This volume offers a diverse set of perspectives on transnational crime. Providing a wide-ranging overview of the legal and policy issues that arise in connection with various forms of transnational crime, the authors outline the criminal justice responses adopted across different jurisdictions. Including contributions from high profile Chinese and European academics and practitioners across a variety of disciplines and methodological backgrounds, the authors address some of the hitherto underexplored issues related to transnational crime. These range from trafficking in cultural objects derived from illicit metal-detecting and metal-detecting tourism in China to the European approaches to criminalising the denial of historical truth. The central theme of the book is that useful lessons can be drawn from each other's experiences, and that a cross-fertilisation of domestic approaches to transnational crime is essential to effective cooperation. This book will be of use to students and academics of comparative criminal justice and anyone interested in transnational crime.

The centre for comparative laws in Africa held its inaugural methodology workshop from 22 to 24 October 2012. Over 40 scholars from various universities in South Africa, Africa, Europe and the United States of America participated in plenary and panel discussions around comparative law in cultural, interdisciplinary and subject context, Western legal traditions and mixed jurisdictions in African comparative legal studies, traditional and informal law in Africa, religious law in Africa and its comparative implications and the role of African comparative legal studies in the development of law in Africa. Comparative law in Africa: Methodologies and concepts is the outcome of the workshop. Its aim is to contextualise comparative legal studies in the African continent, with the ultimate goal of paving the way for the development of a comparative methodology specifically addressed to Africa. The studies presented in this volume offer different views and perspectives around the main theme of how to methodologically approach comparative legal studies in Africa, and how to properly take into consideration all the different layers composing the African legal systems, in order to give them the proper role and the proper place. The diverse background of the different contributors to this volume enriches its continental approach and offers a stimulating voice to African comparative legal scholars to continue their research.

Many scholars posit distinct European and American approaches to public policy, with the European approach more likely to have a generous social safety net, tougher regulations on businesses, and stronger protections for animals. Via a comparative analysis of several policies, In Search of Canine Justice asks whether this conventional wisdom holds in the area of canine welfare. While there is much vindication of these two distinct approaches, the reality is more complex when the behavior of particular states is taken into account. In short, European laws are more likely to advance canine welfare, but there are not only exceptions but places where practices deviate from the laws. At the state level in the United States, the trend is toward more protective laws and practices in this area as well. In Search of Canine Justice is a valuable resource for students of comparative politics, animal studies, animal law, and public policy, as well as anyone with a general interest in canine welfare or a specific interest in the regulation of commercial breeding, euthanasia, commercial greyhound racing, scientific experimentation, and/or unnecessary surgeries for cosmetic reasons.

A commitment to free speech is a fundamental precept of all liberal democracies. However, democracies can differ significantly when addressing the constitutionality of laws regulating certain kinds of speech. In the United States, for instance, the commitment to free speech under the First Amendment has been held by the Supreme Court to protect the public expression of the most noxious racist ideology and hence to render unconstitutional even narrow restrictions on hate speech. In contrast, governments have been accorded considerable leeway to restrict racist and other extreme expression in almost every other democracy, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. This book considers the legal responses of various liberal democracies towards hate speech and other forms of extreme expression, and examines the following questions:
What accounts for the marked differences in attitude towards the constitutionality of hate speech regulation?
Does hate speech regulation violate the core free speech principle constitutive of democracy?
Has the traditional US position on extreme expression justifiably not found favor elsewhere?
Do values such as the commitment to equality or dignity legitimately override the right to free speech in some circumstances?
With contributions from experts in a range of disciplines, this book offers an in-depth examination of the tensions that arise between democracy's promises.
Readership Academics, scholars, and advanced students of Human Rights; Comparative Human Rights; Freedom of Information & Freedom of Speech; Media, Information, & Communication Industries; Censorship; Extreme Speech & Hate Speech

This collection brings together a group of international legal historians to further scholarship in different areas of comparative and regional legal history. Authors are drawn from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to produce new insights into the relationship between law and society across time and space. The book is divided into three parts: legal history and legal culture across borders, constitutional experiences in global perspective, and the history of judicial experiences. The three themes, and the chapters corresponding to each, provide a balance between public law and private law topics, and reflect a variety of methodologies, both empirical and theoretical. The volume highlights the gains that may be made by comparing the development of law in different countries and different time periods. The book will be of interest to an international readership in Legal History, Comparative Law, Law and Society, and History.

Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation.
Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.

The book profiles some of the macro and micro factors that have impact on European religious literacy. It seeks to understand religious illiteracy and its effects on the social and political milieu through the framing of the historical, institutional, religious, social, juridical and educational conditions within which it arises. Divided into four parts, in the first one, One literacy, more literacies?, the book defines the basic concepts underpinning the question of religious illiteracy in Europe. Part II, Understanding illiteracies, debating disciplines?, highlights the theological, philosophical, historical and political roots of the phenomenon, looking at the main nodes that are both the reasons religious illiteracy is widespread and the starting points for literacy strategies. Part III, Building literacy, shaping alphabets, examines the mix of knowledge and competences acquired about religion and from religion at school as well as through the media, with a critical perspective on what could be done both in the schools and for the improvement of journalists' religious literacy. Part IV, Views and experiences, presents the reader with the opportunity to learn from three different case studies: religious literacy in the media, religious illiteracy and European Islam, and a Jewish approach to religious literacy. Building on existing literature, the volume takes a scientific approach which is enriched by interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives, and deep entrenchment in historical methodology.

The issue of who has the power to declare war or authorise military action in a democracy has become a major legal and political issue, internationally, and is set to become even more pertinent in the immediate future, particularly in the wake of military action in Syria, ongoing wars in the Middle East, and tense discussions between the United States and its allies, and Russia and China. This book comparatively examines the executive and prerogative powers to declare war or launch military action, focusing primarily on the United States, Britain and Australia. It explores key legal and constitutional questions, including: who currently has the power/authority to declare war? who currently has the power to launch military action without formally declaring war? how, if at all, can those powers be controlled, legally or politically? what are the domestic legal consequences of going to war? In addition to probing the extensive domestic legal consequences of going to war, the book also reviews various proposals that have been advanced for interrogating the power to commence armed conflict, and explores the reasons why these propositions have failed to win support within the political establishment.

The First Amendment-and its guarantee of free speech for all Americans-has been at the center of scholarly and public debate since the birth of the Constitution, and the fervor in which intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary citizens approach the topic shows no sign of abating as the legal boundaries and definitions of free speech are continually evolving and facing new challenges. Such discussions have generally remained within the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution and its American context, but consideration of free speech in other industrial democracies can offer valuable insights into the relationship between free speech and democracy on a larger and more global scale, thereby shedding new light on some unexamined (and untested) assumptions that underlie U.S. free speech doctrine. Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr., compares the First Amendment with free speech law in Japan, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom-countries that are all considered modern democracies but have radically different understandings of what constitutes free speech. Challenging the popular-and largely American-assertion that free speech is inherently necessary for democracy to thrive, Krotoszynski contends that it is very difficult to speak of free speech in universalist terms when the concept is examined from a framework of comparative law that takes cultural difference into full account.

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities, for example in Poland and Hungary, have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature in Central and Eastern European countries. Several political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power after the democratic transformation process in 1989/1990. These claims are explicitly or implicitly connected to the charge that courts have constrained the room for manoeuvre of the legislatures too heavily and that they have entered the field of politics. Nevertheless, the question to what extent has this aggregation of power constrained the dominant political actors has never been examined accurately and systematically in the literature. The present volume fills this gap by applying an innovative research methodology to quantify the impact and effect of court's decisions on legislation and legislators, and measure the strength of judicial decisions in six CEE countries.

This book analyzes the development policies behind the evolution of various arrangements for international petroleum exploitation. By studying examples of the principal categories of petroleum arrangements in four representative developing countries (Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil and China), this study examines in particular the issues of recent trends and new directions in contractual development and environmental sustainability that are reflected in both the structure and substance of the modern petroleum contracts that have emerged since the 1950s. Modern petroleum contracts are generally able to achieve a greater commerciality and mutuality of interests, but they have failed to produce a necessary balance between resources extraction and environmental sustainability. The future direction for petroleum agreements is that they must explicitly recognize the inherent interdependence of commercial viability and sustainable development.

The new edition of this seminal text outlines the fundamental aspects of the German approach to criminal procedure. It explores a wide range of issues from setting out the basic procedural principles to presenting the main players in the criminal justice system, pre-trial investigations, the path from indictment to trial judgment, rules of evidence, sentencing, and appeals and post-conviction review. As far as it is useful for an introductory text, the differences between proceedings against adults and juveniles are highlighted. The theoretical discussion of decision-making and style of judgment writing is supported by practical insights through specimen translations of an indictment, a trial judgment and an appellate judgment by the Federal Court of Justice.

'Armed mainly with tremendous scholarly energy, the University of Washington has developed into the premier center of Asian legal studies in North America. This volume is a tribute to the breadth and depth of activity at the Asian Law Center over its first five decades, and a treasure trove of substantive insights into comparative law in Asia. As Asian law continues to attract more attention around the world, we must all be grateful for the contributions of the innovators who built the field.' - Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago Law School, US 'Professors Haley and Takenaka have put together a wonderfully eclectic collection of essays to commemorate the founding of the Asian Law Center at the University of Washington School of Law in 1964. Written by leaders in their respective fields, the essays, which explore legal developments, innovations and transplants in Japan and its neighbours, will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese law, as well as comparative lawyers with an interest in Asian law.' - Jean Ho, National University of Singapore 'For fifty years now, the University of Washington's Asian Law Center has stood at the center of American scholarship on Japanese law. Its scholars have consistently produced the very best work in the field, and men and women associated with it have increasingly turned their attention to other legal systems in Asia as well. In this broad-ranging volume, the contributors explore the intriguing connections among the many legal systems at stake. They have produced a tantalizing blend of analytical depth and geographical breadth.' - J. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard Law School, US Legal Innovations in Asia explores how law in Asia has developed over time as a result of judicial interpretation and innovations drawn from the legal systems of foreign countries. Expert scholars from around the world offer a history of law in the region while also providing a wider context for present-day Asian law. The contributors share insightful perspectives on comparative law, the role of courts, legal transplants, intellectual property, Islamic law and other issues as they relate to the practice and study of law in Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and Southeast Asia. Students and scholars of Asian law will find this a timely and fascinating read, as will legal practitioners and colleagues of the Asian Law Center. Contributors: H. Baum, D. Clarke, J. Eddy, D.H. Foote, J.O. Haley, K. Ishida, K.S. Kim, V.I. Lo, C.B. Lombardi, S. Matsui, H.D. Nam, O. Phanraska, T. Takenaka, V.L. Taylor, K. Toha, T.S. Utomo, T.-S. Wang, R. Yamakawa, D. Zang

This book is a comparative law study exploring the piercing of the corporate veil in Latin America within the context of the Anglo-American method. The piercing of the corporate veil is a remedy applied, in exceptional circumstances, to prevent and punish an inappropriate use of the corporate personality. The application of this remedy and the issues it involves has been widely researched in Anglo-American jurisdictions and, until recently, little attention has been given to this subject in Latin America. This region has been through internal political conflicts that undermined economic development. However, rise of democratic governments has created the political stability necessary for investment and economic development meaning that the corporate personality is now more commonly used in Latin America. Consequently, corporate personality issues have become a subject of study in this region. Drawing on case studies from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, Piercing the Corporate Veil in Latin American Jurisprudence examines the ingenuity of Latin American jurisdictions to deal with corporate personality issues and compares this method with the Anglo-American framework. Focusing in particular on the influence of two key factors- legal tradition and the uniqueness of each legal system- the author highlights both similarities and differences in the way in which the piercing of the corporate veil is applied in Latin American and Anglo-American jurisdictions. This book will be of great interest to scholars of company and comparative law, and business studies in general.

This book examines donor conception and the search for information by donor-conceived people. It details differing regulatory approaches across the globe, including those that provide for 'open-identity' or anonymous donation, or that take a 'dual-track' approach. In doing so, it identifies models regarding the recording and release of information about donors that may assist in the further development of the law, policy and associated practices. Arguments for and against donor anonymity are considered, and specifically critiqued. The study highlights contrasting reasoning and emphasis upon various interests and factors that may underpin secrecy, anonymity or openness. The book will be of value to academics, students and legal practitioners involved with this area. It is also relevant to policy makers, health practitioners and anyone with an interest in the subject.

This book critically examines the proper role of the law in protecting job security in the contemporary workplace. It provides a historical, theoretical, practical and comparative perspective on this under-researched, but fundamentally important, legal mechanism at a time when the pressure to deregulate and dilute worker-protective laws has taken on increased importance. The volume critically analyses both statute and case law from three advanced industrialised liberal democracies with a common law foundation, the UK, Australia and the USA, to understand the extent to which job security is realised. By applying a common approach and a conceptual framework that emphasises the complex relationships between law, the economy and society to analyse a series of national studies, the book is also designed to draw upon the insights of comparative analysis to deepen our understanding of the limits and possibilities of legal regulation of job security. The national case studies are supplemented by research that focuses on how supra-national organisations have sought both to develop and disseminate new legal norms around the practices and processes of dismissal. This study critically analyses and assesses the adequacy of the international regulatory framework for protecting the rights of employees in the dismissal process.

Until quite recently questions about methodology in legal research have been largely confined to understanding the role of doctrinal research as a scholarly discipline. In turn this has involved asking questions not only about coverage but, fundamentally, questions about the identity of the discipline. Is it (mainly) descriptive, hermeneutical, or normative? Should it also be explanatory? Legal scholarship has been torn between, on the one hand, grasping the expanding reality of law and its context, and, on the other, reducing this complex whole to manageable proportions. The purely internal analysis of a legal system, isolated from any societal context, remains an option, and is still seen in the approach of the French academy, but as law aims at ordering society and influencing human behaviour, this approach is felt by many scholars to be insufficient. Consequently many attempts have been made to conceive legal research differently. Social scientific and comparative approaches have proven fruitful. However, does the introduction of other approaches leave merely a residue of 'legal doctrine', to which pockets of social sciences can be added, or should legal doctrine be merged with the social sciences? What would such a broad interdisciplinary field look like and what would its methods be? This book is an attempt to answer some of these questions.

This book invites readers to critically rethink the interrelations between geography and the law. Traditionally, legal-geographical interrelations have been dominated by scholars with backgrounds in geopolitics, economics, or geography. More recently, a new interdisciplinary approach has been developed with the aim of offering a fresh perspective on how law and geography intersect. There has been a steady growth in cross-disciplinary research in this field; how legal-geographical taxonomies interrelate has attracted attention from scholars and academics with a diverse range of backgrounds - namely, law, anthropology, and human/physical geography -, thus giving rise to several publications. Against this backdrop, the book adopts a legal comparative perspective and assesses 'normative spatialities', which are the outcomes of processes of legal-spatial production. In addition, the comparative analysis offers readers new insights on some traditional geographic features which are essential to legal studies (territorial identity, regional demarcation, territorial alternation, and place-name policy). Examples are drawn from several jurisdictions (both from the Global North and the Global South) and partly employ a diachronic perspective. As its subversive character is ideally suited to revealing policies and agendas, comparative law is used to identify the ethnocentric and colonial biases underpinning the use (and misuse) of legal geographic devices by policymakers and academics. In sum, the book presents legal geography as an interdisciplinary undertaking in which geographers and legal scholars can jointly examine common concepts in the historical, cultural, political and social contexts in which law is practised. The book transcends the boundaries between disciplines to engage in a fruitful dialogue on how the law can help to address the current socio-geographic and ecological crises.

This volume takes stock of the rapid changes to the law of unjust enrichment over the last decade. It offers a set of original contributions from leading private law theorists examining the philosophical foundations of the law. The essays consider the central questions raised by demarcating unjust enrichment as a separate area of private law - including how its normative foundations relate to those of other areas of private law, how the concept of enrichment relates to property theory, how the remedy of restitution relates to principles of corrective justice and what role mental elements should play in shaping the law.

Trade liberalization has shaped international economic relations since the conclusion of the GATT 1947. The last few decades have seen a significant shift in the focus of this process: multilateralism seems to have reached its limits, giving way to regionalism, and the focus of trade liberalization has shifted to non-tariff barriers. While these developments have attracted considerable attention, exploring them from comparative perspectives has been largely neglected. Trading systems - the WTO, regional economic integrations and federal systems - are all based on the same dichotomy of free trade and local public interest: they generally prohibit the constituent parties (states) from restricting trade, but exempt them from this limitation if the restriction is warranted by a legitimate local end. The purpose of this volume is to contribute to filling the above-mentioned research gap by exploring central issues in regional economic integrations from a comparative perspective. It provides a general economic analysis of the costs and benefits of trade liberalization and the role and function of normative values in commercial policy. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the approaches used in various regional economic integrations (in North America, Europe and Latin America) and federal markets (the United States, Australia and India) regarding the balance between free trade and local public interest. Key issues in investment law, one of the most contentious elements of next-generation free trade agreements, are also addressed.

Law's Political Foundations: Rivers, Rifles, Rice and Religion explains the development of the two basic systems of public and private law and their historical transformations. Examining the historical development of law in China, Japan, Western Europe, and Hispanic America, Haley argues that law is a product, rather than a constitutive element, of political systems.Four narrative chapters commence with the development of Chinese legal tradition as a public law order in which regulatory and penal rules were central, compared to the primacy of private law in Western Europe. China was not only among the earliest but also historically the most enduring example of public law order. The European Legal Tradition, in contrast, became the source of the private law structures of legal systems worldwide. The Japanese and Hispanic American experiences are explored as pivotal links that help to identify foundational factors that underpin the historical development of public and private law orders. Also explained in both contexts is the endurance of private ordering both within and beyond the law. These vivid comparisons and analyses in these stories of rivers, rifles, rice, and religion will serve as an excellent critical resource for scholars and academics of comparative law and legal theory.

Over the course of the last four decades as China's ideological realm has been transformed, it has become significantly more complicated. This is well illustrated in the current discourse concerning China's constitutional future. Among Chinese intellectuals the liberal constitutionalism paradigm is widely accepted. However, more recently, this perspective has been challenged by mainland New Confucians and Sinicized Marxists alike. The former advocate a constitutionalism that is based upon and loyal to the Confucian tradition; while the latter has sought to theorize the current Chinese constitutional order and reclaim its legitimacy. This book presents a discussion of these three approaches, analyzing their respective strengths and weaknesses, and looking to the likely outcome. The study provides a clear picture of the current ideological debates in China, while developing a platform for the three schools and their respective constituencies to engage in dialogue, pluralize the conceptions of constitutionalism in academia, and shed light on the political path of China in the 21st Century. The consequences of this Chinese contribution to the global constitutionalism debate are significant. Notions of the meaning of democratic organization, of the nature of the division of authority between administrative and political organs, of the nature and role of political citizenship, of the construction of rights are all implicated. It is argued that China's constitutional system, when fully theorized and embedded within the global discourse might serve, as the German Basic Law did in its time, as a model for states seeking an alternative approach to the legitimate construction of state, political structures and institutions.

The gap between the rich and poor is widening across the globe. This book explores whether this major societal challenge of our time can be addressed by the means of competition law. The primary goal of today's competition law is to ensure that market power does not lead to an inefficient production of goods and services. Nevertheless, even such efficiency-oriented curbing of market power may arguably contribute to the reduction of differences in how much people own and earn. Furthermore, many competition law regimes do take into account distributive considerations too. The chapters investigate the relationship between competition law and economic (in)equality from philosophical, historical, and economic perspectives. Their inquiries concern the conceptual foundations of competition law and doctrinal frameworks of individual jurisdictions, as well as specific problems and markets. As such, the book provides a novel and comprehensive overview of whether and how competition law can contribute to more equality in both developed and developing countries. The book is a must-read for researchers, public officials, judges, and practitioners within the competition law community. It will also appeal to anyone more broadly interested in issues of inequality and economic policy.

While their use and significance have increased in recent decades, constitutional preambles have received only scant attention in academic literature. This book presents a uniquely quantitative and qualitative analysis of all the preambles currently in force around the world and addresses fascinating questions concerning their occurrence, content, style, function and legal status. Studying preambles not only helps us understand the phenomenon itself, but also teaches us more about constitutions and constitutional systems in which they are situated. Constitutional Preambles illuminates the great variety that constitutional preambles display. The authors discuss the different styles, legal and non-legal functions, and content of the preambles, as well as analysing their use in the courts. This work also contains a carefully curated anthology of the world's preambles in English.

This book charts the path to revitalisation for trade unions in Australia, the USA, the UK, and Italy. It examines the examples of innovation and digital campaigning that are enabling unions to build new forms of worker power - and overcome decades of declining membership wrought by neoliberalism, globalisation, and hostility from employers and the state. The study evaluates the responses of unions in each country to falling membership levels since the 1980s. It considers the US 'organising model' and its adoption in Australia and the UK, comparing this with the strategies of Italian unions which have been more deliberately focused on precarious and migrant workers. The increasing reliance of US unions on community alliances, as seen in the 'Fight for $15' and similar campaigns, is scrutinised along with new union prototypes like Hospo Voice in Australia, the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain and SI Cobas in Italy. The book includes an in-depth analysis of union responses to the gig economy in the four countries, and the emergence of self-organised worker collectives to combat this exploitative business model. The vital role played by unions in defending the interests of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic is also examined. As well as highlighting the most successful union initiatives to meet the challenges of the past 30 years, the book assesses the strengths and deficiencies of the legal framework for union representation in the four nations. It identifies the labour law reforms needed to rebuild collectivism, but argues that more is needed than favourable laws. This cross-national study provides a rich basis for identifying the combination of reforms, strategies and linkages required to ensure that unions can remain relevant for a new generation of digitally-active workers.