external stimuli preparing the agent for action. So far, the relationship between stimuli, affect, and action has been mainly studied in highly controlled laboratory conditions. In order to find the generalization of this relationship to social interaction, we assess the influence of the salience of social stimuli on human interaction. We constructed reality ball game in a mixed reality space where pairs of people collaborated in order to compete with an opposing team. We coupled the players with team members with varying social salience by using both physical and virtual representations of remote players (i.e., avatars). We observe that, irrespective of the team composition, winners and losers display significantly different inter- and intrateam spatial behaviors. We show that subjects regulate their interpersonal distance to both virtual and physical team members in similar ways, but in proportion to the vividness of the stimulus. As an independent validation of this social salience effect, we show that this behavioral effect is also displayed in physiological correlates of arousal. In addition, we found a strong correlation between performance, physiology, and the subjective reports of the subjects. Our results show that proxemics is consistent with affective responses, confirming the existence of a social salience effect. This provides further support for the so-called law of apparent reality, and it generalizes it to the social realm, where it can be used to design more efficient social artifacts.

METAL–INSULATOR TRANSITION AND THE TEMPERATURE OF THE PSEUDOGAP ANOMALY OPENING IN PRASEODYMIUM DOPED Y1-zPrzBa2Cu3O7-δ SINGLE CRYSTALS

The influence of praseodymium doping on the electrical resistivity in the ab-plane of Y 1-z Pr z Ba 2 Cu 3 O 7-δ single crystals, is investigated. It is determined that as the concentration of praseodymium (0.0 ≤ z ≤ 0.5) is rising there occurs a significant shift of the temperature regions, corresponding to the metal–insulator transitions, as well as to the regime of the implementation of the pseudogap anomaly. The part of the curves related to the metal–insulator transition are well described by means of an asymptotic dependence that corresponds to the implementation of a quantum critical regime in the system, the so-called law of the "one third".