Legal systems and bank development

In some countries, banks are firms’ key source of financing. In others, firms look mainly to credit markets to meet their financial needs. Why should this be so? New research suggests that a country’s legal tradition strongly influences which financial system becomes dominant there.Banking law ; Finance

Norms and Law: Putting the Horse Before the Cart

Law and society scholars have long been fascinated with the interplay of formal legal and informal extralegal procedures. Unfortunately, the fascination has been accompanied by imprecision, and scholars have conceptually conflated two very different mechanisms that extralegally resolve disputes. One set of mechanisms might be described as the shadow of the law, made famous by seminal works by Professors Stewart Macaulay and Marc Galanter, in which social coercion and custom have force because formal legal rights are credible and reasonably defined. The other set of mechanisms, recently explored by economic historians and legal institutionalists, might be described as order without law, borrowing from Professor Robert Ellickson\u27s famous work.1 In this second mechanism, extralegal mechanisms—whether organized shunning, violence, or social disdain—replace legal coercion to bring social order and are an alternative to, not an extension of, formal legal sanctions. One victim of conflating these mechanisms has been our understanding of industry-wide systems of private law and private adjudication, or private legal systems. Recent examinations of private legal systems have chiefly understood those systems as efforts to economize on litigation and dispute-resolution costs, but private legal systems are better understood as mechanisms that economize on enforcement costs. This is not a small mischaracterization. Instead, it reveals a deep misunderstanding of when and why private enforcement systems arise in a modern economy. This Essay provides a taxonomy for the various mechanisms of private ordering. These assorted mechanisms, despite their important differences, have been conflated in large part because there has been a poor understanding of the particular institutional efficiencies and costs of the alternative systems. Specifically, enforcement costs have often been inadequately distinguished from procedural or disputeresolution costs, and this imprecision has produced theories that inaccurately predict when private ordering will thrive and when the costs of private ordering overwhelm corresponding efficiencies. The implications for institutional theory are significant, as confusion in the literature has led to overappreciation of private ordering, underappreciation of social institutions, and Panglossian attitudes toward both lawlessness and legal development

Two Paradigms of Jurisdiction

Globalization causes convergence of legal orders. Or so it is argued. Law and economics scholars predict that legal orders will move towards the same efficient end state. They argue that the requirements of globalization will pressure legal orders to converge on the level of economic efficiency, because regulatory competition between legal orders makes it impossible for individual legal systems to maintain suboptimal solutions. Many comparative lawyers predict a similar convergence. In particular traditional functionalist comparatists have long held that unification of law was both desirable and unavoidable. Their basic argument is based on functional equivalence and can be summarized as follows: legal systems may look different because they have different doctrines and institutions; these differences, however, are only superficial, because the institutions fulfill the same functions and are therefore actually similar. Realizing that legal orders are already similar in substance should make it easy to unify the law formally as well

Generating Rembrandt: Artificial Intelligence, Copyright, and Accountability in the 3A Era--The Human-like Authors are Already Here- A New Model

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are creative, unpredictable, independent, autonomous, rational, evolving, capable of data collection, communicative, efficient, accurate, and have free choice among alternatives. Similar to humans, AI systems can autonomously create and generate creative works. The use of AI systems in the production of works, either for personal or manufacturing purposes, has become common in the 3A era of automated, autonomous, and advanced technology. Despite this progress, there is a deep and common concern in modern society that AI technology will become uncontrollable. There is therefore a call for social and legal tools for controlling AI systems’ functions and outcomes. This Article addresses the questions of the copyrightability of artworks generated by AI systems: ownership and accountability. The Article debates who should enjoy the benefits of copyright protection and who should be responsible for the infringement of rights and damages caused by AI systems that independently produce creative works. Subsequently, this Article presents the AI Multi- Player paradigm, arguing against the imposition of these rights and responsibilities on the AI systems themselves or on the different stakeholders, mainly the programmers who develop such systems. Most importantly, this Article proposes the adoption of a new model of accountability for works generated by AI systems: the AI Work Made for Hire (WMFH) model, which views the AI system as a creative employee or independent contractor of the user. Under this proposed model, ownership, control, and responsibility would be imposed on the humans or legal entities that use AI systems and enjoy its benefits. This model accurately reflects the human-like features of AI systems; it is justified by the theories behind copyright protection; and it serves as a practical solution to assuage the fears behind AI systems. In addition, this model unveils the powers behind the operation of AI systems; hence, it efficiently imposes accountability on clearly identifiable persons or legal entities. Since AI systems are copyrightable algorithms, this Article reflects on the accountability for AI systems in other legal regimes, such as tort or criminal law and in various industries using these systems

A Holistic Vision of the Socio-Legal Terrain

Tamanaha discusses Marc Galanter\u27s holistic vision of the socio-legal terrain. Galanter\u27s socio-legal vision has two central overlapping foci, and he always keeps an eye on each and on their interaction. The first focus is the official state legal system, which he examines from every conceivable angle: who becomes lawyers, how are they trained, how many lawyers are there, what are the circumstances of their work environment, who pays for their services. Galanter also focuses on what they are not doing (intentionally or otherwise), inquiring into the implications and consequences of their inaction. These inquiries extend from the official legal system to engage, encompass, and interact with Galanter\u27s second central focus: the social realm of intercourse and regulation. This social realm, in Galanter\u27s vision, is chock full of a plurality of interacting, overlapping, active regulatory systems of every kind-from religious systems, to corporations, to sports leagues, to the family

A Review of Renaud Colson’s and Stewart Field’s ‘The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Comparing France with England and Wales’

This material was first published by Sweet and Maxwell Limited in Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos 'A Review of Renaud Colson’s and Stewart Field’s ‘The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Comparing France with England and Wales', Criminal Law Review, 10, pp. 863-867 and is reproduced by agreement with the publishers.This book opens with forewords by two of the most exceptional contemporary legal minds in the English and French legal systems: Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the first president of the UK Supreme Court, and Robert Badinter, former president of the Conseil constitutionnel, eminent scholar and politician known for his tireless contributions on criminal justice and human rights issues. Lord Phillips finds that “this is an erudite comparative study of recent reforms to the English and French criminal justice systems”, which shows how “reforms have brought the two systems closer together”, thus being “of interest to those who have been brought up to consider the two systems as dissimilar as chalk and cheese” (p.7)

Civil Justice Systems in Europe and the United States

Professor Kötz delivered the inaugural Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law in 2002 and this article is based on his remarks. The article is included in the inaugural volume of CICLOPs that collects the first six Bernstein lectures. In order to highlight the similarities and differences in legal regimes between Europe and the United States, Professor Hein Kötz analyzes the German and American civil legal systems and, to a minor extent, the British civil legal system. Specifically, Kötz focuses on one of the distinguishing features of the American legal system, the civil jury, and its impact on the structure and flow of the civil court case. By targeting this feature of the American system, he highlights the differences in values held by each society, the impact these differing values have in altering fairly similar legal objectives, and the mechanisms that are created to fulfill these objectives, as well as the consequences of such mechanisms. Kötz shows how the American preference for a jury over a judge as the trier of fact for a civil trial greatly impacts a number of aspects of the trial, including discovery, the role of the judge, and the approach governing the introduction of expert testimony. This comparison puts into relief not only the differences between the two systems, but also the benefits and drawbacks of each. These differences are highlighted particularly well through the use of examples of solutions found within the legal systems to deal with unique problems – such as the American class-action suit