Street‐Level Tort Law: The Bureaucratic Justice of Liability Decision‐Making

Most legal scholarship on tort focuses primarily on judicial decisions, but this represents only a limited aspect of tortious liability. The vast majority of decisions concerning tortious liability are made by bureaucrats. Unavoidably then, there are two tiers of justice in tort law. This article focuses on the lower tier – bureaucratic decision‐making – arguing that the justice of bureaucratic decisions on tort should be considered on its own terms and not by judicial standards. We develop the notion of bureaucratic justice, applying a normative framework originally set out in relation to public administration. This enables an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of different ways of bureaucratically determining liability claims in tort. The regimes discussed concern the liability of public authorities, but decision makers comprise both state and non‐state actors and the bureaucratic justice framework is, in principle, applicable to understand and evaluate the liability of both public and private actors.     

Prison labor and recidivism

This study examines recidivism among inmates who participated in prison industry programs during confinement and a comparison group of inmates who were not employed in prison industry. Industry participants had lower recidivism rates than nonparticipants, but when differences between the groups on other characteristics associated with recidivism were controlled, the recidivism rates of participants and nonparticipants were virtually identical. A proportional hazards regression model was estimated that showed that, net of other variables, the effect of prison industry participation on the probability of postrelease felony arrest was small and insignificant. The findings are discussed in the context of existing correctional outcome research and recent developments in prison work programs.     

Resisting the Fall: The Single Dominant Party,Policies and Elections in Malaysia

Before Malaysia’s 2013 general election, one of the few remaining dominant coalitions in the world was aware it would struggle to retain power. A fledgling opposition coalition had inspired public confidence of its capacity to competently rule while public discontent with the ruling party was rife due to the ubiquity of patronage that had prevented the responsible implementation of policies. However, regime change did not occur. How does the protracted rule of Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional coalition, and the hegemonic party in it, the United Malays National Organisation, relate to debates over authoritarian durability, during a period when dominant parties struggle to sustain power? Malaysian elections have been free enough that the opposition has been able to obtain and retain control of state governments, so why has Barisan Nasional not lost power? This article reviews the 2013 election examining three issues: the significance of coalition politics; how policies have shaped voting trends; and the growing monetisation of politics. These perspectives provide insights into the institutional structure of coalitions and their conduct of politics, including clientelistic practices, forms of mobilisation and governance and the outcomes of policies introduced to address socio-economic inequities and drive economic growth.     

Architects of the State: International Financial Institutions and the Reconstruction of States in East Asia

For international financial institutions (IFIs), it is a continuing puzzle why the global norms they propagate are enacted either reluctantly or not at all. This article shows that failures of enactment and implementation frequently occur because many IFI‐initiated law reforms go far beyond changing the law; they amount to a restructuring of the state itself and the accompanying redistributions of power. This article demonstrates how state restructuring can occur in a technical area of commercial law by reanalyzing the ways global and transnational designs of corporate bankruptcy regimes fared between 1998 and 2006 in three countries variously affected by the Asian financial crisis: China, Indonesia, and South Korea. State restructuring occurred by (1) shifting the boundary between the market and state, (2) shifting power inside the state, and (3) vesting new powers in the state. The article identifies the recursive dynamics through which the changes unfolded and shows how variations in the efficacy of international architects of the state can be attributed to the interplay of four sets of factors: the coherence of global norms, the relative power of global versus state actors, domestic demand and mobilization for restructuring, and the extent of state restructuring that reforms will induce.     

The Justice Development Commission: overcoming bureaucratic resistance to innovative policy-making

Abstract. The relationship between particular bureaucratic structures and the provision of innovative public programmes is clearly of some importance. In British Columbia a variety of changes in the administration of justice for the province have been promoted by a special organization in the Attorney General's Department, the Justice Development Commission. This paper examines the work of that Commission and analyses the programmatic and structural consequences of its creation. It concludes that the model of the relationship between the special organization and the ongoing bureaucracy suggested by Downs in Inside Bureaucracy provides the most likely explanation for the actions of the Justice Development Commission. Sommaire. Les rapports entre des structures bureaucratiques existantes et l'établissement des programmes nouveaux ont, de toute évidence, une certaine importance. En Colombie Britannique, la Justice Development Commission, rattaché au ministère du Procureur général a provoqué un ensemble de changements dans l'administration de la justice, à l'échelle de la province. L'auteur de cet exposéétudie les travaux de la Commission et analyse les conséquences de sa création, du point de vue des programmes et des structures. Il conclut que le scénario des rapports entre cette commission et la bureaucratic, proposé par Downs dans Inside Bureaucracy, constitue l'explication la plus vraisemblable des mesures adoptees par la Justice Development Commission.     

Contractual Discretion and Administrative Discretion: A Unified Analysis

While judicial control of discretionary power is at the centre of administrative law, it is a topic which has received little attention in contract. By tracing the development of the relevant case law in administrative law judicial review and in contract, the paper seeks to show how review in both contexts has converged upon a single core technique of control through decisional standards. The paper further argues that the consequent identity of method in public and private law review of discretion does not in itself weaken basic public/private law distinctions. While the territories of legislation and contract may overlap, they present basic differences as contexts for the exercise of judicial control of discretion, and these differences of context may weigh more heavily than identity of approach in determining the outcomes of litigation. ¹