Who is the Author of Halakhah?

The Jewish Law (Halakahh) is probably the older legal system working in our time. It is established on a hierarchy of different texts. The oldest and more authoritative is the Torah (the five books of Moshe), then come the Mishnah, the Talmud, the compilation as Maimonide’s Mishne Torah and Caro’s Shulchan Arukh, then the responsa of the rabbis. While the authorship of the later texts is more or less clear, the one of the Torah is highly problematic, also in the self-understanding of Jewish hermeneutics. This question is discussed in the present paper not from a philological-historical point of view, but from a semiotic one, trying to understand what devices and regimes of enunciation are enacted by the text in order to establish its semiotic-juridical effects. A special double enunciation frame is proposed as the mark of the legislative power in the text, in correlation with another textual device, a sort of divine “signature”. The further evolution of the authorship of the Jewish Law is discussed in its relation with the question of the autonomy in the interpretation of the sacred text.     

The division of labour between academia and industry for the generation of radical inventions

The Journal of Technology Transfer - The paper investigates the relationship between public research and radical technological development. This study draws on the theory of recombinant innovation...     

Allele sharing in first-degree and unrelated pairs of individuals in the Ge F I AmpFlSTR Profiler Plus database

Eleven Italian forensic laboratories participated in a population study based on the AB Profiler Plus loci with proficiency testing. The validated database, including 1340 individuals, is available on-line. Tests for Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, gametic unbalance, and heterogeneity of gene frequency were generally not significant. Gene frequencies at each locus were consistent with those of two previously published Italian studies, but different from a third. Individuals of each subsample were paired, and the total number of alleles shared across the nine loci was determined in each pair. The analysis was replicated over the total sample. In addition, two samples of mother-child pairs (N=315) and full-sib pairs (N=91) were subjected to allele sharing analysis. The resulting distributions were sufficiently distinct from the sample of unrelated pairs as to be of practical usefulness.     

A single mutation in the FGA locus responsible for false homozygosities and discrepancies between commercial kits in an unusual paternity test case

We report an unusual paternity test case showing multiple peculiarities. Using AmpFlSTR Profiler Plus and AmpFlSTR Identifiler PCR Amplification kits, the alleged father and the two children were apparently homozygous at the FGA locus, but using the PowerPlex 16 kit the three individuals were found to be heterozygous. Drop-out was caused by a single mutation event in the presumptive binding site of the reverse primer. In addition, three inconsistencies were detected between the daughter and the alleged father among 18 STR markers. The occurrence of the rare null allele at the FGA locus and case history suggested that the true father was the brother of the alleged father. Furthermore, a single-step repeat maternal mutation was also detected at D16S539. This puzzling case was solved by using multiple analytical approaches, including the use of different primer pairs, the use of a high number of STR markers, and the characterization of the mutation causing the "null allele."     

Co-evolution of politics and corporate governance

In the OECD countries, there exists a negative cross-country correlation between an economy's degree of employment protection and its degree of corporate ownership dispersion. One explanation is that employees’ political rights influence corporate governance: systems characterized by strong employees’ rights tend to be balanced by strong and concentrated owners. In this approach, the separation between ownership and control is only possible when unions and social democratic parties are sufficiently weak. In this paper we argue that causation runs also in the opposite direction (from strong concentrated ownership to strong employees’ protection) and leads to multiple equilibria characterized by alternative co-evolution paths of politics and corporate governance. To empirically assess our theoretical arguments we estimate a simultaneous equation model for workers rights’ protection and corporate ownership structure determination by three-stage least squares in a sample of 21 OECD countries. We conclude by arguing that the relative relevance of each flow of causation has important economic policy implications.     

Public markets, private orderings and corporate governance

In the New Property Rights approach the degree of incompleteness of markets is taken independently of the cost of the public ordering and of their efficiency relatively to private orderings. In this approach “public markets,” similarly to a Swiss cheese, are either assumed to be nonexistent empty holes (because of infinite third party verification costs) or assumed to be smooth and efficient (because of zero third party verification costs). When we allow for positive but not infinite third party verification costs we are necessarily pushed back to the insights of Commons, Coase, Fuller and Williamson. The degree of (in)completeness of public markets becomes an endogenous economic problem and managers can be seen as agents that make “second order” specific investments to run specific relations that cannot be efficiently handled by public markets. Managers and the public authorities build respectively private and public “legal equilibria” that set the working rules within which transactions can take place. Private and public legal equilibria are not only substitutes but also complements. This complementarity is an important source of the path dependency that characterizes the development of different legal systems. The framework is applied to GM’s acquisition of Fisher Body. We suggest that, contrary to the claims of the New property Rights approach, the advantages of the acquisition were not due to the superior incentives of the new private owners but should be rather related to the replacement of public markets by the new private ordering set up by Alfred Sloan.     

Reasonable,Ruled, Responsible

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The paper begins by posing the theoretical problem of the foundation of reasonable...     

Robots in the cloud with privacy: A new threat to data protection?

The focus of this paper is on the class of robots for personal or domestic use, which are connected to a networked repository on the internet that allows such machines to share the information required for object recognition, navigation and task completion in the real world. The aim is to shed light on how these robots will challenge current rules on data protection and privacy. On one hand, a new generation of network-centric applications could in fact collect data incessantly and in ways that are “out of control,” because such machines are increasingly “autonomous.” On the other hand, it is likely that individual interaction with personal machines, domestic robots, and so forth, will also affect what U.S. common lawyers sum up with the Katz's test as a reasonable “expectation of privacy.” Whilst lawyers continue to liken people's responsibility for the behaviour of robots to the traditional liability for harm provoked by animals, children, or employees, attention should be drawn to the different ways in which humans will treat, train, or manage their robots-in-the-cloud, and how the human–robot interaction may affect the multiple types of information that are appropriate to reveal, share, or transfer, in a given context.     

Incomplete Contracts, Intellectual Property and Institutional Complementarities

In the New Property Rights model ownership of assets should be assigned to the most capable agents. While, in a world of incomplete contracts, the application of the model to IPRs provides insights on the nature of their second best allocation, suggesting a direction of causation going from technology to property rights, also the opposite direction of causation may arise: owners of IPRs tend to develop more capabilities in the production of new IPRs. For some firms and countries, a virtuous complementarity between the development of IPRs and skills arises. For others, the disincentive effect of the exclusion from intellectual property has more damaging consequences than the lack of access to material capital.