Empirical Legal Studies Before 1940: A Bibliographic Essay

The modern empirical legal studies movement has well-known antecedents in the law and society and law and economics traditions of the latter half of the 20th century. Less well known is the body of empirical research on legal phenomena from the period prior to World War II. This paper is an extensive bibliographic essay that surveys the English language empirical legal research from approximately 1940 and earlier. The essay is arranged around the themes in the research: criminal justice, civil justice (general studies of civil litigation, auto accident litigation and compensation, divorce, small claims, jurisdiction and procedure, civil juries), debt and bankruptcy, banking, appellate courts, legal needs, legal profession (including legal education), and judicial staffing and selection. Accompanying the essay is an extensive bibliography of research articles, books, and reports

Assessing the Effectiveness of Tradable Landuse Rights for Biodiversity Conservation: An Application to Canada's Boreal Mixedwood Forest

Ecological reserve networks are an important strategy for conserving biodiversity. One approach to selecting reserves is to use optimization algorithms that maximize an ecological objective function subject to a total reserve area constraint. Under this approach, economic factors such as potential land values and tenure arrangements are often ignored. Tradable landuse rights are proposed as an alternative economic mechanism for selecting reserves. Under this approach economic considerations determine the spatial distribution of development and reserves are allocated to sites with the lowest development value, minimizing the cost of the reserve network. The configuration of the reserve network as well as the biodiversity outcome is determined as a residual. However cost savings can be used to increase the total amount of area in reserve and improve biodiversity outcomes. The appropriateness of this approach for regional planning is discussed in light of key uncertainties associated with biodiversity protection. A comparison of biodiversity outcomes and costs under ecological versus economic approaches is undertaken for the Boreal Forest Natural Region of Alberta, Canada. We find a significant increase in total area protected and an increase in species representation under the TLR approach

Securitization in East Asia

Securitization offers a range of benefits for Asia's financial systems and economies as a mechanism to assist funding and investment. As a form of structured finance, reliable and efficient securitization can assist development by enabling financial systems to deepen and strengthen - thus contributing to overall economic growth and stability. It must be recognized, however, that there are both overt and more subtle risks in certain uses of securitization. The credit and liquidity crisis that began in the United States and spread to other developed financial systems in mid-2007 exposed the danger associated with securitization: excessive risk-taking or regulatory capital arbitrage rather than a tool to assist more conventional or conservative approaches to funding, risk management, or investment. Securitization has also been criticized for rendering financial markets opaque, while contributing to a growing emphasis in the global economy of credit intermediation conducted in capital markets rather than through banks. This study examines the institutional basis of these concerns by investigating the use of securitization in East Asia, questioning both the growth in regional activity since the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis, and the reasons for it remaining constrained. The paper concludes with a discussion of proposals to support proper development of securitization in the region, including institutional mechanisms that could better allow securitization to enhance development and financial stability. If East Asia begins to make fuller use of securitization, its motive will be to meet funding or investment needs in the real economy rather than balance sheet arbitrage of the kind that peaked elsewhere in 2007