Principal-Agency Theory in Illegal Markets: Cooperation and Conflict Among Chinese Loansharks

There are management and organizational problems common to both legal and illegal businesses, such as moving one party to act in the interest of another rather than his own. In principal-agency theory, the party that wants someone else to do a job on his behalf is called the “principal” and the other party is called the “agent”. Principal-agency theory tries to find solutions to real and potential conflicts that arise from such transactional arrangements. We believe principal-agency theory has great potentials for understanding the operation and interpersonal relationships of criminal enterprises, in addition to the structural arrangements (e.g., a disorganized crime market) and the social network perspectives. Using a case study of Chinese loan sharking and cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands, we seek to make a theoretical contribution to existing literature on organized crime by focusing on how different individuals within a criminal enterprise negotiate the most efficient transactional arrangement in a principal-agent relationship amidst the uncertainties of an illicit market environment. We specifically look at four phases of the criminal enterprise studied: the selection of agents by the principal, attempts to bind these agents to the principal, potential conflicts and finally the solution of any problems. Incidentally, our study also gives insight in the less well-researched topic of loansharking.     

Ambiguity and Conflict in the Implementation of Evidence Law in Criminal Matters: a Study of the United Arab Emirates Jurisprudence

Due the lack of the law of evidence in criminal matters in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), it is important to address the issue of the rules of evidence in the UAE where Sharia criminal law is applied along with enacted law of Criminal Procedural Law. The courts’ decisions contradicted each other because of the differences of opinions among the law schools exist in Islamic law in one hand and between the Sharia criminal law and enacted law in the other hand. Further, the Criminal Procedural Law does not state the rules of evidence in clear manner to judges and individuals. The lack of stated rules and procedures and what evidence could be accepted and what cannot are not definite in the UAE legal system. The article will argue that because of the differences in the opinions related to the admission and acceptance of the evidences exist among the Islamic law schools and between the Sharia law and enacted law, the court decisions have contradicted each other and create ambiguities in the field of the evidence in criminal law. The Islamic jurists have different opinions about evidence in fornication crimes, Qasama evidence in qisas, and women and non-Muslim testimonies. Such differences affect the Union Supreme Court decisions. Therefore, the UAE legislator must enact the law of evidence in criminal matters in order to reduce the contradiction between judges’ opinions, clear ambiguities, and protect individual rights as it did with civil and commercial matter.     

Transplanting Jury Trials in South Korean Legal Soils: Comparative Analysis with Jury Trials in the United States

Jury trials, known as common-law institution centering on the UK and the USA, for the first time in Korean adjudicatory history, have been transplanted into Korean legal soils under cultural and political climate with legal roots of the “Civil Participation in Criminal Trial Act (CPCTA) of 2007” since 2008. This research examines legal and operational issues of jury trials through comparative analysis between the United States and South Korea. Several legal characteristics of 2013 revision bill of CPCTA, proposed by the Committee of Civil Participation in the Judiciary (CCPJ), are to be pointed out: so-called “civil participation” approach, de facto binding power of jury verdict and sentencing, and a stricter standard for a jury verdict or decision (3/4 majority). Statistical results from planting jury trials in both American and Korean legal system proved to be very similar. Meanwhile, a 2013 revision bill has to overcome several practical and legal obstacles, such as low usage of jury trials, the high rate of judicial dismissal of defendants’ petitions, and violation of Article 27 of the Korean Constitution. Under the current legislative scheme, judges in Korean courts need to operate jury trials in such a careful and respectful way that the revision may neglect neither a defendant’s right to jury trial nor jury’s verdict. Legal scholars, experts, and legislators with interests in implementing jury trials in Korea should research on ways to expand the system to other judicial procedures such as juvenile, civil, family, and administrative cases.     

Equality as a Basis for Religious Toleration: A Response to Leiter

In this short essay, I respond to Brian Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion. I focus on two criticisms. First, I argue that Leiter’s own theory depends on an unacknowledged ideal of equality, and that equality is central to the utilitarian and Rawlsian bases for religious toleration that he draws upon in his book. Second, I argue against Leiter’s allowing, in certain circumstances, the state to establish religion and to promote religious conceptions of the good.     

Reply to Critics

This article responds to the four contributors to the book symposium on Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience. Those four contributors are Thomas Hill Jr, David Lefkowitz, William Smith, and Daniel Weinstock. Hill examines the concepts of conviction and conscience (Chapters 1 and 2); Smith discusses conviction and then analyses the right to civil disobedience and my humanistic arguments for it (Chapter 4); Weinstock explores democratic challenges for civil disobedience (Chapter 5); and Lefkowitz assesses the merits of a legal demands-of-conviction excuse for civil disobedience (Chapter 5). This ‘Reply to Critics’ addresses them in turn.     

The Priority of Participation: A Friendly Response to Professor Gargarella

A response to Roberto Gargarella’s review of Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury, by Albert W. Dzur.     

Why Tolerate Conscience?

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument. The first claim is that it is not religion as such, but conscience that deserves toleration and respect. The second claim is that respect for religion and conscience demands ‘principled toleration’ but does not entail stronger policies of legal exemptions. Against the first claim, we argue that Leiter does not successfully distinguish religious belief from secular conscience and morality; and he does not explain why secular conscience (which shares many of religious conscience’s epistemic features) deserves respect. Against the second claim, we argue that the most promising theories of legal exemptions are not classical theories of liberal toleration.     

Theories of Criminalization

In this article, I comment on Simester and von Hirsch’s theory of criminalization and discuss general principles of criminalization. After some brief comments on punishment theories and the role of moral wrongdoing, I examine main lines of contemporary criminalization theories which tend to focus on the issues of harm, offense, paternalism and side-constraints. One of the points of disagreement with Simester and von Hirsch concerns the role of the harm principle. I rely on a straightforward normative concept of “rights of others,” not in the sense of rights granted in positive law but in the sense of rights which are to be justified in political philosophy. With a rights-centered rather than a harm-centered approach, a prima facie reason for criminalization is the violation of others’ rights. It is unnecessary to develop a separate category of “offense to others,” and paternalistic interventions can be criticized straightforwardly because rights can be waived.     

The Criminal Trial,the Rule of Law and the Exclusion of Unlawfully Obtained Evidence

If the criminal trial is aimed simply at ascertaining the truth of a criminal charge, it is inherently problematic to prevent the prosecution from adducing relevant evidence on the ground of its unlawful provenance. This article challenges the starting premise by replacing the epistemic focus with a political perspective. It offers a normative justification for the exclusion of unlawfully obtained evidence that is rooted in a theory of the criminal trial as a process of holding the executive to the rule of law. On this theory, it is the admission rather than exclusion of such evidence that is inherently problematic. The differences between this theory and others that are in currency will be noted, as will its implications and limitations.     

Responsibility and the Limits of Conversation

Both legal and moral theorists have offered broadly “communicative” theories of criminal and moral responsibility. According to such accounts, we can understand the nature of responsibility by appealing to the idea that responsibility practices are in some fundamental sense expressive, discursive, or communicative. In this essay, I consider a variety of issues in connections with this family of views, including its relationship to free will, the theory of exemptions, and potential alternatives to the communicative model. Focusing on Michael McKenna’s Conversation and Responsibility, I argue that communicative accounts, and the conversational model in particular, direct our attention to important and under-appreciated elements of our responsibility practices. However, rather than focusing on a model of conversation-as-address, as McKenna does, we do better to regard gossip as the paradigmatic conversational form that captures the main features of moral responsibility.