On being asset-constrained in litigation contests

This paper establishes that being asset-constrained may be advantageous for defendants in litigation contests. An active asset constraint of defendants (i) may increase (decrease) defendant (plaintiff) contest effort, (ii) may lower the sum of plaintiff and defendant contest effort, (iii) lowers expected defendant payment, and (iv) makes a symmetric contest asymmetric.     

起诉抽象行政行为:行政相对人和人民检察院谁更适合?——关于行政诉讼法修改建议的一点探讨

将抽象行政行为即行政规范性文件纳入司法机关的审查范围,业已成为学界有关行政诉讼法修改的共识。但是,由于检察机关在国家政权体制中的地位和作用以及检察权的性质等因素,由人民检察院作为规范性文件的起诉原告,并不合适。相比较而言,赋予公民个人等其他行政相对人起诉行政规范性文件的原告资格,更为合适。在确保行政相对人优先起诉规范性文件权利的同时,还须进行一些必要的制度设计,以防止诉权的滥用。     

和谐语境下社会公益权研究——公益诉讼中社会中间层角色考量

在建设和谐社会的背景下,对公共利益的救济成为关注的焦点问题。公共利益是公益诉讼的利益源头,以利益出发,对公共利益进行法权凝练,进而建构社会公益权这种新型的权利,并以此为权利契机,对公益诉讼的主体进行分析,赋予社会中间层组织以原告资格,是对现有权利体系与诉讼制度的完善与修正。     

Contingent fees meet the British rule: an exploratory study

Compensation schemes in which lawyer’s fees are contingent on winning the suit are becoming increasingly popular throughout Europe. At the same time, the British rule of legal cost allocation is applicable in many European countries. As a result, it is of policy relevance how their coexistence may be harmonized. This paper uses the litigation-contest framework to analyze the consequences of three different cost-allocation regimes if a plaintiff’s attorney is compensated on a contingent fee basis. We compare the equilibrium contest effort, justice, and payoffs for affected parties in the different regimes and find arguments in favor of not reimbursing contingent fees.     

Legal expenditure as a rent-seeking game

Legal expenditures at a civil trial constitute an interesting type of rent-seeking contest. In civil litigation there is a natural interaction between the objective merits of the case and the outcome of the contest. Institutions such as fee shifting do not generally have a counterpart in other rent-seeking contests. The endogenous decision to participate in the rent-seeking contest corresponds to the decision by the plaintiff to bring a case, and the decision by the defendant to defend it. The desirability of fee shifting is very sensitive to the value of the parameter which describes the legal technology.     

Rivalry and superior dispatch: an?analysis of competing courts in medieval and early modern England

In most areas, economists look to competition to align incentives, but not so with courts. Many believe that competition enables plaintiff forum shopping, but Adam Smith praised rivalry among courts. This article describes the courts when the common law developed. In many areas of law, courts were monopolized and imposed decisions on unwilling participants. In other areas, however, large degrees of competition and consent were present. In many areas, local, hundred, manorial, county, ecclesiastical, law merchant, chancery, and common law courts competed for customers. When parties had a choice, courts needed to provide a forum that was ex ante value maximizing.     

Can the U.S. government legally monitor private communications? If so,given the U.S.'s significant protection of privacy rights,what government cannot?

Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA/CSS is the most important case ever regarding whether a government can monitor private communications. This case's discussion could not be any more timely for public affairs purposes. Given continuing terrorist attacks and concomitant calls for private industries, such as Wikimedia Foundation, to do more to stop the spread of violence and rhetoric on the Internet, there has never been a more important time to consider what limits should be placed on government's access to personal data in the quest to prevent terrorism. Here, the district court referred to the plaintiffs' injuries from NSA upstream surveillance as speculative, denying them Article III standing. The Fourth Circuit reinstated Wikimedia Foundation as a plaintiff, finding sufficient allegations for it to survive a facial challenge to Article III standing based on the Wikimedia Allegation. However, the other plaintiffs, relying on the Dragnet Allegation, were properly dismissed based on lacking standing. Until more details of upstream surveillance become public, suing under a dragnet theory should prove difficult. In fact, lobbying the legislative and executive branches to enact changes could be more effective and efficient than relying on the courts.     

Supreme Court Justices’ Economic Behaviour: A Multilevel Model Analysis

Supreme Court justices are overlooked, but important, national policy‐making players who render final and consequential decisions in cases on economic conflicts. The research question asks what forces explain the decisional behaviour of Supreme Court justices in economic rights cases between a private and a public party. Theoretically, the decisional behaviour of an individual justice is a function of his or her notion as to what makes ‘good’ law, pursued in a cultural‐collegial setting that is oriented by majoritarian requirements, while constrained by the legal nature of the case being considered. Empirically, all economic decisions made by Norwegian Supreme Court justices in five‐justice panels from 1963 to 2012 are analyzed. Our multilevel model demonstrates that individual, collegial and case‐level forces all contribute to explain the justices’ votes. These results suggest that case‐related dynamics, such as who the plaintiff is or the amount of disagreement between justices, matter, but also that ideology – via appointment mechanisms – matters when a nation's high court justices decide economic cases. Understanding the foundational assumptions and the institutional procedures is vital when transporting judicial behaviour models across polities.     

关于领导干部综合能力培育的对策思考

领导干部只有提高政治理论水平,提高学习能力、驾驭市场经济能力、依法执政能力和总揽全局的能力,才能培育其综合能力,才能肩负起领导责任,才能当好最广大人民群众根本利益的忠实代表。     

论高等教育大众化背景下学风的蜕变

中国高等教育的大众化是由政府主导并采用行政手段自上而下推动的结果，具有明显的经济实利性。这种特征与高速发展的进程带来许多负面效应，尤以学风的蜕变为突出，表现出功利性的学术目的与实利性的操作手段和自下而上的蔓廷方式的特点。它直接制约了高等教育大众化的发展进程与走向，使我们不得不进行认真的反思。     

污染环境罪主观方面评析

《刑法修正案（八）》对重大环境污染事故罪进行了重大修改,罪名也变为污染环境罪.一般认为,修改前的重大环境污染事故罪是过失犯罪,但对于修改后的污染环境罪是故意还是过失犯罪,理论上颇有争议,存有过失说、双重罪过形式说及故意说等观点.但过失说及双重罪过形式说均不能正确反映本罪修改的实质意义,不利于正确认定污染环境罪,不利于有效打击污染环境的行为,因而不足取.无论从文理的角度,还是从论理的角度,污染环境罪都应当是故意犯罪.将污染环境罪解释为故意犯罪,有利于惩治污染环境的犯罪行为.     

我国行政学界腐败研究的现状分析

腐败造成对政治、经济、社会等领域的巨大腐蚀与破坏,是我们这个时代面临的最大挑战之一。研究腐败的成因、现状、对策等问题,提出遏制腐败的对策,是历史和社会提出的重要课题。国内学界对此进行了深入研究,并且有大批学术成果面世。为推动腐败研究的深入进行,通过对发表于国内行政学界主要期刊上的近一百多篇学术论文的实证分析,总结与综述现阶段腐败研究现状的若干特征和理论观点,并由此分析得出相关的研究结论。     

Understanding the rise of the regulatory state of the South*

This paper, and the special issue it introduces, explores whether, and how, the rise of the regulatory state of the South, and its implications for processes of governance, are distinct from cases in the North. With the exception of a small but growing body of work on Latin America, most work on the regulatory state deals with the US or Europe, or takes a relatively undifferentiated “legal transplant” approach to the developing world. We use the term “the South” to invoke shared histories of many countries, rather than as a geographic delimiter, even while acknowledging continued and growing diversity among these countries, particularly in their engagement with globalization. We suggest that three aspects of this common context are important in characterizing the rise of the regulatory state of the South. The first contextual element is the presence of powerful external pressures, especially from international financial institutions, to adopt the institutional innovation of regulatory agencies in infrastructure sectors. The result is often an incomplete engagement with and insufficient embedding of regulatory agencies within local political and institutional context. A second is the greater intensity of redistributive politics in settings where infrastructure services are of extremely poor quality and often non‐existent. The resultant politics of distribution draws in other actors, such as the courts and civil society; regulation is too important to be left to the regulators. The third theme is that of limited state capacity, which we suggest has both “thin” and “thick” dimensions. Thin state capacity issues include prosaic concerns of budget, personnel and training; thick issues address the growing pressures on the state to manage multiple forms of engagement with diverse stakeholders in order to balance competing concerns of growth, efficiency and redistribution. These three themes provide a framework for this special issue, and for the case studies that follow. We focus on regulatory agencies in infrastructure sectors (water, electricity and telecoms) as a particular expression of the regulatory state, though we acknowledge that the two are by no means synonymous. The case studies are drawn from India, Colombia, Brazil, and the Philippines, and engage with one or more of these contextual elements. The intent is to draw out common themes that characterize a “regulatory state of the South,” while remaining sensitive to the variations in level of economic development and political institutional contexts within “the South.”     

试论激励理论在军队管理中的应用

本文对管理心理学的激励理论进行了简述,对军队管理中实施激励的意义进行了阐释,在分析军队管理中实施激励的特点的同时,对军队管理中复合应用激励理论的问题进行了探讨。     

试析新形势下保持党的纯洁性的战略意义

在新形势下保持党的纯洁性既是马克思主义政党的本质要求,也是保持和发展党的先进性的内在要求,是应对“四大考验”的客观要求和消除“四种危险”的必然要求,我们要扎实做好保持党的纯洁性的各项工作.     

图书馆建立虚拟实验室的思考

建设虚拟实验室是高等院校一种全新的教学尝试,对于提高老师和学生的学习科研水平具有重要意义。从虚拟实验室的内涵、建设虚拟实验室的意义、建设规划和技术要求等四个方面加以论述,比较系统地阐述了如何在网络信息资源十分丰富的图书馆建设虚拟实验室的构想。     

美国宪法“正当法律程序“原则的经济效应分析

本文通过分析美国宪法“正当法律程序”的演变过程 ,并结合美国宪政变迁的实际历程 ,以及“正常法律程序”与美国经济发展的内在关联 ;对传统的宪政理论中的“经济决定论”进行认真反思 ,并初步提出自己的看法     

论法治城市的构建

依法治国是执政党领导人民群众治理国家，管理社会的基本方略。在推进社会主义法治建设的过程中，推进城市法治建设具有十分重要的意义。本文在阐述法治城市基本要素的基础上，试对法治城市的建设提出几点思考和建议．     

对社区体制存续成因的解析——基于物、关系和观念的分析逻辑

社区结构是行为主体为满足居民需求而选择的获取和利用资源的方式及由此形成的相互关系。物质资源对行为主体的相互关系的决定性影响以及主体观念对相互关系的能动作用共同改变着社区的结构,透过物、关系和观念审视社区结构生成和演变所揭示出的内在的规律和发展的逻辑,为解释当前社区体制改革所面临的问题提供了理论依据。     

新中国选举制度六十年发展的回顾与思考

新中国共颁布了两部选举法。其中第二部选举法经历了四次修改、一次补充。建国60年来,我国的选举制度取得了重大进展：享有选举权的主体从有限发展到普遍;选举权的平等性从着眼于实质平等逐渐向统一实质与形式平等方向发展;从记名投票发展到无记名投票;直接选举范围从基层扩大到县级,并逐步向高层迈进;从等额选举发展到差额选举。但选举制度还存在一些问题,需要进一步进行完善,以有力地促进民主政治建设。