Pour un modèle sémiotique de l'analogie du jeu en théorie du droit

Traduit de l'anglais par P. Brunet et E. Landowski (Towards a Semiotic Model of the Games Analogy in Jurisprudence,Droit & Société 17–18 (1991), 97–121.)     

WTO Dispute Settlement and the Missing Developing Country Cases: Engaging the Private Sector

The poorest WTO member countries almost universally fail toengage as either complainants or interested third parties informal dispute settlement activity related to their market accessinterests. This paper focuses on costs of the WTO’s extendedlitigation process as an explanation for the potential but ‘missing’developing country engagement. We provide a positive examinationof the current system, and we catalogue and analyze a set ofproposals encouraging the private sector to provide DSU-specificlegal assistance to poor countries. We investigate the roleof legal service centres, non-governmental organizations, developmentorganizations, international trade litigators, economists, consumerorganizations, and law schools to provide poor countries withthe services needed at critical stages of the WTO’s extendedlitigation process. In the absence of systemic rules reform,the public-private partnership model imposes a substantial cooperationburden on such groups as they organize export interests, estimatethe size of improved market access payoffs, prioritize acrosspotential cases, engage domestic governments, prepare legalbriefs, assist in evidentiary discovery, and pursue the publicrelations effort required to induce foreign political compliance.     

Electoral rules and manufacturing legislative supermajority: evidence from Singapore

Electoral authoritarian regimes usually preserve the dominance of the ruling party through electoral fraud, violence and intimidation. This paper focuses on the subtler forms of manipulation that undermine the electoral integrity and democratic outcomes. Specifically, we examine how an unusual electoral rule, involving multimember districts elected through plurality bloc voting for party slates, exaggerates the legislative seat shares of the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore. This rule, used also by other electoral authoritarian regimes, facilitates the manipulation of district magnitude and gerrymandering, especially the ‘stacking’ form, to produce a large disproportionality which distorts the seats–votes linkage. It operates in an undemocratic fashion by precluding the opposition from gaining anything but token seats as long as the PAP remains the plurality-winning party. The importance of this electoral rule and its manipulation has been overlooked in current work that emphasises redistributive strategies or coercion to repress electoral competition.     

Interpersonal problem-solving skills in battered,counseling, and control women

The present study was designed to examine the interpersonal problem-solving skills of battered women, while controlling for the effects of depression and anxiety. Battered, Counseling, and Control women were administered an interpersonal problem-solving inventory and asked to generate as many behavioral options as possible for each problem and then to select the one option they would chose to use in the given situation. All options were rated for effectiveness by two “blind” raters. Subjects were also administered the BETA intelligence test, the Beck Depression Inventory, and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory Form-Y. Analysis of variance found no significant differences between the groups for intelligence, but the Counseling women were significantly more depressed and anxious than the Battered or Control women. Analysis of covariance (using BDI and STAI scores as covariates) found that Battered women: (1) generated fewer total options, (2) generated fewer effective options, and (3) chose fewer effective options for use in the situation than both Counseling and Control women. These findings provide indirect support for a general problem-solving skills deficit in battered women and reinforce the importance of problem-solving skills training for battered women.