Legal Regimes and Political Particularism: An Assessment of the Legal Families Theory from the Perspectives of Comparative Law and Political Economy

The “legal families” theory of corporate law and ownership structures pioneered by Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-deSilanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny provides one of the most influential accounts of why “law matters” in shaping economic organization and outcomes. However, the empirical bases and theoretical logic of the theory contain serious flaws and limitations. First, as has been pointed out by a number of critics engaged in this revision, the legal origins literature contains numerous problematic characterizations of substantive law that expose the serious problems of quantitative operationalization of legal rules as a mode of comparative legal analysis. Second, the econometrics analysis of broad, cross-national patterns of legal and financial system characteristics departs from the theoretical and practical concerns of law as an academic and professional discipline focused on intra-systemic behavior. Third, the legal families theory is essentially an underspecified, path-dependent account of political economic development that is, at the very least, in logical tension with observable changes in law and financial system structures of both the past and present. Fourth, the methodology does not adequately distinguish between countries in which the rule of law and functional political and legal institutions are well-established (generally the advanced industrial countries) and those in which they are not (generally less developed countries (LDCs), often with significant post-colonial legacies). Given these flaws in, and limitations of, the legal families theory, the intuitively appealing thesis that law matters must be resituated in a more empirically persuasive and historically sensitive account of the relationship between law and politics. I speculate that any meaningful correlation between legal origins and economic outcomes is the product of politics in the first instance rather than law, and that legal families likely function as a proxy for different forms of political economic organization

Legal Regimes and Political Particularism: An Assessment of the Legal Families Theory from the Perspectives of Comparative Law and Political Economy

The “legal families” theory of corporate law and ownership structures pioneered by Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-deSilanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny provides one of the most influential accounts of why “law matters” in shaping economic organization and outcomes. However, the empirical bases and theoretical logic of the theory contain serious flaws and limitations. First, as has been pointed out by a number of critics engaged in this revision, the legal origins literature contains numerous problematic characterizations of substantive law that expose the serious problems of quantitative operationalization of legal rules as a mode of comparative legal analysis. Second, the econometrics analysis of broad, cross-national patterns of legal and financial system characteristics departs from the theoretical and practical concerns of law as an academic and professional discipline focused on intra-systemic behavior. Third, the legal families theory is essentially an underspecified, path-dependent account of political economic development that is, at the very least, in logical tension with observable changes in law and financial system structures of both the past and present. Fourth, the methodology does not adequately distinguish between countries in which the rule of law and functional political and legal institutions are well-established (generally the advanced industrial countries) and those in which they are not (generally less developed countries (LDCs), often with significant post-colonial legacies). Given these flaws in, and limitations of, the legal families theory, the intuitively appealing thesis that law matters must be resituated in a more empirically persuasive and historically sensitive account of the relationship between law and politics. I speculate that any meaningful correlation between legal origins and economic outcomes is the product of politics in the first instance rather than law, and that legal families likely function as a proxy for different forms of political economic organization

Symposium: The Future of Law and Development, Part II

My comments will be mostly connected to Tom’s third question, relating to the future, and I would like to start by responding to Salil Mehra. I generally agree that there is an excessive focus on replicable “tools” and “best practices” in Law and Development studies, but I think there are a lot of questions to be asked regarding Mehra’s suggestion that the way forward involves addressing embedded cultural practices and institutions. In fact, there are currently a number of scholars (myself included) emphasizing the importance of looking at the interaction between so-called informal institutions (such as cultural practices, social norms, and historically entrenched attitudes and values). The problem is that although most of these analyses are very helpful in understanding what went wrong and why the “toolkit” did not work in a given context, they do not tell us how to improve our efforts going forward. So, like the “blueprint” Law and Development scholars, the “context matters” Law and Development scholars are not helping the field move forward

POOL File Catalog, Collection and Metadata Components

The POOL project is the common persistency framework for the LHC experiments to store petabytes of experiment data and metadata in a distributed and grid enabled way. POOL is a hybrid event store consisting of a data streaming layer and a relational layer. This paper describes the design of file catalog, collection and metadata components which are not part of the data streaming layer of POOL and outlines how POOL aims to provide transparent and efficient data access for a wide range of environments and use cases - ranging from a large production site down to a single disconnected laptops. The file catalog is the central POOL component translating logical data references to physical data files in a grid environment. POOL collections with their associated metadata provide an abstract way of accessing experiment data via their logical grouping into sets of related data objects.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, 1 eps figure, PSN MOKT00

Fibre-reinforced geopolymer concretes for sensible heat thermal energy storage: Simulations and environmental impact

Power plants based on solar energy are spreading to accomplish the incoming green energy transition. Besides, affordable high-temperature sensible heat thermal energy storage (SHTES) is required. In this work, the temperature distribution and thermal performance of novel solid media for SHTES are investigated by finite element method (FEM) modelling. A geopolymer, with/without fibre reinforcement, is simulated during a transient charging/discharging cycle. A life cycle assessment (LCA) analysis is also carried out to investigate the environmental impact and sustainability of the proposed materials, analysing the embodied energy, the transport, and the production process. A Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach, taking into account thermal/environmental performance, is used to select the most suitable material. The results show that the localized reinforcement with fibres increases thermal storage performance, depending on the type of fibre, creating curvatures in the temperature profile and accelerating the charge/discharge. High-strength, high-conductivity carbon fibres performed well, and the simulation approach can be applied to any fibre arrangement/material. On the con-trary, the benefit of the fibres is not straightforward according to the three different scenarios developed for the LCA and MCDM analyses, due to the high impact of the fibre production processes. More investigations are needed to balance and optimize the coupling of the fibre material and the solid medium to obtain high thermal performance and low impacts

Evolutionary Dynamics of Multigene Families in Triportheus (Characiformes, Triportheidae): A Transposon Mediated Mechanism?

Triportheus (Characiformes, Triportheidae) is a freshwater fish genus with 18 valid species. These fishes are widely distributed in the major river drainages of South America, having commercial importance in the fishing market, mainly in the Amazon basin. This genus has diverged recently in a complex process of speciation carried out in different river basins. The use of repetitive sequences is suitable to trace the genomic reorganizations occured along the speciation process. In this work, the 5S rDNA multigene family has been characterized at molecular and phylogenetic level. The results showed that other multigene family has been found within the non-transcribed spacer (NTS): the U1 snRNA gene. Double-FISH with 5S and U1 probes were also performed, confirming the close linkage between these two multigene families. Moreover, evidences of different transposable elements (TE) were detected within the spacer, thus suggesting a transposon-mediated mechanism of 5S-U1 evolutionary pathway in this genus. Phylogenetic analysis demonstrated a species-specific grouping, except for Triportheus pantanensis, Triportheus aff. rotundatus and Triportheus trifurcatus. The evolutionary model of the 5S rDNA in Triportheus species has been discussed. In addition, the results suggest new clues for the speciation and evolutionary trend in these species, which could be suitable to use in other Characiformes species

Measurement method for quality control of cylinders in roll-to-roll printing machines

This paper describes a measurement method for the quality control of cylinders for printing machines based on roll-to-roll presses. If the surface finishing of the cylinders is not adequate, the printing is unacceptable, and the defective cylinders must be reworked. The performed quality check of the cylinder surface roughness by means of contact methods was unable to identify the cylinder defects, and acceptance of the manufactured cylinders before integration was demanded to the visual inspection performed by trained operators. In this work a contactless measurement method based on the eddy current displacement sensor was proposed and validated as a tool for quality check as an alternative to optical roughness measurements. A test bench for the characterization of printer cylinders was designed and manufactured, allowing for the validation of the proposed method on different batches of cylinders and the identification of a threshold to guide the acceptance of tested cylinders prior to mounting on the roll-to-roll press

Antarctic Supraglacial Lake Detection Using Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 Imagery: Towards Continental Generation of Lake Volumes

Melt and supraglacial lakes are precursors to ice shelf collapse and subsequent accelerated ice sheet mass loss. We used data from the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellites to develop a threshold-based method for detection of lakes found on the Antarctic ice shelves, calculate their depths and thus their volumes. To achieve this, we focus on four key areas: the Amery, Roi Baudouin, Nivlisen, and Riiser-Larsen ice shelves, which are all characterized by extensive surface meltwater features. To validate our products, we compare our results against those obtained by an independent method based on a supervised classification scheme (e.g., Random Forest algorithm). Additional verification is provided by manual inspection of results for nearly 1000 Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 images. Our dual-sensor approach will enable constructing high-resolution time series of lake volumes. Therefore, to ensure interoperability between the two datasets, we evaluate depths from contemporaneous Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 image pairs. Our assessments point to a high degree of correspondence, producing an average R2 value of 0.85, no bias, and an average RMSE of 0.2 m. We demonstrate our method’s ability to characterize lake evolution by presenting first evidence of drainage events outside of the Antarctic Peninsula on the Amery Ice shelf. The methods presented here pave the way to upscaling throughout the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 observational record across Antarctica to produce a first-ever continental dataset of supraglacial lake volumes. Such a dataset will improve our understanding of the influence of surface hydrology on ice shelf stability, and thus, future projections of Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise

Metalanguage in L1 English-speaking 12-year-olds: which aspects of writing do they talk about?

Traditional psycholinguistic approaches to metalinguistic awareness in L1 learners elicit responses containing metalanguage that demonstrates metalinguistic awareness of pre-determined aspects of language knowledge. This paper, which takes a more ethnographic approach, demonstrates how pupils are able to engage their own focus of metalanguage when reflecting on their everyday learning activities involving written language. What is equally significant is what their metalanguage choices reveal about their understanding and application of written language concepts