Legislating community‐based management: Lessons from the venezuelan freshwater fishery

Abstract

The linkage between legitimate local participation and institutional/legal openness was demonstrated by an evaluation of the current freshwater fishery regulatory system in Venezuela as explicated in the 1944 Ley de Pesca (Law of the Fishery). By examining the current efficacy of Venezuela's freshwater fishery laws and government openness to local input, this case‐study illustrates barriers to community‐based management (CBM) created by top‐down management paradigms and hierarchical legal frameworks. Analysis of a proposed CBM project in Venezuela indicates that enabling institutions and legislation are necessary for effective long‐term, decentralized freshwater fishery management. Social learning is considered as an approach for making the political and legal climate more amenable to local input. The intent is to further clarify how the union of what is legal and what is civil in a society can enhance the capacity and potential of management devolution and therefore bring us closer to achieving sustainable natural resource use.     

Desgolonizando los derechos de propiedad. derechos indígenas comunales y el paradigma de la propiedad privada

The professional legal elites in Latin America often legitimate the importation of foreign legal models without neither taking enough attention to local contexts nor making a critical analysis of the imported models. This essay analyzes the arguments of a paradigmatic work of this type that affirms the efficiency and superiority of Anglo-Saxon Law in the regulation of property and the achievement of “economic development”, compared with the Law derived from Spanish colonization. The three theoretical sources of the mentioned work are the theory of legal origins, the private property school and a biased vision of colonization. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that these theoretical sources have deep ethnocentric roots by making invisible the indigenous communal legality in the colonizer project.     

Confucian Constitutionalism? The Emergence of Constitutional Review in Korea and Taiwan

This paper documents the recent emergence of constitutional review of legislative and administrative action in Korea and Taiwan, two East Asian countries seen to be historically resistant to notions of judicial activism and constitutional constraint. It argues that the ability to draw from foreign legal traditions, especially those of the United States and Germany, empowered judges in these countries and therefore helped to alter the structure of public law away from executive-centered approaches of the past. This is consistent with viewing judicial review as essentially a foreign transplant. Nevertheless, the institution of judicial review has some compatibilities with Confucian legal tradition, a point that has implications for how we think about institutional transfers across borders. By constructing a locally legitimate account of what is undeniably a modern institution of foreign origin, the paper argues that constitutional constraint should not be viewed as an imposition of Western norms, but as a more complex process of adaptation and institutional transformation.     

外资收购企业国有股的法律问题

外资收购我国地方企业国有股已在一些地方出现 ,这是“国有股减持”一种广义的尝试。这种收购有一些问题需要研究 ,包括这类收购的具体法律依据 ;商业市场上的自愿与合意在社会公平性方面是否具有合理性 ;这种收购中是否具有潜在管理层收购 ;这种收购对地方就业问题有何影响 ;政府对此种收购有何行政职责。     

The Path of the Law Review: How Interfield Ties Contribute to Institutional Emergence and Buffer against Change

Early neoinstitutional theory tended to assume institutional reproduction, while recent accounts privilege situations in which alternative models from outside an organizational environment or delegitimizing criticism from within precipitate institutional change. We know little about institutions that persist despite such change conditions. Recent advances in sociological field theory suggest that interfield ties contribute to institutional change but under‐theorize how such ties may reinforce institutions. Extending both approaches, I incorporate self‐reinforcing mechanisms from path‐dependence scholarship. I elucidate my framework by analyzing the student‐edited, student‐reviewed law review. Despite its anomalous position relative to the dominant peer‐reviewed journal model of other disciplines, and despite sustained criticisms from those who publish in them, the law review remains a bedrock institution of law schools and legal scholarship. I combine qualitative historical analyses of legal scholarship and law schools with quantitative analyses of law‐review structures and field contestation. The analysis covers law review's entire historical trajectory—its emergence, its institutionalization and coherence of a field around it, and its current state as a contested but persistent institution. I argue that self‐reinforcing mechanisms evident in law review's ties to related fields‐legal practice, law schools, the university, and legal periodicals—both enabled its emergence and have buffered it against change.     

Banking on China's WTO Commitments: 'Same Bed, Different Dreams' in China's Financial Services Sector

Foreign banks and the Chinese Government have different dreamsabout the business opportunities and obligations that ariseunder China's World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments onfinancial services. This article provides an overview of China'sbanking sector reforms and its gradual opening to foreign participationin the context of General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)rules governing international trade in financial services andthe obligations that apply since China's WTO accession in December2001. The article highlights the contradictory interpretationsthat China and other Members have issued regarding China's GATScommitments and provides a framework for assessing the WTO consistencyof China's banking measures. An analysis is conducted underthis framework to evaluate whether China has fully implementedits GATS commitments on (i) the acquisition of Chinese banksby foreign financial institutions, (ii) legitimate ‘prudentialregulation’ in the banking sector, and (iii) full marketaccess for credit card and electronic payment services. Notwithstandingthe apparent complexity of GATS rules, the article concludesthat the WTO legal framework supports the case for increasedaccess to China's financial services market consistent withits GATS commitments, and fully consistent with China's plansfor continuing domestic growth and its medium-term financialservices export interests.     

外国法解释模式研究

外国法解释不同于外国法查明。借助解释模式这一概念，可将外国法解释的目标、主体、对象和途径等不同要素统合为有机整体，置于国际私法和法律解释理论的双重脉络中予以探究。在现有外国法解释模式中，解释目标一般为确定外国法在其所属国的意义，故裁判者须完全摒弃先见，作为忠实的外部观察者摹写外国法律共同体对外国法的客观理解。此模式在司法实践中的困境揭示出其在相当程度上偏离了法律解释的内在规律。应重新厘定外国法解释目标，结合外国法适用的“情境化”特点，以法律论证理论重构外国法解释模式。     

The penalization of protest under neoliberalism: managing resistance through punishment

The repression of anti-austerity protests in Spain from 2011 to 2014 constitutes an example of how neoliberal developments are facilitated by the penal system as it limits political resistances to the imposition of precarious working conditions and social cuts. The limits imposed on contentious politics are both material (consisting of banning acts that are prominent in social movement’s repertoire of contention, fining demonstrators, etc.) and symbolic (consisting of transforming the meaning of legitimate politics by imposing new legal and political definitions). This case study is used to illustrate the interconnection between labor markets, social policies and the repression of social protest, and to elaborate on Wacquant’s approach to the relationship between punishment and other social institutions. It is at such times of political and economic crisis when institutional interconnections seem particularly exposed, arguably enabling more profound analyses.     

Law and Institutional Legitimacy in the Practice of Human Rights

The Heart of Human Rights develops an account of human rights as legal entities that serve important moral purposes in a legitimate international human rights practice. This paper examines Allen Buchanan’s general concept of institutional legitimacy and aims to expand that concept by emphasizing its connection with several ideas developed in the book about the nature and function of a system of international human rights. When it incorporates those ideas, Buchanan’s ‘Metacoordination View’ can be seen to set a standard of legitimacy not only for assessments of an international scheme of human rights institutions, but also for the basic institutional structures of domestic states. Furthermore, we can see how the nature and function of human rights in the international practice of human rights bears on legitimacy assessments of particular domestic institutions.     

Situated Justice: A Contextual Analysis of Fairness and Inequality in Employment Discrimination Litigation

A substantial body of sociolegal scholarship suggests that the legitimacy of the law crucially depends on the public's perception that legal processes are fair. The bulk of this research relies on an underdeveloped account of the material and institutional contexts of litigants' perceptions of fairness. We introduce an analysis of situated justice to capture a contextualized conception of how litigants narrate fairness in their actual legal encounters. Our analysis draws on 100 in‐depth interviews with defendant's representatives, plaintiffs, and lawyers involved in employment discrimination lawsuits, selected as part of a multimethod study of 1,788 discrimination cases filed in U.S. district courts between 1988 and 2003. This article offers two key empirical findings, the first at the level of individual perceptions and the second at the level of legal institutions. First, we find that neither defendants' representatives nor plaintiffs believe discrimination law is fair. Rather than sharing a complaint, however, each side sees unfairness only in those aspects of the process that work to their disadvantage. Second, we demonstrate that the very notion of fairness can belie structural asymmetries that, overall, profoundly benefit employers in employment discrimination lawsuits. We conclude by discussing how a situated justice analysis calls for a rethinking of empirical research on fairness. Audio recordings of respondents quoted in this article are available online. ¹      

The Importance of Conversation in Transitional Justice: A Study of Land Restitution in South Africa

One of the most replicated findings of the procedural justice literature is that people who receive unfavorable outcomes are more likely to believe that the process was nonetheless legitimate if they thought that it was fair. Using interviews of 150 people compensated through the South African land restitution program, this article examines whether these findings apply in the transitional justice context where it is often unclear who the winners and losers are. The question explored is: When all outcomes are unfavorable or incomplete, how do people make fairness assessments? The central observation was that the ability of respondents and land restitution commission officials to sustain a conversation with each other had the greatest effect on whether respondents believed that the land restitution process was fair. The study also contributes to the existing literature by exploring the institutional arrangements and resources necessary to facilitate communication and to overcome any communication breakdowns encountered.     

Institutions and contracts: Franchising

This paper investigates a new dataset of franchise networks in nine countries in order to assess whether and to what extent do institutions influence the practice of franchising. Our regressions relate the structure of franchise networks (the rate of franchised units as opposed to corporate units) to individual parameters supposed to reflect the extent of moral hazards on the franchisor's and franchisee's sides and, more specifically, to various institutional parameters of the franchisor's country, namely, the legal tradition, the level of procedural formalism, the constraints imposed by labour regulation and the effectiveness of trademark protection. While agency theory parameters seem to perform rather badly in this international setting, institutions such as trademark protection and labour regulation have more explanatory power: greater trademark protection encourages franchising and the impact of labour regulation is mostly positive, depending on the type of labour regulation that is being considered. The effect of legal tradition and formalism seems negligible once these parameters are taken in. JEL Classification D23 · F23 · K12     

Legal Intermediaries: How Insurance Companies Construct the Meaning of Compliance with Antidiscrimination Laws

Existing empirical research suggests that human resource officials, managers, and in‐house counsel influence the meaning of antidiscrimination law by communicating an altered ideology of what civil rights laws mean that is colored with managerial values. This article explores how insurance companies play a critical and, as yet, unrecognized role in mediating the meaning of antidiscrimination law through Employment Practice Liability Insurance (EPLI). My analysis draws from, links, and contributes to two literatures that examine organizational behavior in different ways: new institutional organizational sociology studies of how organizations respond to legal regulation and sociolegal insurance scholars' research on how institutions govern through risk. Through participant observation at EPLI conferences, interviews, and content analysis of insurance loss prevention manuals, my study bridges these two literatures and highlights how the insurance field uses a risk‐based logic to construct the threat of employment law and influence the form of compliance from employers. Faced with uncertain legal risk concerning potential discrimination violations, insurance institutions elevate the risk and threat in the legal environment and offer EPLI and a series of risk‐management services that build discretion into legal rules and mediate the nature of civil rights compliance. My data suggest that insurance risk‐management services may sometimes be compatible with civil rights goals of improving equality, due process, and fair governance in workplace settings, but at other times may simply make discrimination claims against employers more defensible.     

The Institutional Requirements of the WTO in an Era of Globalisation: Imperfections in the Global Economic Polity

To the liberal economist, ‘globalisation’ denotes the virtuous circle of expanded trade, investment and economic growth around the globe. In the political world, ‘globalisation’ is the vaguely understood and yet powerful undercurrents of irrevocable economic changes which have generated social tensions and environmental damage, loss of domestic competitiveness and national sovereignty. Throughout the social sciences, the usage of the term ‘globalisation’ is largely inconsistent and inconclusive—but its imprecision is matched only by its popularity. This article suggests that globalisation should be understood as a reconstruction process of the market as well as the polity. It is essentially a form of global market integration which can be observed from different vantage points, including governance. The premise of the article is that global market integration is surprisingly fragile and requires an adequate institutional foundation in order to move forward. Globalisation and governance are mutually constitutive phenomena. The polity governing the global market integration process cannot be separated in any meaningful sense from the changes in the market itself. This article concerns the institutional requirements of globalisation. While globalisation has produced institutional changes, it has not necessarily produced the most effective or legitimate ones. Exactly what polity construction should underpin globalisation? Should globalisation be left ungoverned? Should existing institutions be improved? Does it require the establishment of supranational sites and the re‐construction of hierarchical legal order at global level?     

涉讼司法鉴定收费制度的检视与重构

我国司法鉴定机构正经历着体制性的变革,司法鉴定事务的逐步立法规范,新的运作方式使现在的鉴定机构已成为市场主体,鉴定人也成为从鉴定费中获取收益的个体。过高的鉴定费用成为公民运用法律保护其合法权益的瓶颈,因而对鉴定费规制问题必须引起足够的重视。我国鉴定费问题突出表现在收费法律依据、收费标准、收费管理以及司法鉴定法律援助几个方面。鉴定费的收取制度应沿此问题的解决路径出发进行建构,其实质是公民诉权的保障和合法权益的维护。     

法治治理中的不同推理主体

由于参与法律活动的人的角色不同,因而其法律推理的目的、采用的方法也不尽相同。作为私权捍卫者的律师应当竭力为委托人的利益服务,作为制度权威言说者的法官有责任作出正当的裁判,承担教学和学术角色的法学教授则应成为法律智慧的启发者和学术知识的增量扩充者。不同角色主体的参与、争辩、对话,是聚向善治的生命活水和智慧溪流。     

法律交易论

在一部民法典中对“民事法律行为”作出专门规定,这在法律逻辑上是有问题的。考察所谓“民事法律行为”的由来及其本质,可知产生这样的问题是必然的。因为我们在上个世纪初接受西方法律,特别是德国民法时,并没有完全把握《德国民法典》中法律交易的实质及其整个理论体系,一开始就将法律行为与法律交易混淆,从而导致了一系列理论上的混乱。在德国民法中,法律行为与法律交易是明确区分的,前者的法律后果是法律规定的,而后者的法律后果则是交易人意思指向的。就此而言,法律交易的合法性乃毋庸置疑的题中之义。与此同时,它又必然是民法的核心。因为它既从根本上体现着私人自治和意思自治的法律理念,又从技术和制度上表明着最基本法律活动的最一般抽象。从法律史上考察,这种思路早在古代罗马法中就已现端倪,但最终形成于19世纪德国法学。至于现今我们民法中所谓的“法律行为”或“民事法律行为”,其实就是德国民法中的法律交易。它原本是民法中的一个专属概念,但由于我们原始的概念混淆与误解,才不得不用“民事”加以限定,以至于造成不用“民事”限定就无法区别于法律行为,若用“民事”限定就导致逻辑问题的尴尬与两难。解决这个问题的途径只能是:从整个法律理论,特别是民法理论体系上梳理把握法律交易和法律     

Race categorization and the regulation of business and science

Despite the lack of consensus regarding the meaning or significance of race or ethnicity amongst scientists and the lay public, there are legal requirements and guidelines that dictate the collection of racial and ethnic data across a range of institutions. Legal regulations are typically created through a political process and then face varying kinds of resistance when the state tries to implement them. We explore the nature of this opposition by comparing responses from businesses, scientists, and science-oriented businesses (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) to U.S. state regulations that used politically derived racial categorizations, originally created to pursue civil rights goals. We argue that insights from cultural sociology regarding institutional and cultural boundaries can aid understanding of the nature of resistance to regulation. The Food and Drug Administration's guidelines for research by pharmaceutical companies imposed race categories on science-based businesses, leading to objections that emphasized the autonomy and validity of science. In contrast, similar race categories regulating first business by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and later scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) encountered little challenge. We argue that pharmaceutical companies had the motive (profit) that NIH-supported scientists lacked and a legitimate discourse (boundary work of science) that businesses regulated by the EEOC did not have. The study suggests the utility of a comparative cultural sociology of the politics of legal regulation, particularly when understanding race-related regulation and the importance of examining legal regulations for exploring how the meaning of race or ethnicity are contested and constructed in law.