This book explores the political, economic and regulatory context in which credit regulation is taking place following the global financial crisis. It suggests that current neoliberal economic policies favour multi-national corporations rather than consumers and examines regulatory responses to the internationalization of consumer finance protection. Detailing how EU consumers have been affected by national economic conditions, the book also analyses the lending regimes of Europe, Australia, the US and South Africa and offers suggestions for responsible lending to avoid over-indebtedness and corrupt mortgage-lending. Finally, new approaches and directions for consumer credit regulations are outlined, such as protection for small businesses, protection against risky credit products, reorganization of mortgage securitization and the possibility of a partnership model to address financial exclusion. The book includes contributions from leading names in the field of consumer law and will be invaluable to those interested in banking, business and commercial law.

This book examines the prospects for business law reform to drive economic development in developing countries. It argues that, despite statements to the contrary, cultural factors and other local conditions in developing countries are not properly taken into account in current business law reform programs. Utilizing the city of Dakar as an example, this book investigates the consequences of this lack of fit between local needs and transplanted legal models by examining the potential and actual impact of the OHADA program of law reform on local business practices. Focusing on how managers make decisions and apply appropriate norms in routine business operations, the book documents how contractual disputes arise and are solved in Dakar and the role played by formal law in these processes. By examining imported law from the point of view of the end-users of legal reforms, the book reveals the complex relationship between formal law, local cultural norms and the activities of SMEs operating in developing economies, and calls for a reconsideration of current law and development theory as well as the role of contract law in business decisions. It will be relevant to all developing countries seeking to align their laws with 'best practice' as identified by aid institutions.

This book examines the structure of the rule on restrictive agreements in the context of vertical intra-brand price and territorial restraints, analysing, comparing and evaluating their treatment in US antitrust and EU competition law. It examines the concept of 'agreement' as the threshold question of the rule on restrictive agreements, the structure and focus of antitrust/competition law analysis, the treatment of vertical intra-brand price and territorial restrictions and their place in the test of antitrust/competition law. The treatment of vertical intra-brand restraints is one of the most controversial issues of contemporary competition law and policy, and there are substantial differences between the world's two leading regimes in this regard. In the US, resale price fixing merits an effects-analysis, while in the EU it is prohibited almost outright. Likewise, territorial protection is treated laxly in the US, while in the EU absolute territorial protection - due to the single market imperative - is strictly prohibited. Using a novel approach of legal analysis, this book will be of interest to academics and scholars of business and commercial law, international and comparative law.

This book provides a leading point of reference in the field of partial defences to murder and with respect to the mental condition defences of loss of control and diminished responsibility in general. The work includes contributions from leading specialists from different jurisdictions. Divided into two parts, the first provides an analysis from the perspective of the UK, looking at particular concerns such as domestic violence, revenge and mixed motive killings, mistaken beliefs. The second part presents a comparative and international view to provide a wider background of how alternative systems treat issues of human frailty short of full insanity (loss of control, diminished responsibility) in the context of the criminal law.

Electronic Commerce and International Private Law examines the maximization of consumer protection via the consumer's jurisdiction and law. It discusses the proposition that a new connecting factor be used to improve the efficiency of juridical protection for consumers who contract with foreign sellers by electronic means and offers recommendations as to how to amend existing jurisdiction and choice of law rules to provide a basis for the consumer to sue in his own jurisdiction and for the law of the consumer's domicile to apply. The book will be a valuable resource for academics, students and practitioners working in the areas of international private law, electronic commerce law and consumer law.

This book looks at the consumer protection offered in a range of Asian countries, for example China, Japan, and South Korea in key areas such as consumer sales law, unfair terms, product liability, and unfair commercial practices. However, it is interesting to note that consumer protection is on the rise everywhere and to compare how this differs depending upon the legal cultures. It is also fascinating to reflect on the influence of models for law reform such as the EU laws. ASEAN has also affected the development of consumer policy for its member states. The book takes the form of national reports which explain the development of the law and also shed light on how the law works in practice. The book also contains thematic reports which look at each area of the law from a comparative perspective. Commentators from around the globe reflect on their impression of Asian consumer law based on their own differing legal systems and benchmarks. A must-read for anyone with an interest in consumer law in Asia and beyond, this book will form the basis of further research and discussion internationally.

Utilizing a comparative examination of case-law from England, Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, this volume provides a comprehensive and systematic study of the law of intervening causation (novus actus interveniens) to present an analysis of this particular judicial limitation of liability device. The work provides a structure from which to formulate core general legal principles and identify the various legal tests utilized by the courts.

This book proposes a new way of thinking about the controversial and complex challenges associated with the regulation of high-cost credit, specifically payday lending. These products have received significant attention in both the media and political arena. The inadequacy of regulatory interventions has created ongoing problems with the provision of high-cost credit, particularly for consumers with lesser bargaining power and who are already financially vulnerable. The book tackles two specific gaps in the existing literature. The first involves inadequate analysis of the relevant philosophical concepts around high-cost credit, which can result in an over-simplification of what are particularly complex issues. The second is a lack of engagement in both the market and lived experience of borrowers, resulting in limited understanding of those who use these financial products. The Future of High-Cost Credit explores the theoretical grounding, policy initiatives and interdisciplinary perspectives associated with high-cost credit, making a novel and insightful contribution to the existing literature. The problems with debt extend far beyond the legal sphere, and the book will therefore be of interest to many other academic disciplines, as well as for those working in public policy and 'the third sector'.

This book looks at responsible government under the Australian Constitution. It undertakes a detailed examination of the history leading to the incorporation of responsible government into the Constitution, examining the political history and constitutional ideas which informed the framers’ views. It draws on this history to develop a theory of responsible government and explore its implications for the interpretation of the Constitution and the structure of modern government in Australia. The book fills a major gap in our knowledge of the intellectual background of the Australian Constitution by explaining the constitutional ideas that have shaped the text and structure of the Australian Constitution. It contributes to worldwide debates about constitutional interpretation by showing how rigorous use of history can lead to novel interpretations of constitutions without being tied to the 'dead hands of the founders'.

Comparative Law and Society, part of the Research Handbooks in Comparative Law series, is a pioneering volume that comprises 19 original essays written by expert authors from across the world. This innovative handbook offers both a history of the field of comparative law and society and a thorough exploration of its methods, disciplines, and major issues, presenting the most comprehensive look into this contemporary field to date. In Part I, Methods and Disciplines, contributors approach critical issues in comparative law and society from a variety of academic fields, including sociology, criminology, anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology. This multidisciplinary approach highlights the importance of addressing the variance of perspectives inherent to the field. In Part II, Core Issues, chapters offer an exploration of major legal institutions, processes, professionals, and cultures associated with particular legal subjects. Since authors utilize the perspective of at least two different legal systems, this book offers a truly thorough and wide-ranging focus. The general reader, as well as students and scholars, will find this handbook useful in their continuing explorations into the interaction between law and society. Practitioners such as lawyers and judges with an interest in global perspectives of law will also find much to admire in this innovative volume. Contributors: M. Adler, N. Brewer, D.S. Clark, R. Cotterrell, B.L. Cutler, T. Ginsburg, M. Goodale, C. Guarnieri, R. Horry, B. Luppi, S.C. McCaffrey, E. Mertz, D. Nelken, F. Pakes, M.A. Palmer, F. Parisi, J.T. Polk, J.C. Reitz, R.E. Salcido, S. Stendahl, J.C. Suk, G.A. Tarr, S.C. Thaman, K. van Aeken, H.J. Wiarda

In this set of essays,public lawyers, property lawyers and legal philosophers examine the public dimensions of private property. At a time when governments across the globe are privatising formerly public property, the public forum is being replaced by the privately owned shopping mall, and an increasing range of interests are being described as 'property', an examination of the powers which attach to ownership becomes all the more pressing. The contributors consider whether property is a human right, its role in making responsible citizens, its relationship to freedom of speech and other values, the proper scope of constitutional protections of private property, impediments to the redistribution of property, and attempts to redress historical wrongs by property settlements to indigenous people. Taking a richly comparative perspective, examples have been drawn from jurisdictions as diverse as the United Kingdom, South Africa, Germany, the United States, and New Zealand. Contributors: Janet McLean (ed), Kevin Gray, Susan Francis Gray, Geoffrey Samuel, J W Harris, Gregory Alexander, Andre van der Walt, Tom Allen, Jeremy Waldron, Maurice Goldsmith, Alex Frame, John Dawson, Michael Robertson.

Compensation funds are used in vastly different ways across jurisdictions and legal traditions. They are an alternative to traditional tort, insurance and social security structures, and change or eliminate ordinary liability rules for certain classes of victims. Compensation funds have been established to solve liability problems in the domains of traffic accidents, financial deposits, crime victim redress, industrial and environmental damage, natural disasters and healthcare damage. They are popular with lawmakers, but their undefined nature (and sometimes incoherent status) raises important legal questions that have not yet been fully answered.The way that compensation funds have developed in different jurisdictions has not always been consistent with the rest of the legal system within that jurisdiction. The contributions in this book consider the way in which these funds have been used in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom. Focusing on their functions, purpose, funding and quantum of compensation, new conclusions are drawn on the objectives of compensation funds and how they differ from insurance and social security.Compensation Funds in Comparative Perspective is useful for all comparative law, liability law and insurance law scholars and practitioners seeking to understand contemporary issues in the operation of compensation funds and introduces novel ideas for future development.

The papers published in this proceedings volume are written by a selection of authors, resulting from a call for papers for the 1st International Conference on Law and Governance in a Global Context (ICLAVE) originating from Indonesia and other countries. This proceedings volume shall be a very valuable contribution to understand contemporary law issues in Indonesia which are not always taught in law schools. These proceedings will not only serve as a useful reference for law students and academicians, but also help law practitioners to understand law issues that may be encountered in Indonesia. It covers selected items such as Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Business Law, Intellectual Property Law, Criminal Law, Human Rights Law, Adat Law, Shariah Law, Judiciary Law and International Law, which are all important for undergraduate and post-graduate law students, as well as academicians and law practitioners in the law community.

The volume offers both a general overview and selected details of Italian private law and its transition from early 20th century legal tradition to a modern legal system based on constitutional values and geared towards European integration. Among the areas presented are family law, succession, legal persons, businesses and companies, property, contract, and tort. The volume takes into account not only the legislative system, starting from the 1942 Civil Code and highlighting the many and significant changes that have been made in the past six decades, but also the profound influence of case-law and legal scholarship. The authors emphasise the eclectic but systematically solid foundations of Italian private law, which has been able to blend successfully the best of the diverse continental legal traditions and adapt itself to the ever growing pressure of EU legislation. The volume is addressed to legal scholars, practitioners and students who wish to gain first hand knowledge of Italian private law in their research, professional or academic activity.

A novel and incisive investigation of the role of judicial precedents and customs in Russian law, this book examines the trends in the development of judge-made law in Russian civil law since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Exploring the interrelated propositions that a certain creative element is intrinsic to the judicial function in modern legal systems, which are normally shaped by both legislators and judges and that the Russian legal system is not an exception to this rule, the author argues that the rejection or acceptance of judge-made law can no longer be sufficient grounds for distinguishing between common law and civil law systems for the purposes of comparative analysis.

Divided into six chapters, it covers:

• the principles applied by judges when interpreting legal acts; analyzing a number of academic writings on this subject
• the boundaries of the realm of judge-made law and the problem of 'hard cases' and the factors, which make them 'hard'
• a taxonomy of forms in which Russian courts effectuate their law-creation functions
• current policies of courts in legal and socio-political matters
• joint-stock societies and arbitrazh courts.

Estimating the degree of creativity within different branches of the Russian judiciary and explaining the difference in the approaches of various courts as well as setting out proposals as to how the discrepancies in judicial practice can be avoided, Judicial Law-Making in Post-Soviet Russia is invaluable reading for all students of international law, comparative law, legal skills, method and systems and jurisprudence and philosophy of law.

Italian Private Law provides an excellent overview and analysis of Italian private law and its transition from the early twentieth century legal tradition to a system based on constitutional values, geared towards European integration. Exploring the eclectic yet systematically solid foundations of Italian private law, which has adapted itself to the ever growing pressure of EU legislation, Alpa and Zenovich look at the legislative system as well as the profound influence of case-law and legal scholarship. It examines: family law succession legal persons businesses and companies property law contract law tort law. This volume is a key resource for legal scholars, practitioners and students who want to gain a deeper knowledge of Italian private law in their research, professional or academic activity.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of new research on constitution making. Comparative Constitution Making provides an up-to-date overview of this rapidly expanding field. Bringing together leading scholars from political science and comparative public law, this handbook presents a broad historical and geographical perspective, exploring debates on constitutionalism across the world. Contributions provide original, innovative research on central issues related to the process and context of constitution making and identify distinctive elements or models of regional constitutionalism. Insightful and comprehensive, this handbook offers impeccable guidance for students and scholars of constitutional and comparative public law, as well as political science, sociology and history, who are interested in the study of constitution making, democratization and post-conflict reconstruction. Lawyers, civil servants and NGOs in the field of constitutional advising and post-conflict institution building will also benefit from this handbook's unique insight.

Globalisation has opened new avenues to corruption. Corrupt practices are proliferating not only within national borders but across different countries. Despite many national and international anti-corruption bodies and strategies, corruption far from being eradicated. There is an urgent global demand for a better understanding of corruption as a phenomenon and a thorough assessment of the existing regulatory remedies, towards the establishment of more effective (and possibly uniform) anti-corruption measures. Our previous collection, Corruption in the Global Era (Routledge, 2019), analysed the causes, the sources, and the forms of manifestation of global corruption. An ideal continuation of that volume, this book moves from the analysis of the phenomenon of corruption to that of the regulatory remedies against corruption and for the promotion of integrity. Corruption, Integrity and the Law provides a unique interdisciplinary assessment of the global anti-corruption legal framework. The collection gathers top experts in different fields of both the academic and the professional world - including criminal law, EU law, international law, competition law, corporate law and ethics. It analyses legal instruments adopted not only at a supranational level but also by different countries, in the attempt of establishing an interdisciplinary and comparative dialogue between theory and practice and between different legal systems towards a better global promotion of integrity. This book will be of value to researchers, academics and students in the fields of law, criminology, sociology, economics, ethics as well as professionals - especially solicitors, barristers, businessmen and public servants.

First published in 1999, this book focuses on the new role of private law in late modernity. It analyses the pressures for changes in this area of law due to the present processes of privatisation and marketisation. The perspective is welfarist: in what ways and to what extent can the welfare state expectations of the citizens be defended through private law mechanisms when state-offered security is diminishing? Which alternatives are available when developing private law? The questions are discussed against the background of theories concerning important features of late modern society, for example consumerism, risk, information, globalisation and fragmentation. Several fields of private law are analysed, such as private law theory, tort and liability law, contract law and credit law as well as access to justice issues. The approach is comparative, including analyses of both common law and continental law.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of 4 economically significant Asian jurisdictions: Mainland China, India, Hong Kong and Singapore. These jurisdictions have recently either reformed - or are considering reforming - their corporate restructuring laws to promote regimes conducive to restructuring financially distressed, but otherwise economically viable, companies. Mainland China, India, Hong Kong and Singapore continue to adhere to a framework that requires the court's final approval but draw references from Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code 1978 in the United States and/or the schemes of arrangement in the United Kingdom. However, the institutional and market structures are very different in Asia; in particular, Asia has a far higher concentration in shareholdings among listed firms, including holdings by families and the state, and a different composition of creditors. The book explains how, notwithstanding the legal transplantation, corporate restructuring laws in these Asian jurisdictions have adapted and evolved due to the frictions in shareholder-creditor and creditor-creditor relationships, and the role of the state in resolving non-performing loans and financial distress of state-owned enterprises which are listed, or which issue public debt. The study argues that any reforms must go beyond professionalising the insolvency professionals and the judiciary but must be designed to address fundamental issues of corporate governance, bank regulation and enforcing non-bankruptcy rules. It offers invaluable insights for academics and policy makers alike.

Industrial consolidation, digital platforms, and changing political views have spurred debate about the interplay between public and private power in the United States and have created a bipartisan appetite for potential antitrust reform that would mark the most profound shift in US competition policy in the past half-century. While neo-Brandeisians call for a reawakening of antitrust in the form of a return to structuralism and a concomitant rejection of economic analysis founded on competitive effects, proponents of the status quo look on this state of affairs with alarm. Scrutinizing the latest evidence, Alan J. Devlin finds a middle ground. US antitrust laws warrant revision, he argues, but with far more nuance than current debates suggest. He offers a new vision of antitrust reform, achieved by refining our enforcement policies and jettisoning an unwarranted obsession with minimizing errors of economic analysis.

This book explores key innovations in Rwandan law, exploring how the country has tried to combine the homegrown legal system with the civil law and common law legal systems to create a new hybrid legal system. The author explores the history of Rwandan law through the pre-colonial, to colonial and post-independence periods, and examines the homegrown legal and justice approaches, such as Gacaca, Abunzi, and Imihigo, introduced to deal with legal problems that could not be dealt with using the western legal system in post genocide Rwanda. The book highlights the innovative Rwandan approach to incorporating international law in the domestic legal system; it also covers the evolution of Rwandan constitutional law and constitutionalism since independence, and the development of family law from a legal system that oppressed women to one that promotes the rights of girls and women. Finally, the book explores the combination of common law and civil law systems in the development of the new Rwandan criminal law and in the transformation of the organization, jurisdiction, and functioning of Rwandan courts. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of African law, international law, and the legal system in Rwanda.

Scholars have produced a wide variety of theoretical work on contract law. This is the first book to compile it, to present it coherently, to evaluate it, and to supply numerous references to additional sources. The author also offers his own practical perspective that emphasizes contract law's richness and complexity and questions the utility of abstract unitary theories. The author argues that, notwithstanding contract law's complexity, it successfully facilitates the formation and enforcement of private arrangements and ensures a degree of fairness in the process of exchange. Each chapter presents a pair of largely contrasting theories to clarify the central issue of contract law and theory, to set forth the range of views, and to help identify a practical middle ground. Among the contract theories discussed and analyzed are promise, contextual, feminist, formal, mainstream, critical, economic, empirical, and relational. The book should interest legal theorists, practising lawyers, law students, and general readers who want to learn more about contract law and theory.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The principle of legal certainty is of fundamental importance for law and society: it has been vital in stabilising normative expectations and in providing a framework for social interaction, as well as defining the scope of individual freedom and political power. Even though it has not always been fully realised, legal certainty has also functioned as a normative ideal that has structured legal debates, both at the national and transnational level. This book presents research from a range of substantive areas regarding the meaning, possibility and desirability of legal certainty in the context of a rapidly changing global society. It aims to address these issues by bringing together scholars from various jurisdictions in order to examine changes in the shifting meaning of legal certainty in a comparative and transnational context. In particular, the book explores some of the tensions that now exist between the conventional expectation of legal certainty and the various challenges associated with regulating highly complex, late modern economies and societies. The book will be of interest to lawyers concerned with understanding the transformation of core rule of law values in the context of contemporary social change, as well as to political scientists and social theorists.