This book examines the role and potential of derivative actions in shareholder protection in public limited companies. Derivative actions have been a focal point of legislators' agendas on shareholder protection, in the past few decades, throughout Europe and beyond. Nevertheless, there remain jurisdictions, such as Greece, which are still devoid of this remedy. Against this backdrop, this book examines whether and how the derivative action may improve shareholder protection, constituting thus a mechanism that justifies legislative attention. It does so in three parts. First, it analyses the desirable role derivative actions assume in protecting shareholder property, monitoring corporate management and mitigating agency costs, alongside their economic implications, introducing the reader to the contemporary international debate on the topic. Having set the desiderata, the second part proceeds with the comparative analysis of Greek, German and UK law - jurisdictions that have recently reformed their provisions on shareholder protection - examining not only the law on derivative actions and their Greek counterpart remedy but also mechanisms of shareholder protection that do, or could, assume functions similar to those of the derivative action. By critically assessing the merits and failures of the respective UK, German and Greek shareholder protection laws, the book then proceeds to offer (in Part III) a model framework of shareholders' derivative litigation for jurisdictions considering reform. Written in an accessible format, it will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this important aspect of company law and corporate governance.

This book presents a clear and precise account of the structure and content of Max Weber's sociology of law: situating its methodological and epistemological specificity in relation to other approaches to the sociology of law; as well as offering a critical evaluation of Weber's usefulness for contemporary socio-legal research. The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the methodological foundations of Weber's sociology of law. The second analyses the central theme of this sociology, the rationalisation of law, from the perspective of its internal logical coherence, its empirical validity, and finally its legitimacy. The third part questions the present-day relevance of the Weberian sociology of law for socio-legal research, notably with regard to legal pluralism. Max Weber, it is demonstrated, is not merely a 'founding father' of the sociology of law; rather, his methodology, concepts, and empirical analyses remain highly useful to the further development of work in this area.

Written in accessible language, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of a topical subject that is being widely debated across Europe. The work presents an overview of emerging case law from the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union, as well as from national courts and equality bodies in European countries, on the wearing of religious symbols in public spaces. The author persuasively argues that bans on the wearing of religious symbols constitutes a breach of an individual's human rights and contravene existing anti-discrimination legislation. Fully updated to take account of recent case law, this second edition has been expanded to consider bans in public spaces more generally, including employment, an area where some of the recent developments have taken place.

This book analyses the development of anti-corruption as a policy field in the European Union with a particular focus on the EU Anti-Corruption Report. It reconstructs the origins of anti-corruption policy in the 1990s when the EU started to recognise corruption as a serious crime with a cross-border dimension. It also analyses the processes surrounding the downfall of the Santer Commission on charges of corruption in 1999 and the enlargement of the EU. This incorporation of transitional new Member States was accompanied by a number of specific measures, instruments and monitoring mechanisms to combat corruption at the supranational level, finally leading to the introduction of the EU-wide Anti-Corruption Report in 2014. The book presents an in-depth analysis of its implementation, abandonment and the way forward under the European Semester as the new instrument for achieving EU anti-corruption reforms. It offers a new interpretation of the Report as a form of reflexive governance that operates at multiple levels and involves not only the European institutions and national governments, but also the role of civil society actors in the process of developing anti-corruption policy. It applies the theory of reflexive governance in analysing the impact of the Report in the UK, Romania and Albania, including the involvement of non-state actors in anti-corruption policy making in these countries. The book concludes with a discussion on how future EU Anti-Corruption policy can make use of reflexive governance and offers recommendations to enhance anti-corruption policies of the EU, the Member States and Candidate States.

In 2009 and 2010, the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights underwent significant reforms to their respective judicial appointments processes. Though very different judicial institutions, they adopted very similar - and rather remarkable - reforms: each would now make use of an expert panel of judicial notables to vet the candidates proposed to sit in Luxembourg or Strasbourg. Once established, these two vetting panels then followed with actions no less extraordinary: they each immediately took to rejecting a sizable percentage of the judicial candidates proposed by the Member State governments. What had happened? Why would the Member States of the European Union and of the Council of Europe, which had established judicial appointments processes that all but ensured themselves the unfettered power to designate their preferred judges to the European courts, and who had zealously maintained and exercised that power over the course of some fifty years, suddenly decide to undermine their own capacity to continue to do so? This book sets out to solve this mystery. Its point of departure is that it would be a mistake to view the 2009-2010 establishment of the two vetting panels in isolation from other European judicial developments. Though these acts of institutional creation are certainly the most notable recent developments, they actually represent but the crowning achievement of a process of European judicial appointments reform that has been running unremittingly since the 1990's. This longstanding and tenacious movement has actually triggered a broad set of interrelated debates and reforms, encompassing not only judicial appointments per se, but also a much wider set of issues, including judicial independence, judicial quality, judicial councils, the separation of powers, judicial gender equity, and more.

This book analyses corporate rescue laws, processes and policies prescribed in corporate insolvency or bankruptcy laws, and employment laws of the UK and the US, with a particular focus on how extant employee rights are treated when a debtor employer initiates corporate insolvency proceedings. The commencement of formal insolvency proceedings by an employer affects employees' rights and interests. Employment laws seek to protect employees' rights and interests, while insolvency laws seek to promote corporate rescue, which may entail workforce changes. Consequently, this creates a tension between whose interest insolvency law should give primacy of protection. The book analyses how corporate rescue processes such as administration, pre-pack business sales, company voluntary arrangements, receivership and liquidation impact employee rights and protection during corporate rescue proceedings in both jurisdictions. It goes on to address how the federal system of government in the US and the diffusion of power between federal and state law jurisdictions impact a uniform code of employee protection during Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganisation proceedings. The book considers how an interpretative approach to law (Dworkin's Interpretative Theory of Law) may be used to balance both employee protection and corporate rescue laws during corporate insolvency in the UK and the US. Of interest to academics, students and employment law practitioners, this book examines the tension between corporate rescue laws and employment protection laws during corporate insolvency in the US and the UK and how this tension may be remedied or balanced.

This book is a critical examination of recently introduced individual accountability regimes that apply to the financial services industry in the UK (SMCR) and Australia (BEAR and the forthcoming FAR), together with a forthcoming new individual accountability regime ( in particular, SEAR) in Ireland. It provides a framework for analysing whether these regimes will achieve behavioural change in the financial services industry. This book argues that, whilst sanctioning individuals to deter future misconduct is an important part of any successful regulatory strategy, the focus should be on ensuring that individuals in the financial services industry internalise the norms of behaviour expected under the new regimes. In this regard, the analysis in this book is informed by criminological theory, regulatory theory and behavioural science. The work also argues for a "trajectory towards professionalisation" of financial services, and banking in particular, as an important means of positively influencing industry-wide norms of behaviour, which have a key influence on firms' and individuals' behaviours.

This ground-breaking and timely book explores how big data, artificial intelligence and algorithms are creating new types of agency, and the impact that this is having on our lives and the rule of law. Addressing the issues in a thoughtful, cross-disciplinary manner, the authors examine the ways in which data-driven agency is transforming democratic practices and the meaning of individual choice. Leading scholars in law, philosophy, computer science and politics analyse the latest innovations in data science and machine learning, assessing the actual and potential implications of these technologies. They investigate how this affects our understanding of such concepts as agency, epistemology, justice, transparency and democracy, and advocate a precautionary approach that takes the effects of data-driven agency seriously without taking it for granted. Scholars and students of law, ethics and philosophy, in particular legal, political and democratic theory, will find this book a compelling and invaluable read, as will computer scientists interested in the implications of their own work. It will also prove insightful for academics and activists working on privacy, fairness and anti-discrimination. Contributors include: J.E. Cohen, G. de Vries, S. Delacroix, P. Dumouchel, C. Ess, M. Garnett, E.H. Gerding, R. Gomer, C. Graber, M. Hildebrandt, C. Maple, K. O'Hara, P. Ohm, m.c. schraefel, D. Stevens, N. van Dijk, M. Veale

Commonwealth Caribbean Law and Procedure: The Referral Procedure under Article 214 RTC in the Light of EU and International Law is about the referral procedure set out in Article 214 of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (RTC), which Treaty established the Caribbean Community Single Market and Economy (CSME). Article 214 RTC bears clear parallels to Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), the most important being that that both articles pursue the same objective, i.e. they seek to ensure that CSME law and EU law, respectively, are uniformly applied in all Member States. Although Article 214 RTC was inspired by, and modelled on, Article 267 TFEU, it is not its exact replica. The similarities and differences between Article 214 RTC and Article 267 TFEU are critically assessed in this book. Also, the book: Examines how Article 214 RTC operates in the Caribbean context, how it interacts with other provisions of the RTC, and how it fits into the various national legal systems of the Member States of the CSME. Explores possible reasons why, so far, national courts of the Member States of the CSME have not made any referrals to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). Puts Article 214 RTC in a comparative perspective; in particular, the book compares and contrasts it with Article 267 TFEU. Examines some of the aspects of Article 214 RTC in the light of public international law, bearing in mind that under Article 217(1) RTC, the CCJ is required, when exercising its original jurisdiction under Article 211 RTC, to "apply such rules of international law as may be applicable." This is to ensure that the CCJ will not bring in a finding of non liquet on the ground of silence or obscurity of CSME law, which Article 217(2) RTC expressly prohibits. This book will be of interest to academics and students studying CSME law, EU law, and comparative law, as well as judges, lawyers, and governmental and non-governmental organizations from the Caribbean region.

The insolvency of multinational corporate groups creates a compelling challenge to the commercial world. As many medium and large-sized companies are multinational companies with operations in different countries, it is important to provide appropriate solutions for the insolvency of these key market players. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the cross-border insolvency theories, practical solutions and regulatory solutions for the insolvency of multinational corporate groups. Whilst the book recognises certain merits of these solutions, it also reveals the limitations and uncertainty caused by them. An analysis of the provisions and tools relating to cross-border insolvency of multinational corporate groups in the new EU Regulation on insolvency proceedings 2015, the UNCITRAL Model Law on cross-border insolvency, the Directive on preventive restructuring frameworks and the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive 2014, along with a study of directors' duties, are included in this book. This book focuses on the insolvency and rescue of non-financial corporate groups. However, it is also important to recognise the similarities and differences between corporate insolvency regimes and bank resolution regimes. In particular, lessons learnt from bank resolution practices may be useful for non-financial corporate groups. This book aims to provide an in-depth examination of the existing solutions for the insolvency of multinational corporate groups. It also aims to view cross-border insolvency of corporate groups within a broad context where all relevant regimes and theories interact with each other. Therefore, directors' duties in the vicinity of insolvency, preventive insolvency proceedings, procedural consolidation, international cooperative frameworks and bank resolution regimes are considered together. This book may appeal to academics, students and practitioners within the areas of corporate law, cross-border insolvency law and financial law.

Limited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In Privacy at the Margins, Scott Skinner-Thompson highlights why privacy is of acute importance for marginalized groups. He explains how privacy can serve as a form of expressive resistance to government and corporate surveillance regimes - furthering equality goals - and demonstrates why efforts undertaken by vulnerable groups (queer folks, women, and racial and religious minorities) to protect their privacy should be entitled to constitutional protection under the First Amendment and related equality provisions. By examining the ways even limited privacy can enrich and enhance our lives at the margins in material ways, this work shows how privacy can be transformed from a liberal affectation to a legal tool of liberation from oppression.

Persons with disabilities report high levels of harassment worldwide, often based on intersectional characteristics such as race, gender and age. However, while #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have highlighted ongoing experiences of sexual and racial harassment, disability harassment has received little attention. This book focuses on legal measures to combat disability harassment at work. It sets disability harassment in its international context, including its human rights framework, and confronts the lack of empirical information by evaluating the Irish legal framework in practice. It explores the capacity of the law to address intersectional harassment, particularly that faced by women with disabilities, and outlines the barriers to effective legal solutions.

This book is the first to approach Jacques Ranciere's work from a legal perspective. A former student of Louis Althusser, Ranciere is one of the most important contemporary French philosophers of recent decades: offering an original and path-breaking way to think politics, democracy and aesthetics. Ranciere's work has received wide and increasing critical attention, but no study exists so far that reflects on the wider implications of Ranciere for law and for socio-legal studies. Although Ranciere does not pay much specific attention to law-and there is a strong temptation to identify law with what he terms the "police order"-much of Ranciere's historical work highlights the creative potential of law and legal language, with important legal implications and ramifications. So, rather than excavate the Rancierean corpus for isolated statements about the law, this volume reverses such a method and asks: what would a Ranciere-inspired legal theory look like? Bringing together specialists and scholars in different areas of law, critical theory and philosophy, this rethinking of law and socio-legal studies through Ranciere provides an original and important engagement with a range of contemporary legal topics, including constituent power and democracy, legal subjectivity, human rights, practices of adjudication, refugees, the nomos of modernity, and the sensory configurations of law. It will, then, be of considerable interest to those working in these areas.

The Sunday Times bestseller and a BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week‘ Full of hilarious and shocking stories, the Secret Barrister's memoir Nothing But The Truth tracks their transformation from hang 'em and flog 'em austerity-supporter to celebrated, campaigning, bestselling author. 'Masterful, compassionate and hilarious' – Adam Rutherford In a diary that takes us behind the scenes of their middling ambition, Nothing But The Truth charts an outsider's progress down the winding path towards practising at the Bar. By way of the painfully archaic traditions of the Inns of Court, where every meal mandates a glass of port and a toast to the monarch, and the Hunger Games-style contest for pupillage - which most don't survive - here is the brilliant reality of being a frustrated junior barrister. With a keen eye for the absurd and an obsessive fondness for Twitter, SB reveals the uncomfortable truths and darkest secrets about life in our criminal courts. _____ ‘Words tumble out with extraordinary fluency . . . entertaining and instructive’ – The Times ‘Written with compassion, wit and intelligence’ – TLS ‘Excellent . . . at once a vicious polemic, a helpful primer and a cringe-inducing account of one barrister's travails' – The Telegraph

In Volume 1 of Christianity and Freedom, leading historians uncover the unappreciated role of Christianity in the development of basic human rights and freedoms from antiquity through today. These include radical notions of dignity and equality, religious freedom, liberty of conscience, limited government, consent of the governed, economic liberty, autonomous civil society, and church-state separation, as well as more recent advances in democracy, human rights, and human development. Acknowledging that the record is mixed, scholars document how the seeds of freedom in Christianity antedate and ultimately undermine later Christian justifications and practices of persecution. Drawing from history, political science, and sociology, this volume will become a standard reference work for historians, political scientists, theologians, students, journalists, business leaders, opinion shapers, and policymakers.

In Rethinking EU Consumer Law, the authors analyse the development of EU consumer law on the basis of a number of clear themes, which are then traced through specific areas. Recurring themes include the artificiality of the EU's consumer image, the problems created by the drive towards maximum harmonisation, and the unexpected effects EU Consumer Law has had on national law. The book argues that EU Consumer Law has the potential of enhancing the protecting of consumers throughout the EU and could offer a model for consumer law elsewhere in the world, but in order to unlock this potential, there needs to be a rethink with regard to the EU's approach to consumer law and policy.

This book presents a compelling and highly sophisticated politico-legal history of a particular security operation that resulted in one of the most high-profile torture cases in the world. It reveals the extent to which the Ireland v. United Kingdom judgment misrepresents the interrogation system that was developed and utilised in Northern Ireland. Finally, the truth about the operation is presented in a comprehensive narrative, sometimes corroborating secondary literature already in the public domain, but at other times significantly debunking aphorisms, or, indeed, lies that circulated about interrogation in depth. The book sets out the theoretical reference paradigm with respect to the culture and practice of state denial often associated with torture, and uses this model to excavate the buried aspects of this most famous of torture cases. Through the lens of a single operation, conducted twice, it presents a fascinating expose of the complicated structures of state-sponsored denial designed to hide the truth about the long-term effects of these techniques and the way in which they were authorised.

This book offers a rigorous empirical and theoretical analysis of an important dimension of European integration - the implementation of EU legislation and its effect in the wake of the accession of ten new member states to the EU in 2004. The authors concentrate on the key field of social policy, which is of vital interest for the viability of the welfare state and the future of labour law standards in Europe. Following on from a previous prize-winning study, Complying with Europe: EU Harmonization and Soft Law in the Member States, this new volume looks at how EU social legislation works in practice, particularly in Central and Eastern European countries. The authors offer in-depth empirical case studies of three of the most significant pieces of EU social legislation: the Working Time Directive, the Equal Treatment Directive and the Employment Equality Directive. Their analysis makes it possible for the authors to make useful generalizations for the policy field as a whole.

The European integration project currently faces profound political, economic, legal, and societal challenges. These challenges seem increasingly to overburden the European Union as well as the cohesion among the Member States, and therefore pose a serious threat to the integration project. The EU faces a major task in coping with this situation and it is one that calls for new approaches and ideas This book addresses the major challenges confronting the EU, analyses the consequences for the integration project, and develops fresh perspectives on the EU's future prospects for coping with the most debated, current and upcoming issues, such as the rise of Euroscepticism or the contested idea of an 'ever-closer union'. Renowned experts in European Studies from the fields of political science, law, economics and sociology provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the different dimensions of the EU's crisis-laden situation and question whether the EU's existing problem-solving mechanisms and methods are sufficient to address the imminent tasks. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU Politics, European Politics, European Governance, and more broadly European law, history and the wider social sciences.

Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation is a path-breaking collection of some of the world's leading cultural legal scholars addressing issues of law, representation and the image. Law is constituted in and through the representations that hold us in their thrall, and this book focuses on the ways in which cultural legal representations not only reflect or contribute to an understanding of law, but constitute the very fabric of legality itself. As such, each of these 'readings' of cultural texts takes seriously the cultural as a mode of envisioning, constituting and critiquing the law. And the theoretically sophisticated approaches utilised here encompass more than simply an engagement with 'harmless entertainment'. Rather they enact and undertake specific political and critical engagements with timely issues, such as: the redressing of past wrongs; recognising and combatting structural injustices; and orienting our political communities in relation to uncertain futures. Envisioning Legality thereby presents a cultural legal studies that provides the means for engaging in robust, sustained and in-depth encounters with the nature and role of law in a global, mediated world.

In this two-volume set, Larry D. Barnett delves into the macrosociological sources of law concerned with society-important social activities in a structurally complex, democratically governed nation. Barnett explores why, when, and where particular proscriptions and prescriptions of law on key social activities arise, persist, and change. The first volume, Societal Agents in Law: A Macrosociological Approach, puts relevant doctrines of law into a macrosociological framework, uses the findings of quantitative research to formulate theorems that identify the impact of several society-level agents on doctrines of law, and takes the reader through a number of case analyses. The second volume, Societal Agents in Law: Quantitative Research, reports original multivariate statistical studies of sociological determinants of law on specific types of key social activities. Taken together, the two volumes offer an alternative to the almost-total monopoly of theory and descriptive scholarship in the macrosociology of law, comparative law, and history of law, and underscore the value of a mixed empirical/theoretical approach.

Fighting for marriage and family rights; protection from discrimination in employment, education, and housing; criminal law reform; economic justice; and health care reform: the LGBT movement is engaged in some of the most important cultural and political battles of our times. Seeking to reshape many of our basic social institutions, the LBGT movement's legal, political, and cultural campaigns reflect the complex visions, strategies, and rhetoric of the individuals and groups knocking at the law's door.

The original essays in this volume bring social movement scholarship and legal analysis together, enriching our understanding of social movements, LGBT politics and organizing, legal studies, and public policy. Moreover, they highlight the struggle to make the law relevant and responsive to the LGBT community. Ultimately, Queer Mobilizations examines how the LGBT movement's engagement with the law shapes the very meanings of sexuality, sex, gender, privacy, discrimination, and family in law and society.

Contributors: Ellen Ann Andersen, Steven A. Boutcher, Bayliss Camp, Casey Charles, Ashley Currier, Courtenay W. Daum, Shauna Fisher, David John Frank, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Charles W. Gossett, Marybeth Herald, Nicholas Pedriana, Darren Rosenblum, Susan M. Sterett, and Amy L. Stone.

Libby Adler offers a comprehensive critique of the mainstream LGBT legal agenda in the United States, showing how LGBT equal rights discourse drives legal advocates toward a narrow array of reform objectives that do little to help the lives of the most marginalized members of the LGBT community.

This book looks at the way in which the 'call for justice' is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law. 'Calls for justice' may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it. This study shows how art operates as an interface, here, between two spheres: the larger realm of justice and the more specific system of law. This interface has a double potential. It can make law and justice affirm or productively disturb one another. Approaching issues of injustice that are felt globally, eight chapters focus on original works of art not dealt with before, including Milo Rau's The Congo Tribunal, Elfriede Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart, Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives. They demonstrate how through art's interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light. The book considers the improvement of law and justice to be a global struggle and, whilst the issues dealt with are culture-specific, it argues that the logics introduced are applicable everywhere.

Volume 17 of The Jewish Law Annual adds to the growing list of articles on Jewish law that have been published in volumes 1-16 of this series, providing English-speaking readers with scholarly articles presenting jurisprudential, historical, textual and comparative analysis of issues in Jewish law. The volume contains seven articles diverse in their scope and focus. Two articles are devoted to the halakhic thought of Rabbi A. I Kook; two treat classic legal questions: breach of a promise to marry, and the legal capacity of minors; two examine aspects of the judicial process, one exploring talmudic analyses of the biblical requirement that courts be established in every town, and the other, post-talmudic views on judicial authority in cases suspected of fraudulent claims. Another article addresses the fascinating question of the epistemic-pedagogic worldviews of the rival Tannaitic legal academics, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. The volume concludes with a section on Israeli legislation that adduces or is informed by Jewish law, and two reviews of a much-discussed recent book on a topic of considerable contemporary interest: the agunah problem.