The emergence of the rule of law in Russia

This paper challenges an empirical claim about the commercial courts (arbitrazhnye sudy) made by Kathryn Hendley and her co-authors in their paper “Law, Relationships and Private Enforcement: Transactional Strategies of Russian Enterprise” in Vol. 52, No. 4, Europe-Asia Studies in 2000. Basing their case on a quantitative survey of Russian firms, they conclude that economic actors in the 1990s relied on ‘the law and legal institutions’ because the commercial courts were relatively effective. In order to test this claim about the link between individual behaviour and the judiciary, I ask: What type of belief about corruption was held by Russian economic actors who trusted the commercial courts for conflict resolution at the end of the 1990s? The data set is drawn from a survey of 227 Russian firms made in 1997. I use self-reported data on economic actors’ preference for using or not using the commercial court (in case of a hypothetical conflict about a considerable amount of money) as a proxy for trust. A binary logistic regression model shows that economic actors who accepted corruption as a fact of life at the time of market entry were three times more likely to trust the commercial courts for conflict resolution than economic actors who rejected corruption. This finding contradicts any reasonable definition of the rule of law and suggests that the neo-liberal reformers should have paid more attention to the content – rather than merely to the speed – of reform.     

Nome law: Deleuze & Guattari on the emergence of law

This article orientates Deleuze & Guattari’s pragmatic semiotics towards a semiotics of law. This pragmatic semiotics is explored, and directly related to the theory of emergence and complexity that is also a key feature of Deleuze & Guattari’s work. It is suggested that the development of these aspects of Deleuze & Guattari’s thought in relation to law allows the contours of a noological legal theory to be sketched out. Noology is the study of images of thought, their emergence, their genealogy, and their creation. A first exploration of this noological legal theory is then carried out by the conceptualisation of nome law as the first emergence of law as theorised by Deleuze & Guattari in the plateau “1837: Of the Refrain” from “A Thousand Plateaus”. This is a conceptualisation of law’s emergence in a far-from-equilibrium palaeolithic hunter-gatherer pack, and contrasts to accounts of law’s origin in a founding violence or mythical contract. It is the ‘big bang’ of legality, and the opening up of a first image of legality, problematic of social organisation, and anthropomorphic knowledge space.     

The art of law (and the law of art) is perpetual crisis

In this performance-based work, which essentially concerns the fable of ‘Khi + Ordo’, we obliquely—through visual-textual storytelling—focus on what we call ‘the agency of the artist-scholar’, deconstructing, inter alia, many of the rules and regulations associated with the art-academic industrial complex—i.e., the institutional dictates to produce commodifiable works, the enforced metrics associated with authorised forms of research and publication, and the often-inelegant and mostly unnecessary dance that the artist-scholar performs with ‘all of that’. The photo-essay is developed from the archive of the Out of India Collective (OOI), but in association with the Metropolitan Transmedia Authority (MTA), its successor collective. It draws upon documents associated with OOI experiments in transmedia undertaken across multiple submissions for residencies, exhibitions, and publications in both academia and the art world in the years 2017–2019, even as it focuses upon the fable of ‘Khi + Ordo’. ‘Ordo’ is a synonym (or metaphor) for totalitarian states and regimes—‘regimes’ being, in this case, those that rule art + law. ‘Law’ here infers, through its negation, the appearance of a higher law, one that is entered upon when one resists assimilation to the rules and regulations associated with police states—incipient or otherwise. We call that other law ‘works-based agency’, and the artist-scholar is beholden to it once s/he departs company with all such quotidian systems of abject hegemony. One crisis leads to another, so to speak, on multiple levels and all at once.

     

Refusal of the biological proof practice and the harm of the law to effective judicial guardianship in constitutional jurisprudence]

The Spanish Constitution protects the free investigation of the paternity on its 39.2 the article, in which is granted that possibility. This right is not absolute, it has limits, but those limits will have to be interpreted in a restrictive way due to the principles based on it, such as the legal equality of children, and the integral protection of them. In view of this, the sentences are a very valuable element to delimit the aplication of this right, and establish its limitations.     

The body and the body politic: assisted suicide under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

The author critically examines the majority judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Rodriguez v. Canada (A.G.) and concludes that the judges in the majority have adopted a legislative public policy mandate rather than carrying out a judicial function that accords with established canons of Charter interpretation and analysis. The author contends that the majority read section 7 of the Charter as enshrining the sanctity of life as an intrinsic, abstract societal value necessary to protect the ill and the vulnerable and not as an expression of the individual's entitlement to autonomy against the State. She also contends that the majority's section 1 analysis was unduly deferential not only to the Canadian Parliament but also to the legislatures of the majority of Western democracies. This came at the expense of considering the legislative pattern of abandoning laws against suicide, the common law respect for individual autonomy and quality of life regarding refusal of and withdrawal from medical treatment, and the widespread lax enforcement of laws critical of the majority's reliance on "slippery slope" reasoning, which subordinated Ms Rodriguez's Charter rights to apprehend wrongdoing by the medical profession and the presumed best interests of society as a whole. The author recommends that legislators who address the question of assisted suicide look to methods of regulating access to assisted suicide that reflect respect for individual dignity under the Charter at the end of life, and reject any reading of the majority judgment that suggests that legislators are free to regulate or to proscribe assisted suicide according to abstract notions of the sanctity of life, pragmatic views of the public good, or the false consciousness or perceived vulnerability of the terminally ill or disabled.     

Operation of guardianship laws in the emergency ward

Enduring and workable legislative schemes typically include (a) a balanced approach to the rights and duties of all parties under their purview; and (b) consideration of all major consequences that may flow from the codification of underpinning doctrines. This column examines the 1999 amendments to the Guardianship and Administration Act 1986 (Vic) regulating patients' consent to medical treatment focusing on their application in modern emergency departments. The legislation needs to reconcile the human rights principle that humane and appropriate treatment is a fundamental right of all those who suffer from ill health and disease, with the principle that all patients (including those with impaired, but not totally absent, decisional capacity) have an absolute right to refuse life-saving treatment. Consent and refusal of treatment provisions should be based on the notion of reasonableness, including recognition that the mental and emotional states experienced by physically ill people may, in the short-term, adversely affect their decision-making capacity. Unless the consent legislation factors in the realities of modern emergency practice and resources, statutory thresholds for decisional competence, instead of affording protection, may result in much worse outcomes for vulnerable patients.     

成年后见制度的日本法观察--兼及我国的制度反思

为适应新理念———维持身心障碍者生活的正常化及尊重其自我决定权 ,日本的新成年后见制度废除禁治产、准禁治产宣告 ,并以辅助、保佐及后见三种形式对意思能力不足的成年人予以救济 ,新设任意监护制度并优先于法定监护的适用。我国应借鉴日本的先进制度 ,转换新的理念 ,并以此构筑成年监护制度 ,引进意定监护 ,扩大受监护的对象 ,加强监护制度的公法化。