Guilty by Association: Small-World Problem Emphasizes Critical Need for Business Strategies in Response to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Corporatization of state owned press institutions in Egypt : an adapted corporate governance index

This study analyzes the published corporate governance guidelines and related documents of the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian Media Group and Thomson Reuters and accordingly creates an adapted corporate governance index suitable for implementation on the state-owned press institutions in Egypt with the aim of moving them towards a greater degree of corporatization. The notion of the research is that the legislations and board structures of state owned press institutions in Egypt don’t fit their mandate and that corporate governance needs to be applied to these institutions to make them eligible for market. Qualitative content analysis is applied to the studied documents and in depth interviews are conducted with ten media and academic experts to realize the proposed index. The study adopts three justified approaches, public interest, stakeholders’ benefit and agency governance approaches. The index is then applied as an assessment tool to Al-Ahram state owned press institution

The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information

The United States government leaks like a sieve. Presidents denounce the constant flow of classified information to the media from unauthorized, anonymous sources. National security professionals decry the consequences. And yet the laws against leaking are almost never enforced. Throughout U.S. history, roughly a dozen criminal cases have been brought against suspected leakers. There is a dramatic disconnect between the way our laws and our leaders condemn leaking in the abstract and the way they condone it in practice. This Article challenges the standard account of that disconnect, which emphasizes the difficulties of apprehending and prosecuting offenders, and advances an alternative theory of leaking. The executive branch\u27s leakiness is often taken to be a sign of organizational failure. The Article argues it is better understood as an adaptive response to external liabilities (such as the mistrust generated by presidential secret keeping and media manipulation) and internal pathologies (such as overclassification and bureaucratic fragmentation) of the modern administrative state. The leak laws are so rarely enforced not only because it is hard to punish violators, but also because key institutional actors share overlapping interests in maintaining a permissive culture of classified information disclosures. Permissiveness does not entail anarchy, however, as a nuanced system of informal social controls has come to supplement, and all but supplant, the formal disciplinary scheme. In detailing these claims, the Article maps the rich sociology of governmental leak regulation and explores a range of implications for executive power, national security, democracy, and the rule of law

Addressing Information Asymmetry In The Social Contract: An Archival-diplomatic Approach To Open Government Data Curation

This thesis shows that the concepts and practices developed in the field of record-keeping can be applied to the curation of open government data to strengthen the trustworthiness of that data. It begins by situating open government data in the context of the social contract, which operates through the exchange of information. The thesis develops the notions of the ‘record-as-command’ and ‘data-as-command’ to explain the dialogical but asymmetrical information relationship between the individual and the state, which is modelled as a principal-agent problem. Using concepts from information economics, the study argues that open government data is the latest monitoring mechanism in a long history of government secrecy and openness. This establishes the significance of the curation of open government data beyond technical questions. The thesis then considers how trustworthiness has figured in thinking about record-keeping, identifying three core record-keeping controls; 1) metadata used to document 2) custodianship in 3) auditable systems. To show how these three broad controls have been put into practice, the study examines two examples of record-keeping guidance, one for paper records and one for hybrid records, which demonstrates the application of the three core controls across time and media. The study then looks for the presence or absence of these controls in government datasets published in Kenya and Australia. These analyses trace the datasets back to their source(s), at each step looking for evidence of custodial and curatorial interventions documented in metadata managed in auditable systems. The study’s contribution to open government data work is its demonstration of the value of record-keeping controls in the curation of data. Additionally, the study contributes new insights to information in the principal-agent problem of the social contract, contributes to archival theory and finds a need to foster critical data literacy in the body politic if open government data is to be read and used to correct information asymmetry

Anti-corruption commissions: lessons for the Asia-Pacific region from a proposed Australian federal anti-corruption watchdog

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper reviews the experience of anti-corruption commissions in the region and argues that the debate on the establishment of a national anti-corruption body in Australia is dependent on the country’s political culture, institutions and elites. Corruption and integrity coexist and are conceived as the obverse and converse, respectively, of a functional and dysfunctional system. Anti-corruption bodies in the Asia-Pacific region are compared against applicable global anti-corruption frameworks, policies and principles. The paper proposes a conceptual model for a National Integrity Ecosystem (NIE), premised on community values and trust and situates the Australian experience within such an ecosystem. A federal anti-corruption watchdog is the missing piece in Australia’s institutional infrastructure. Its acceptance and effectiveness require difficult and sustained change in the underlying political culture of the country and its elites

Does transparency come at the cost of charitable services? Evidence from investigating British charities

Recent high-profile scandals related to misuse of funding and donations have raised the demand for scrutiny over financial transparency and operational activities of non-profit organizations in developed countries. Our analysis challenges the common practice in the sector of using programme ratios and overhead costs as indicators for non-profit accountability. Using Benford's Law to measure irregularities in financial data for a large sample of public charities we estimate that 25% of the sample potentially misreport their financial information. We show theoretically and empirically that charities with a higher programme ratio (their level of spending on charitable activities), will be less likely to misreport their financial information only when their overhead costs (spending on governing activities) are also sufficiently high. Tighter monitoring becomes ineffective in increasing the sectoral transparency and accountability unless accompanied by a sufficiently high level of charitable spending

Public Law and Economics

This comprehensive textbook applies economic analysis to public law. The economic analysis of law has revolutionized legal scholarship and teaching in the last half-century, but it has focused mostly on private law, business law, and criminal law. This book extends the analysis to fundamental topics in public law, such as the separation of government powers, regulation by agencies, constitutional rights, and elections. Every public law involves six fundamental processes of government: bargaining, voting, entrenching, delegating, adjudicating, and enforcing. The book devotes two chapters to each process, beginning with the economic theory and then applying the theory to a wide range of puzzles and problems in law. Each chapter concentrates on cases and legal doctrine, showing the relevance of economics to the work of lawyers and judges. Featuring lucid, accessible writing and engaging examples, the book addresses enduring topics in public law as well as modern controversies, including gerrymandering, voter identification laws, and qualified immunity for police