Global resource grabs,agribusiness concentration and the smallholder: two West African case studies

This paper places land grabbing within the context of developments within agribusiness within the last 30 years, tracing the various trajectories of increasing competition and concentration and pressures on commodity prices that have resulted in increasing dispossession of smallholders and a move in some agri-food chains towards large estate production. The paper explores the ways in which contemporary agricultural policies and neoliberal market reforms reflect these developments and examines recent framing of land policies in Africa in the context of the development of agrarian capital and agribusiness. Competitiveness results in dispossession of less successful smallholders from below by commercial smallholders, and from above by large estates vertically integrated into agribusiness marketing chains. This is illustrated with examples from the cocoa sector in Côte d'Ivoire and pineapples in Ghana.     

Wrongfulness and Prohibitions

This paper responds to Antje du-Bois Pedain’s discussion of the wrongfulness constraint on the criminal law. Du-Bois Pedain argues that the constraint is best interpreted as stating that φing is legitimately criminalised only if φing is wrongful for other-regarding reasons. We take issue with du-Bois Pedain’s arguments. In our view, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of legitimate criminalisation that φing is wrongful in du-Bois Pedain’s sense. Rather, it is a necessary (albeit insufficient) condition of legitimate criminalisation that φing is what we call bare wrongful—that is, that the reasons in favour of φing are defeated by the reasons against. Though du-Bois Pedain is critical of this view, we argue that her criticisms do not convince.     

The History in “Critical Legal Histories”: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125

This commentary explores Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” from the perspective of the discipline of history. It argues that we are still stalled at the intellectual juncture that Gordon described so well twenty‐five years ago because functionalism and the resulting problems that Gordon addresses in the area of sociolegal studies also pervade the discipline of history. The results reinforce the divide between sociolegal studies and other kinds of historical studies that tend to inhibit the conceptual transformation that Gordon advocates and to marginalize legal studies within the discipline of history.