The Changing Legal Environment and ICWA in Alaska: A Regional Study

By 1974, according to the Association of American Indian Affairs, approximately 25 to 35 percent of all Indian children were separated from their families and placed in foster homes, adoptive homes, or institutions.The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed in 1978 in response to this overwhelming evidence that Native children were being adopted out of tribes at alarming rates. ICWA mandates that tribes and Alaska Native villages have jurisdiction over their child welfare cases, and mandates certain rules when Native children's cases are heard in state courts, including permitting the tribe to intervene in the state case at any time, higher levels of proof, and special evidentiary requirements. This report describes the current implementation status of ICWA in Interior and Southcentral Alaska, with an analysis of the changing legal environment and its significance for Alaska Native villages. In Alaska, recent changes in state law and state court acceptance of the tribal role in ICWA proceedings has legally eliminated state resistance to tribes transferring cases from state court to their own forums, and may lead to a change in the numbers of cases heard in tribal courts in Alaska.Bureau of Indian AffairsAcknowledgements / Introduction / Historical Analysis of ICWA Implementation in Alaska / Ethnographic analysis of ICWA implementation in Alaska / Conclusion / Recommendations / Bibliography / Appendix: Eklutna Questionnair

To steal or not to steal: Firm attributes, legal environment, and valuation

Newly released data on corporate governance and disclosure practices reveal wide within-country variation, with the variation increasing as legal environment gets less investor friendly. This paper examines why firms practice high-quality governance when law does not require it; firm attributes that are related to the quality of governance; how the attributes interact with legal environment; and the relation between firm valuation and corporate governance. A simple model, in which a controlling shareholder trades off private benefits of diversion against costs that vary across countries and time, identifies three relevant firm attributes: investment opportunities, external financing, and ownership structure. Using firm-level governance and transparency data on 859 firms in 27 countries, we find that firms with greater growth opportunities, greater needs for external financing, and more concentrated cash flow rights practice higher-quality governance and disclose more. Moreover, firms that score higher in governance and transparency rankings are valued higher in the stock market. Equally important, all these relations are stronger in countries that are less investor friendly, demonstrating that firms do adapt to poor legal environments to establish efficient governance practices.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39939/3/wp554.pd

The Legal Environment and the Choice of Default Resolution Alternatives: An Empirical Analysis

In addition to standard foreclosure, three other methods of resolution for mortgage defaults are available: bankruptcy protection, surrender of deed to the lender, and pre-foreclosure sale. This paper develops a model that specifies the choice of resolution method as a function of the state-specific legal environment and local area economic conditions. A large national data set is used to estimate a multinomial logit choice model for the 1987 to 1991 period. The results indicate that the choice of default resolution alternative is sensitive to the legal environment. The results imply that selected legal reforms will tend to improve the efficiency of the default resolution process.

The judiciary and the contributions of the Brazilian code of civil procedure in legal security, predictability and consistency of decisions-model inspired by the English system (judicial accountability)

Based on the effectiveness of the guarantees of legal certainty, predictability and fairness, this article analyzes the main contributions of the Code of Civil Procedure (Law 13.105 / 2015). With this scope, we introduce initial considerations of some statistics on the increase of the litigation in Brazil and the phenomenon of judicial subjectivism; to explore some of the most relevant mechanisms brought by the CPC that contribute significantly to the construction of a legal environment based on the principles of legal certainty, stability and equality; with clear inspiration in the common law, especially in the English system. This study used the hypothetic-deductive method, based on the literature, the legal system and jurisprudence

Comparisons Between Public and Private Sector Union Wage Differentials: Does the Legal Environment Matter?

A stylized fact in the growing literature on public sector labor markets is that estimates of public sector union wage premia are significantly lower than estimates of private sector union wage premia. In this paper I investigate the hypothesis that this difference may in part be due to the differing legal environments in which public and private sector unions operate. Using data from the Current Population Survey and the Census of Population, I find that public sector union wage differentials increase significantly with the degree of legal protection afforded to the union in bargaining. However, the estimated public sector union wage premia when no legal controls are included in the specification are close to the estimated premia under the strongest legal environment. Consequently, while controlling for the legal environment in the public Sector is important, it may not reconcile the differences between estimated public and private sector union wage premia.

Toward a Writing-Centered Legal Education

The future of legal education—and experiential learning—should be grounded in a curriculum that requires students to take writing courses throughout law school. Additionally, the curriculum should be one that collapses the distinction between doctrinal, legal writing, and clinical faculty, as well as merges analytical, practical, and clinical instruction into a real world curriculum. The justification for a writing-intensive program of legal education is driven by the reality that persuasive writing ability is among the most important skills a lawyer must possess and a skill that many lawyers and judges claim graduates lack. Part of the problem is that law schools dedicate fewer than six credits to required legal writing courses and treat legal writing faculty as if they were second-class citizens. That should stop now. In making legal education more writing-centered, law schools can help struggling students to become competent writers, cultivate an educational environment in which good writers can become great writers, and bridge the divide between legal education and law practice

Oh, the Treatise!

This foreword to the Michigan Law Review’s 2013 Survey of Books Related to the Law considers the history of the American legal treatise in light of the well-known criticisms of legal scholarship published by Judge Harry Edwards in 1992. As part of his critique, Edwards characterized the legal treatise as “[t]he paradigm of ‘practical’ legal scholarship.” In his words, treatises “create an interpretive framework; categorize the mass of legal authorities in terms of this framework; interpret closely the various authoritative texts within each category; and thereby demonstrate for judges or practitioners what ‘the law’ requires.” Part I examines the origins of the legal treatise and its early importance to the U.S. lawyers; Part II the impact that the massive growth in published case law had on the treatise during the latter part of the nineteenth century; and Part III the implications for the treatise of shifts from print to electronic formats in the twentieth century. The Foreword concludes by speculating briefly on the continuing need for the treatise in light of Edwards’s concerns and its place in the digital legal information environment