The Politics of Legal Representation: The Influence of Local Politics on the Behavior of Poverty Lawyers

This article explores the influence of local groups on the strategies employed by poverty lawyers in representing clients. Data collected from one suburban legal services program suggest that despite attitudinal predispositions to initiate law reform litigation, poverty lawyers are constrained in their use of social reform strategies by local organizations opposed to such activity. I argue that politics inevitably affect poverty lawyer behavior due to the nature of legal services work and programmatic features of the national Legal Services Corporation. I assess the implications of these findings for federal control of local programs.     

The Rule of Law and Authoritarian Rule: Legal Politics in Sudan

Mark Fathi, Massoud . 2013 . Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan . Cambridge University Press. Pp. xxii + 265. $109.99 cloth, $34.99 paper. Does the rule of law guarantee peace and democracy, as so many people in the development and governance field believe? What are the historical and sociocultural conditions that shape the way rule of law mechanisms work in practice? Mark Massoud's monograph tracing the changing dimensions of the rule of law in Sudan from its colonial period to the present offers an important perspective on these questions, casting doubt on the simple argument that the rule of law produces democracy and peace. Instead, he shows how colonial and authoritarian rulers used the rule of law to consolidate power and legitimate their rule. In Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan, Massoud develops the concept of legal politics, arguing that the way the rule of law works varies with the political system in which it is embedded. He concludes that the forms of legal politics that reinforce the power and authority of legal institutions are more likely to sustain an authoritarian state than to bring democratic rule. His analysis is a valuable caution to those who promote the rule of law as the salvation for all. Taking a sociolegal perspective, he shows how it works in practice.     

法人本质学说的法律技术和价值理念

要探究法人本质论争的实质,就有必要揭示其社会背景,这就是近代以来社会组织的现代化变迁。面对这一历史变迁,萨维尼一方面维护封建团体的特权地位,故主张其具有完全超越于其成员的独立本体和伦理人格;另一方面又认为新兴团体虽然具有独立本体,但并不具备伦理人格,其法律人格源于国家的拟制。耶林则将绝对主义观念贯彻到底,彻底解构法人的实体性,完全否认法人的主体地位,因而认为所有法人都没有独立本体,真正的主体是法人的成员或受益人,法人只是一个拟制的法律符号;而基尔克则认为法人不仅具有独立本体,还有伦理人格,其法律人格只是伦理人格在法律上的体现。可见,法人本质的论争不仅是关于法人本质的法律技术之争,也是对于法人人格的哲学和伦理价值之争。     

法系渊源、政治与现代股票市场

许多现代经济学著作认为,法系渊源决定着一国证券市场的实力和公司所有权结构,发达国家更是如此。然而,本文认为法系渊源并不是证券市场的基础。现代政治学为不同的所有权结构和发达国家证券市场发展状况的差异提供了另一种解释。20世纪残酷的事实——许多重要国家被完全摧毁,而其先前的许多制度也遭到破坏,很好地预示了战后现代证券市场的实力,并与发达国家在战后政治及政策上的差异有着密切关系。在20世纪,几乎每个核心的大陆法系国家都遭受到军事侵略和占领,这种整体动荡甚至摧毁了强大的制度,然而核心的普通法系国家并未在这种灾难中垮掉。世界上最发达的各个国家中占主导地位的利益和意识形态以及这些国家的基本经济任务在20世纪后半期各不相同,这使得一些发达国家乐于发展证券市场,而另一些发达国家则对其保持冷淡或敌对。这些政治经济学思想比法系渊源观念能更好地解释西方发达国家证券市场不同的实力。     

民主政治--现代法制的政治前提

民主政治以个人自由为中心价值取向,自由与民主具有内在统一性.以自由为中心价值取向的现代政治与现代民主法制具有着有机联系,它构成现代法制的基础,为现代法制的建立提出要求,现代法制又为这种民主政治提供根本保障.     

The Politics of Law in Mozambique: Customary Authority and Changing Premises of Legal Reform

During the last thirty years Mozambique has undergone two major processes of socio-political transformation, which have culminated in the creation of new legal systems. The first change took place atindependence in 1975, when a state-socialist system was adopted; the second came twenty years later when a liberal-democratic model was embraced. Setting out from Lotmanian semiotics,this paper analyses the political context of legal change in Mozambique. The analysis shows that the collapse of the radical project in the 1980s was linked to the new centre's failure to establish its metalanguage over the periphery, and to penetrate and transform the cultural memory of the rural population. During this period the political culture of the ruling party changed from rule-focused to expression-focused, becoming at the same time increasingly defensive and pragmatic. During the latest phase political debate has concentrated on local communities and the role of customary institutions. Both are burdened with contradictory textual memories, which the parties have failed to reconcile. However, due to its strong institutional position the ruling party has managed to maintain centralised control, albeit with an altered metalanguage to support it.     

Tacticians,Stewards, and Professionals: The Politics of Publishing Select Committee Legal Advice

At Westminster, there are increasing pressures on select committees to publish in‐house legal advice. We suggest that examining the process of deciding to publish provides useful insights into the provision, reception, and use of legal advice, and the dynamics of select committees generally. We argue that the autonomy of select committees to decide what use they make of evidence and advice they receive is, in practice, constrained by the intra‐institutional dynamics and practices of select committees. Committee actors – parliamentarians, clerks, and parliamentary lawyers – each have overlapping, sometimes competing, roles. Most of the time, these roles and the responsibilities they encompass coincide, but the prospect of publication reveals clear tensions between the different actors. This is the politics of publication: the tactical approach of politicians is in tension with the stewardship of clerks and the professional norms of parliamentary lawyers. We suggest this tension will only increase in the near future.     

The Politics of a New Legal Regime: Governing International Crime through Domestic Immigration Law

Through an analysis of a unique and understudied unit within the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit (HRVWCU, or “the Unit”), this article addresses the following theoretical and policy question: once someone has been admitted to the United States and granted permanent residency, or even citizenship, how does the law facilitate the reversal of that decision based on acts committed long ago and far away? We argue that the HRVWCU has created a significant new way to govern immigration through crime—specifically international crime—while simultaneously trying to ensure justice for mass atrocities through immigration law. In offering an overview of the Unit's origins and approach in blending international criminal law, domestic criminal law, and immigration law, we show how this Unit reflects an expansion of crimmigration in the United States and abroad. In order to illustrate the dilemma of internationalized crimmigration, the article focuses on the Unit's cases related to war crimes in Liberia and Bosnia, which have two very different (at least from the perspective of international criminal law) types of alleged perpetrators: those who allegedly gave orders and those who allegedly followed orders.     

Legal Ambiguity and the Politics of Compliance: Affirmative Action Officers' Dilemma

Equal employment opportunity and affirmative action mandates, like many other laws regulating organizations, do not clearly define what constitutes compliance. Thus compliance depends largely on the initiative and agenda of those persons within organizations who are charged with managing the compliance effort: in the case of civil rights, "affirmative action officers." This paper draws on case studies of affirmative action officers to suggest that the political climate within which affirmative action officers work, together with the officers' interpretations of the law, their role conceptions, and their professional aspirations have important implications for the nature and extent of organizational compliance with law. We conclude that compliance should be understood as a process that evolves over time rather than as a discrete event or non-event.     

The Politics of Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction is a central concept in the framing of the legal world but it has received short shrift in mainstream legal theory. This article examines the prevailing conceptual forms of jurisdiction in order to retrieve space for the political. The study of jurisdiction is also the study of the political community that it invokes and authorises. The first part of the article examines the three forms that jurisdiction takes in contemporary scholarship (territory, community, governance) to show that each form overlooks some implication of the political community that is tethered to jurisdiction. The second part of the article flips the inquiry to demonstrate the oversight of jurisdiction in theories of sovereign exception. The emergent understanding of jurisdiction as political provides an anchor for the study of jurisdiction going forward and highlights the potential role for jurisdictional arrangements in contemporary public law and constitutional law settings.     

The Politics of Fear

The article attempts to analyze the mechanisms of political control used by the Kremlin vis-à-vis its rivals. Russian authorities had opted the politics of fear, which include overt intimidation and public discrediting of the regime's critics, and selective persecution and open harassment of opposition activists and/or supporters. This approach to political control to some degree reproduced similar mechanisms that had enabled regime survival in the late-Soviet period, and fit general trends of repressive policies in a number of contemporary authoritarian regimes. The article discusses causes and mechanisms of the politics of fear in contemporary Russia, its roots in comparative and historical contexts, and strengths and weaknesses of repressive policy in Russia from the viewpoints of the regime, the opposition, and Russian society.     

The Politics of Constitution Making: Transforming Politics into Constitutions

According to our conventional perception of the interrelations between revolutions and constitutions, constitutions perpetuate the interests of the victorious forces of the revolution. This paper analyzes the distinctive character of the revolutions of 1989 in East and Central Europe with respect to their claim to constitutionalism. The main characteristic of these revolutions is the disbelief of their proponents in the postulate of a homogeneous unitary popular will which imposes itself on the society. Intead, two different concepts of civil society have been emerging, both of which can be connected with a more elaborate notion of constitutionalism. Constitutions can be understood as institutional devices which encourage the endurance of their legality without being entirely dependent on either the principle of self-interest or the idea of pre-political consensus.     

Ideals and Practices in the Rule of Law: An Essay on Legal Politics

Massoud, Mark Fathi. 2013 . Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 277. Paper $34.99. This essay responds to the three commentators in the symposium on my book, Law's Fragile State, by describing the sociolegal study of the rule of law as an investigation into both a set of ideals (the rule of law as a normative question) and a set of practices (the rule of law as an empirical question). Studying the rule of law involves understanding the contingent nature of its ideals as well as investigating the actual work that lawyers, judges, state officials, aid workers, activists, and others have done in specific contexts to promote legal remedies to social or political ills. These overlapping layers of the study of the rule of law—ideals and practices, normative and empirical—provide a sociolegal framework for understanding the successes and failures of legal work and, ultimately, how citizens experience state power in democratic and nondemocratic societies alike.     

论民法作为政治文明的法制与文化基础

在西方历史中,民法精神提供了推动政治文明进步的直接动力。民法作为政治文明法制与文化基础之根源在于, 政治文明以市民社会为基础,民法为市民社会基本法,民法文化为市民社会之文化。民法培育了政治文明系统的 基本要素,提供了促进政治文明的社会动力,并创造其运行的外围环境。中国的政治文明建设,应以民事立法的 发达为基础,并依赖于民法成为最广泛的社会文化,中国民法典则当然地承担这一政治使命。