Journal Publishing, Journal Reputation, and the United Kingdom's Research Assessment Exercise

Many academic lawyers believe that the Research Assessment Exercise has encouraged writing for academic journals, often at the expense of other forms of scholarly discourse. Moreover, it is widely perceived that the reputation of the journal in which research is published affects how that research is assessed in connection with the RAE. In this article, the authors report data gathered from a large-scale study measuring the perceptions of academic lawyers concerning the journal publishing process, how the RAE has affected journal quality generally, and how specific journals rank in terms of academic quality and their perceived importance to the RAE process.     

Syllabus,examinations and the teaching of law

In Australia, applicants for admission to the legal profession must hold appropriate academic qualifications, and competently complete practical legal training (PLT). The author’s research investigates institutional PLT practitioners’ engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). The theoretical framework for the research draws on Bourdieu and Passeron’s reflexive sociology of education and culture. This article focuses on responses to a paramount obligation proposition put to 34 PLT practitioners during semi-structured interviews: “Might lawyers’ paramount obligations to the court intersect with PLT practitioners’ teaching and assessment practices?” The proposition elicited responses and insights about field forces within the individual and organisational dimensions of teaching and learning in PLT. These include top-down/bottom-up pressures that impinge on PLT practitioners’ engagement with SoTL.     

作为法哲学范畴的“幸福”——关于“幸福”在法学理论“学术地形图”中的定位问题之思考

法学理论研究应当适应时代需要,不断修正并更新自己的范畴体系。在法学理论的"学术地形图"中,将幸福定位为从属于法学理论学科体系价值论部分的普通法学范畴,具有正当性与合理性。幸福研究,是一个"理论发现"的过程。     

信用评级法律制度的国际化发展趋势

信用评级的国际化决定了信用评级法律制度的国际化趋势，而信用评级国际化中的信用评级霸权问题、信用评级霸权导致的关欧信用评级监管标准之争则直接推动了信用评级法律制度的国际化进程。金融危机前后许多国际组织和区域组织都先后立法，意图对国际信用评级机构进行规制。在信用评级的国际化和信用评级霸权的争夺中，我国并不能“独善其身”。须正确认识信用评级法律制度的国际化；培育国内信用评级机构和市场；完善国内信用评级法律制度；积极参与国际信用评级法律制度的制定。     

Ranking of United Kingdom Law Journals: An Analysis of the Research Assessment Exercise 2001 Submissions and Results

Notwithstanding the Chancellor of the Exchequer's announcement in the 2006 Budget that, after the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise ('RAE 2008'), it is the government's firm presumption that the system for assessing research quality and allocating quality-related funding to United Kingdom universities will be mainly metrics based, RAE 2008 is vitually certain to proceed and to have considerable significance for legal research in the United Kingdom. In this rapidly developing and controversial context, this paper uses statistical analysis of the data from RAE 2001 to construct a series of metrics-based rankings which, when taken together, provide a reliable and coherent ranking of leading United Kingdom law journals.     

Courts,Criminal Process,and AIDS: The Institutionalization of Culture in Legal Decision Making*

This study views legal process as part of an interactive web of social and cultural relationships. While law may create public policy, its own creation is part of a complex system of institutional deference and subjective behaviors which reflect a larger cultural context. The fears engendered by AIDS help to highlight the underlying cultural biases and patterns of disease scare management ingrained in legal policymaking. These patterns are again enhanced when placed in a criminal context where the resident focus is one of controlling those who precipitate anxiety. Using a method of qualitative comparative analysis, this study concludes that the historical patterns of bias and institutional deference in disease scare management continues in modern criminal court process.     

Beyond Endogeneity: How Firms and Regulators Co‐Construct the Meaning of Regulation

What role do regulators and firms play in the construction of open‐ended regulatory terms? The new institutional legal endogeneity model posits that organizations respond to legal uncertainty by adopting formal structures to symbolically signal their compliance. These structures, however, tend to embody businesses' managerial and commercial values, as opposed to regulatory goals. Law becomes endogenous insofar as legal actors then defer to businesses' institutionalized ideas about regulation and compliance. Professionals, such as lawyers and human‐resource managers, and their strategic deployment of framing, are portrayed as the engines of the above process of legal endogeneity. By comparison, administrative agencies' strategies in shaping the meaning that corporations attach to the law are practically ignored. Building on a detailed case study of British financial firms' responses to the Financial Services Authority's Treating Customers Fairly initiative, this article problematizes the supposition of regulatory deference to business constructions of law. Instead, it develops a more balanced model that recognizes business professionals' and regulators' co‐construction of regulation and compliance. The process of regulatory meaning co‐construction, as depicted by this model, involves alignment and disputes between regulators' and professionals' strategic framing of regulatory concerns with tangible consequences for the enactment of regulation.     

Constructing International Crime: Lawyers,States, and the Origin of International Criminal Prosecution in the Interwar Period

This article explains the development of international crime as a legal category. I argue that states’ pursuit of political rights claims empowers international lawyers to develop new legal categories to grant states new tools to pursue their interests. At the same time, lawyers have a stake in defending the autonomy of law from politics, thus pushing for the development of legal norms and institutions that go beyond the original state intent. States’ turn to law thus begets more law, expanding the legal and institutional tools to solve international problems while simultaneously enforcing a commitment to principles of legality. To demonstrate the plausibility of the theory, the article studies the construction of the concept of an international crime in the interwar period (1919–1939). In response to the Allies’ attempt to prosecute the German Emperor, international lawyers sought the codification of international criminal law and drafted enforcement mechanisms. The interwar legal debate not only introduced international crime into the legal and political vocabulary, it also legitimized a new set of institutional responses to violations of international law, namely, international criminal prosecution.     

体系前研究到体系后研究的范式转型

我国法律体系形成过程的特点,造就了同时期法学研究的“立法中心主义”特征,具体表现为以功能设计与规范建构为路径的立法论研究范式、大规模引进域外立法材料引致的外源型研究范式、基于立法引导型建构的学术导向范式。这种“立法中心主义”的研究为法律体系的建构和充实作出了重大贡献。然而,社会主义法律体系形成后,“体系前研究范式”隐含的学术缺陷也日益明显,难以满足法治不断发展的需求,有必要向“体系后研究范式”转型。在建构体系后研究范式时,宜确立以中国问题为中心的学术取向、立足中国场景发现和讨论中国问题、基于平等心态拓展法学知识的域际交流、开展问题导向的新综合研究、赋予解释论研究以应有的时代使命。     

Legal Problems of People in Mental and Penal Institutions: An Exploratory Study

This exploratory study of the legal problems or needs of prisoners and mental hospital patients (the institutionalized) reveals the wide range and diversity in the perceptions of what the needs are and what the legal responses might be. It argues for the need to conduct research that first promotes our qualitative understanding of legal demand among the institutionalized, and it suggests the need to experiment with and do research on legal supply pro-grams in the institutions. Only then can we begin to think about quantifying the needs and designing with some precision delivery programs based upon such quantitative information. The study also suggests the need for a lawyer role in the institutional context that departs from traditional role perceptions, both in terms of the approach taken to cases and clients and in terms of the substantive problems deemed deserving of legal attention.     

论作为"制度"的法学院

法律职业为限制性的职业,目前两大法系主要国家都在制度上将法学院教育作为进入法律职业的第一道门槛;法律的技艺性、智识性和一定的神秘性及其规范特征决定了法律职业必须具备共同的职业素养,凭借法学教授、法学图书资科和法学院的社区生活三要件,制度性法学院而非仅仅作为场所的法学院培育这些素养并促使法律职业共同体形成。我国现实呼唤在制度上确立法学院教育的门槛地位,建设胜任于培育法律人的制度性法学院。     

Transnational Anticorruption Law in Action: Cases from Argentina and Brazil

Debates over whether transnational and international legal institutions are fair, effective, or legitimate responses to corruption of local public officials have an important empirical dimension. We use case studies to examine whether foreign legal institutions serve as fair, effective, and legitimate complements to local anticorruption institutions. We refer to this set of claims as the “institutional complementarity theory.” The first case study centers on proceedings concerning bribes paid by subsidiaries of Siemens AG, a German company, to obtain and retain a contract to provide national identity cards for the Argentine government. The second case study examines events stemming from overbilling in the construction of a courthouse in Brazil. Analysis of these cases suggests that the institutional complementary theory is credible. At the same time, the findings suggest that local institutions have greater potential, and foreign institutions have more limited potential, than the theory assumes.     

The Critic’s Love of The Law: Intimate Observations on an Insular Jurisdiction

This article, which should not in any sense be taken to reflect the views of the Editorial Board of Law and Critique, argues that the political project of critical legal studies in England remains overwhelmingly in the future. Lacking academic identity, political purpose and ethical conviction, critical legal scholarship in England has been too insecure in its institutional place and too unconscious of its individual and collective desires to resist absorption into the institution. Critical legal studies – as distinct from feminist legal studies, gay and lesbian studies or critical race theory –has tended to teach and so reproduce the core curriculum in a passive and negative mode. Resistant, ostensibly for historical and political reasons, to self-criticism and indeed to self-reflection upon their institutional practices, critical scholars have ended up repeating the law that they came to critique and overcome. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Adherence to the Law-Based Protection of Human Rights and Improvement of the Legal Guarantee Mechanism of Human Rights

XI Jinping, General Secretary of Central Committee of the Communist Party of China(CPC), made an important speech (Speech) on China’s path of advancement of human rights at a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on February 25, 2022. Adherence to law-based protection of human rights and improvement of the legal mechanism of protection of human rights are important requirements for firmly following China’s path of human rights development. To improve the law-based mechanism of guarantee of human rights, the principles of respecting the people’s principal position and removing systematic and institutional barriers should be adhered to. The Constitution should be comprehensively implemented to promote record and review of new laws presented by legislatures, and to safeguard its authority. Innovations of human rights theory should be accelerated, along with faster construction of a human rights academic system, of a human rights academic system, and of a human rights discourse system, for meeting China’s needs in the new era. A sound legal mechanism of guarantee for human rights can better guarantee people’s better life. Furthermore, China should actively participate in global human rights governance and make appropriate contributions.     

Creating Legal Subjectivity Through Language and the Uses of the Legal Emblem: Children of Law and the Parenthood of the State

This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment—namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant’s love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the permanent attachment to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant.     

人民法院在学位撤销案件中如何进行审查——基于司法审查强度的裁判反思

通过对1998年至2020年我国各级人民法院公开发布的学位撤销案件进行爬梳可以发现,高校撤销学位的事由主要集中在学历证明伪造和科研论文造假,兼有学术性和非学术性;法院对高校撤销学位决定的司法审查强度基于事实认定、法律适用和法律程序的不同而存在差异性的界分。为了维系学术自由与司法审查之间的平衡,并实质性地解决教育行政争议,人民法院应根据学术性事由和非学术性事由、正式程序和非正式程序的区分来建构二元化的事实认定审查标准,强化对学位撤销构成要件审查的释法说理,并审慎对待学位撤销决定的程序违法、审慎适用撤销判决,避免"程序空转"和"虚置诉讼"。     

The Emergence of Penal Extremism in California: A Dynamic View of Institutional Structures and Political Processes

This article examines legal and political developments in California in the 1970s and early 1980s that led to extreme changes in the state's use of imprisonment. It uses historical research methods to illustrate how institutional and political processes interacted in dynamic ways that continuously unsettled and reshaped the crime policy field. It examines crime policy developments before and after the passage of the state's determinate sentencing law to highlight the law's long‐term political implications and to illustrate how it benefited interest groups pushing for harsher punishment. It emphasizes the role executives played in shaping these changes, and how the law's significance was as much political as legal because it transformed the institutional logics that structured criminal lawmaking. These changes, long sought by the law enforcement lobby, facilitated crime's politicization and ushered in a new era of frenetic and punitive changes in criminal law and punishment. This new context benefited politicians who supported extreme responses to crime and exposed the crime policy process to heightened degrees of popular scrutiny. The result was a political obsession with crime that eschewed moderation and prioritized prison expansion above all else.     

计量与案例:法律实证研究方法的细剖析

法律实证研究方法可以分为计量研究和案例研究两大类。它们各自又可以再细分,如前者可分为基于原始生成数据、人工数据、实验数据作出的研究;后者可以分为基于假想案例、日常案例、全景式案例、罕见案例作出的研究。每种具体研究方法的优缺点都值得深入分析。正确认识其分类与短长可以帮助我们更好地选择、使用这些研究方法,有针对性地进行学术批评、回应,及进行有效的学术跟进、完善。     

Studies of foreign legal history in china over the past 60 years

This article gives a detailed review of the evolution of the Chinese study of Foreign Legal History over the past 60 years. It covers five aspects: academic conferences, Chinese translated works on Foreign Legal History, the education of Chinese scholars in this field, academic activities and contestations, and the prospect of Foreign Legal History as a discipline. This article aims to tease out the achievements and problems of the studies of Foreign Legal History and analyze the social conditions underlying these problems and achievements. It concludes that the reconstruction of Chinese legal system and the development of Chinese legal system cannot stand in isolation from the process of absorbing, transplanting, and learning from foreign jurisprudence and legal systems. Though Foreign Legal History might not become a hot topic, it remains of great significance to the Chinese understanding of law.     

Legal skills and the SQE: confronting the challenge head on

Whether the teaching and assessment of practical legal skills and professional conduct should be focused at the academic or vocational stage of legal education has been considered numerous times, with recommendations made and varying degrees of implementation carried out. With the approval of the Solicitors Qualifying Examination being granted by the Legal Services Board this issue is once again being brought into focus. The end of the Legal Practice Course will result in the required compulsory teaching and assessment of core practical legal skills and professional conduct being removed from legal education. The question therefore is whether legal education should incorporate practical legal skills and professional conduct into teaching and assessment at the academic stage and, if so, how can this be achieved in a way that complements rather than distracts from the study of academic law. This study will consider the recommendations made in relation to practical legal skills and professional conduct over the last five decades and identify possible options for the embedding of practical legal skills and professional conduct in the law curriculum at undergraduate level.