How Their Laws Affect our Laws: Mechanisms of Immigration Policy Diffusion in the Americas, 1790–2010

Why do laws become similar across countries? Is the adoption of similar laws and policies due to factors operating independently within each country? Do countries develop similar rules in response to similar challenges? Or is the similarity of laws and policies due to the interdependent responses that scholars have referred to as processes of policy convergence, transfer, and diffusion? We draw on an analysis of immigration and nationality laws of 22 countries throughout the Western Hemisphere from 1790 to 2010, and of seven case studies of national and international policymaking, to show that policies are often interdependent, even in the domain of immigration law, which scholars have presumed to be relatively immune to external influence. We argue that specific mechanisms of diffusion explain the rise of racist immigration policies in the Americas, their subsequent decline, and the rise of an anti‐discriminatory norm for policies. Most striking among our findings is that at key junctures after 1940, weaker countries effectively advanced an anti‐discriminatory policy agenda against the desires of world powers. We identify the conditions under which weaker countries were able to reach their goals despite opposition from world powers.     

Tax compliance behaviour during the crisis: the case of Greek SMEs

This paper presents the results of a novel survey of 550 small and micro enterprises in Greece regarding their tax compliance behaviour and drawing some useful policy implications for a country facing one of the largest tax gaps in the developed world. We explore the determinants of such behaviour, by integrating economic and psychological perspectives on tax compliance. Results suggest that respondents perceive a strong connection between the quality of political and of tax institutions, while trust seems to play the most significant role in increasing intended compliance and in deterring strategic tax evasion. We contrast the theoretical results with the actual reported compliance behaviour of entrepreneurs and analyse how this behaviour is influenced by factors like perceived nature of power of tax authorities (legitimate versus coercive), perceived fairness of the tax system, etc. The strategy currently followed, that is toughening the profile of tax authorities is a viable short-term response to increase enforced tax compliance. The present study, however, has provided evidence on the multifaceted nature of power and trust and their relation with tax compliance, and the link between power and trust in political regulatory strategies. Current policies seem to completely miss that link.     

Through the Back Door: Applying Theories of Legal Compliance to Illegal Immigration During the Chinese Exclusion Era

This article applies theories of legal compliance to analyze the making of this country's first “illegal immigrants”—Chinese laborers who crossed the U.S.‐Canadian and U.S.‐Mexican borders in defiance of the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943). Drawing upon a variety of sources, including unpublished government records, I explore the ways in which Chinese laborers gained surreptitious entry into the United States during this period and ask, what explains their mass noncompliance? I suggest that while an instrumental perspective is useful for understanding these border crossings, it overlooks other important determinants of noncompliance: normative values and opportunity structures. Specifically, the exclusion laws were widely perceived by the Chinese as lacking social and moral legitimacy, and thus not worthy of obedience. In addition, the existence of smuggling networks and liberal immigration policies in Canada and Mexico played a critical role in facilitating noncompliance. The article concludes with a discussion about the benefits and challenges of using this theoretical framework to analyze noncompliance in immigration law.     

Stalemate in the States: Agenda Control Rules and Policy Output in American Legislatures

This article examines how the power of majority‐party leaders to set the legislative voting calendar influences policy change in American state legislatures. By generating an opportunity for party leaders to exercise gatekeeping or negative agenda control, such rules introduce an additional partisan veto player into a system of governance. This addition typically increases the size of the core or gridlock interval, which drives policy change downward. Using both traditional data on bill passage counts and new data on Affordable Care Act compliance, I find strong support for these claims. More specifically, when I calculate core sizes that are sensitive to agenda rules, I find that agenda‐control‐adjusted core size is negatively correlated with policy change, as expected. Moreover, even when I match states on their overall preference dispersion or polarization, the ability of party leaders to exercise negative agenda control is strongly negatively associated with policy change.     

Settling for Less? Organizational Determinants of Discrimination‐Charge Outcomes

Although more than 60,000 workers formally charge their employers with unlawful sex or race employment discrimination annually, fewer than one in five charges results in outcomes favorable to the complainant. Building on sociolegal and organizational theory, this study examines how employing organizations avoid unfavorable discrimination-charge outcomes. Using EEO-1 establishment reports matched to discrimination charge data provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I assess the effect of employers' legal experience, resources, and indicators of legal compliance on the likelihood that complainants receive favorable charge outcomes, benefits, monetary settlements, and policy change mandates. In general, I find that legal experience, establishment size, and indicators of legal compliance insulate employers from unfavorable charge outcomes. However, in situations where employers are willing to settle claims, legally experienced establishments are more likely to pay monetary damages and receive mandates to change their workplace policies.     

Bushwhacking the Ethical High Road: Conflict of Interest in the Practice of Law and Real Life

A long‐standing scholarly tradition regards professions, in general, and ethics rules, in particular, as “projects” of market control. It is no surprise, critics charge, that in the latest assault on the monopoly of the American legal profession–waged by multidisciplinary professional service firms–lawyers are hiding behind their ethics rules to protect their turf. In this article, I report on an extensive empirical study of conflict of interest in private legal practice and look comparatively at other fiduciaries, among them, accountants, psychotherapists, physicians, journalists, and academics. I investigate the role of ethics rules that seek to insure fiduciary loyalty in structuring the delivery of services. How does social and institutional change, roiling the fiduciary world, threaten disinterestedness and loyalty and how, if at all, do fiduciaries respond? How is the regulation of conflict of interest accomplished? Where are the conflicts rules most likely to be honored or ignored? What incentive structures encourage compliance? What are the costs and unexpected consequences of compliance? What is foregone? And is it all worth it? In what might come as a surprise to many, I find that the legal profession takes conflict of interest more seriously than many of the rest of us. As the title implies, legal practitioners largely travel alone, bushwhacking through the underbrush snarling the ethical high road. As critical scholarship predicted, lawyers do enjoy a monopoly at the end of the road. But this monopoly is achieved, not by restraint of trade or some other artifice or stratagem of market control, but by lack of competition. It seems that no one else is trudging alongside the lawyers. Lawyers are not necessarily more ethical than the others; they just behave more ethically–at least with respect to conflict of interest. The question is why. And what difference does it make?     

Third Parties,Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress

What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related to Populist issues. The results are consistent with two claims. First, co‐optation of the Populist Party's issues occurred even before the formation of the party. Second, the co‐optation of Populist policies does not appear to be correlated with the electoral success of the Populist candidates.     

Eliminating Poverty? ‘Financial Inclusion’, Access to Land,and Gender Equality in International Development

The UK White Paper on International Development published in 2009 explicitly links access to financial services with poverty reduction. In doing so, it echoes the policies the World Bank set out in its 2008 Policy Research Report on Finance. This paper offers a detailed analysis of these development policies and connects the current plans for the expansion of financial sectors in the developing world with policies that promote the acquisition of formal land title. The paper argues that as asset‐backed lending expands, commercial banks will come to play an increasingly important role in third world economies. In light of this, it reviews important first‐hand accounts of the difficulties of drafting legislation to protect women's access to land in the face of opposition from commercial lenders, using Tanzania and Uganda as illustrative examples. The paper assesses the implications of expanding access to credit for gender equality and concludes that it is difficult to reconcile the promotion of financial inclusion with the aim of international development to end poverty.     

Regulatory Pragmatism,Legal Knowledge and Compliance with Law in Areas of State Weakness

The literature suggests that compliance with law is unlikely in areas of state weakness absent additional state capacity. Utilizing three novel data sets collected in adjacent districts in India and Nepal, this article demonstrates that weak states can significantly increase compliance by fostering accurate legal knowledge—something the literature often assumes is widespread. This assumption is problematic because principal–agent problems prevent many weak states from behaving consistently; target populations often lack education and competent legal advice and struggle to learn about the law via observation. States that employ regulatory pragmatism, however, may overcome this challenge; they do so by designing implementation strategies for on‐the‐ground realities. I investigate two such efforts—delegated enforcement and information dissemination through local leaders. The data indicate that strategies consistent with regulatory pragmatism, in contrast to those that are legally doctrinaire or deterrence based significantly increase legal knowledge and compliance, even where the state is locally weak.     

Competing Normative Frameworks and the Limits of Deterrence Theory: Comments on Baker and Griffith's Ensuring Corporate Misconduct

This essay reviews the contributions to deterrence theory that Tom Baker and Sean Griffith make in Ensuring Corporate Misconduct (2010) and argues that their work highlights the limits of deterrence theory for shaping corporate conduct. Baker and Griffith extend the deterrence framework to account for the mediating effect of third‐party institutions, like insurers, on deterrence calculations, and they suggest how corporate governance decisions, such as what type of insurance coverage to purchase, encode signals about corporations' compliance motivations and capacity. Although these insights might prove useful for enhancing the efficacy of deterrence regimes aimed at white‐collar crime and other types of corporate misconduct, they suggest the difficulty of shaping corporate conduct that is influenced not only by the norms embodied in securities law, but also by the alternative normative system of shareholder value maximization. I discuss the failure of deterrence theory to address adequately noncompliant behavior that springs not solely from material self‐interest, but from adherence to an alternative set of norms, and I explore the possibility of viewing corporate compliance as a norm‐change project.     

Expanding Geographies of Deportability: How Immigration Enforcement at the Local Level Affects Undocumented and Mixed‐Status Families

This article examines the impact of policies and programs that have expanded immigration enforcement from the federal to the local level. Drawing from in‐depth interviews with over sixty individuals who are members of undocumented or mixed‐status families, I discuss how these initiatives have extended the geography of deportability from traditional sites that focus explicitly on immigration enforcement (e.g., the US–Mexico border) to more nontraditional sites in the public sphere (e.g., driving under the influence checkpoints or grocery stores). I demonstrate how this intensification of enforcement strains undocumented immigrants’ resources as well as their participation in school, work, and their communities.     

Realism about the Nature of Law

Legal realism comes in two main versions, namely American legal realism and Scandinavian legal realism. In this article, I shall be concerned with the Scandinavian realists, who were naturalists and non‐cognitivists, and who maintained that conceptual analysis (in a fairly broad sense) is a central task of legal philosophers, and that such analysis must proceed in a naturalist, anti‐metaphysical spirit. Specifically, I want to consider the commitment to ontological naturalism and non‐cognitivism on the part of the Scandinavians and its implications for their view of the nature of law. I argue (i) that the Scandinavians differ from legal positivists in that they reject the idea that there are legal relations, that is, legal entities and properties, and to varying degrees defend the view that law is a matter of human behavior rather than legal norms, and (ii) that they do not and cannot accept the idea that there is a ‘world of the ought’ in Kelsen's sense. I also argue, more specifically, (iii) that the objection to non‐naturalist theories raised by the Scandinavians—that there is and can be no connection between the higher realm of norms and values (the ‘world of the ought’) and the world of time and space—is convincing, and (iv) that Kelsen's introduction of a so‐called modally indifferent substrate does nothing to undermine this objection. In addition, I argue (v) that the Scandinavians can account for the existence of legal relations that do not presuppose the existence of morally binding legal norms by embracing conventionalism about the existence of the sources of law, while pointing out that in doing so they would also be abandoning their legal realism for legal positivism. Finally, I argue (vi) that the implications for legal scholarship of the realist emphasis on human behavior instead of legal norms is not well explained by the realists and appear to amount to little more than a preference for teleological interpretation of legal norms.     

Consequences of Tit‐for‐Tat Enforcement: Toward a Hippocratic Principle of Regulatory Implementation

The article discusses when tit‐for‐tat enforcement, an important strategy in responsive regulation theory, may generate intended reactions in communities of regulatees. Combining insights from compliance motivation theory, responsive regulation theory, and ethnographic studies of compliance, I hypothesize that tit‐for‐tat enforcement's probability of success depends on regulators’ institutionalized capacity to promote law–morality correspondence. Building such institutionalized capacity—so‐called “embeddedness”—simultaneously increases requirements for inspectorates’ competence. This article addresses three forms of law–morality correspondence: moral support for the law's content, the legislator's authority, and harmony between legal and moral guilt criteria.     

The EU–ACP development cooperation – governance challenges for non‐state actors: the case of Malawi

The European Development Consensus 2005 contains a broad policy re‐statement of the EU’s world view vis‐à‐vis its internal and external relations. It places poverty eradication and sustainable development at the heart of its policy. The context within which poverty eradication is pursued is an increasingly globalised and interdependent world that constantly creates new opportunities and challenges. Combating global poverty is seen by both parties not only as a moral obligation; rather as a building block for a more stable, peaceful, prosperous and equitable world, reflecting the interdependency of its richer and poorer countries. The EU has in its relations with the African, Pacific and Caribbean countries, past and present, pursued a development agenda via successive aid and development cooperation arrangements starting with the Yaoundé I convention, through Lomé to the Cotonou Partnership Agreement (CPA). In this article I reflect on the CPA, based on a corpus of shared objectives, principles and the Lomé ‘acquis’ in relation to Malawi non‐state actors (NSAs). I reflect on the opportunities and challenges it presents and how contemplated social dialogue between government and NSAs on the one hand and the EU can translate into poverty reduction, sustainable development and integration of the local economy to the global economy. I conclude that unlike its predecessors, Yaoundé and Lomé conventions, the CPA acknowledges the complementary role of NSAs in the development process, however NSAs in Malawi face constraints in terms of organisation and capacity building that affects their participation. What I do not do is to offer a discussion of the CPA as a whole, for that is outside the scope of this article, but rather have focused on the governance aspect vis‐à‐vis NSAs.     

竞争合规——以规制卡特尔为核心

卡特尔是公认的对市场竞争影响最为恶劣垄断行为。有效规制卡特尔除了加强公共执行和私人执行的威慑水平外,通过制度设计使企业产生自愿服从的内生性动机是一种新思路和新途径,这就需要将竞争政策融入公司治理,在企业内部建立竞争合规制度。     

How to Win Hearts and Minds: Corporate Compliance Policies for Sexual Harassment

Australian law provides incentives and encouragement for companies to develop their own sexual harassment policies. This paper reports on interviews with equal opportunity officers in Australia's financial services industry responsible for best practice sexual harassment policies. Their experiences evoke three scholarly critiques of corporate compliance as a regulatory strategy: (1) that corporate compliance programs are a means by which employees' lives are regimented and controlled by corporate governmentality, (2) or, even worse, that private management priorities subvert the principles of public‐regarding law while appearing to implement them, and (3) that even where law has some effect, regulatory strategies aimed at producing self‐regulatory compliance will provide insufficient deterrence to effect real change. The data however also show that the best of these best practice officers have themselves created complex strategies to resolve tensions between law and management, corporate goals, and normative pressures. In doing so, they have had to combine their personal, professional, and corporate commitments to "win hearts and minds" to antiharassment values by co‐opting management resources to compliance goals through strategic appeals to both "business case" arguments and the specter of public sanctions. This project of cooption depends on their own position and "clout" within the corporation.     

A simulation model of tobacco youth access policies

Empirical studies have found that policies aimed at reducing youth access to tobacco have been successful at increasing retail compliance, but their effects on actual tobacco use are mixed. This article presents a model of youth access policies that helps explain the apparently conflicting results in the extant literature, provides a framework for future empirical studies, and suggests implications for public policy. Our model highlights the interaction of components in a well-designed policy, including sufficient compliance checks, penalties, and community involvement. It also illustrates why it will be difficult to eliminate all of youth supply. Nonretail sources, such as borrowing or stealing from parents and siblings and purchasing from older peers through black markets, are an important component of youth supply and become more important as retail access is reduced. The analysis is limited to policies that affect the retail supply of cigarettes but suggests the need for other policies that affect the demand for cigarettes, such as taxes and cessation policies, in order to further reduce youth smoking rates.     

From Marx to Market: Lawyers,European Law,and the Contentious Transformation of the Port of Genoa

What happens when international courts are asked to tackle local political controversies and their judgments subsequently spark contentious resistance? In the European Union (EU), scholars have posited that the politicization of the often‐liberalizing rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) provokes Euroscepticism and noncompliance. In contrast, I argue that contentious politics may also produce permissive conditions for activist “Eurolawyers” to promote awareness of EU law and mobilize support for liberalization. To unpack this claim, I conduct an intensive case study of perhaps the most explosive controversy in Italy to generate litigation before the ECJ: The 1991 “Port of Genoa” case, where the public monopoly rights of a centuries‐old dockworkers' union were challenged. Leveraging interviews, court and newspaper records, public opinion data, and litigation statistics, I trace how—despite dockworkers' vigorous resistance—a pair of entrepreneurial lawyers liberalized Italy's largest port by combining strategic litigation with a public relations campaign to mobilize a compliance constituency. I conclude with insights the case study offers into the contemporary politics of transnational governance.     

Legal Attitudes of Immigrant Detainees

A substantial body of research shows that people's legal attitudes can have wide‐ranging behavioral consequences. In this article, I use original survey data to examine long‐term immigrant detainees’ legal attitudes. I find that the majority of detainees express a felt obligation to obey the law, and do so at a significantly higher rate than other U.S. sample populations. I also find that the detainees’ perceived obligation to obey U.S. immigration authorities is significantly related to their evaluations of procedural justice, as measured by their assessments of fair treatment while in detention. This finding remains robust controlling for a variety of instrumental and detainee background factors, including the detainees’ experiences with the legal system and legal authorities in their countries of origin. Finally, I find that vicarious procedural justice evaluations based on detainees’ assessments of how others are treated are as important to detainees’ perceived obligation to obey U.S. immigration authorities as their personal experiences of fair or unfair treatment. I discuss the broader implications of these findings and their contributions to research on procedural justice and legal compliance, and research on legal attitudes of noncitizens.