Money,Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.     

Contesting Legality in Authoritarian Contexts: Food Safety,Rule of Law and China's Networked Public Sphere

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top‐down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.     

我国刑事证据制度之新发展——基于修改后《刑事诉讼法》之分析

结合我国现行刑事诉讼法的第二次修改,文章全面阐述了我国刑事证据概念、种类的发展与完善;刑事证据规则的各种类型及其构建样态;非法证据排除规则的有关规定,即非法言词证据的界定、非法证据排除的诉讼阶段、非法证据排除的范围;非法证据的排除程序,即非法证据排除动议的提起主体、证据收集合法性的证明主体、非法证据的排除主体;同时,指出了刑事证据制度在刑事诉讼法第二次修改中存在的不足。     

企业技术创新系统的自组织性分析——基于龙能公司案例

企业是技术创新的主体。充分认识企业主体地位、企业家精神、企业文化在企业技术创新系统自组织过程中发挥的重要作用,对于提高企业技术创新水平具有重要现实意义。     

Canadian prime ministers in the house of commons: Patterns of intervention

This paper explores the parliamentary activity of six Canadian prime ministers from St Laurent to Mulroney. Employing Hansard, each parliamentary utterance by a prime minister from 1949 to 1993 has been coded into one of four categories: answers to questions, speeches delivered, statements made and other interventions. Voting records have also been coded. Employing this database, the analysis compares and contrasts the prime ministers in terms of their political personalities and explores the overall scope and character of prime‐ministerial activism in the House throughout the past 40 years. Canadian profiles are compared with already existing British data in order to test generalisations concerning the diminishing presence of prime ministers in parliaments in Canada and Britain.