政府在食品安全监管中的职能转变与策略选择——基于北京市场的案例调研

基于对我国食品安全监管现状的认识,本文提出了以政府为主导的食品安全控制体系向以企业为主导的食品安全保证体系的发展方向;以农产品批发市场为例,通过案例调研进一步阐述传统监管体系在实际运行中存在的问题及转变政府职能的必要性,如监管重复化、程式化和低效率,市场执行效果不好,抽检规范化、标准化和信息追溯可信度低等;并通过博弈模型分析政府和企业(市场)进行食品安全监管和控制的行为决策过程,找出通过政府职能的转变而促使企业从"反应型食品安全监管"向"自主型食品安全监管"转变的关键所在与有效路径,为提升我国食品安全监管效率、创新食品安全监管模式提供思路。     

民间法与国家法视野下的出嫁女土地补偿款案

出嫁女土地补偿款案频频发生,并非因为农民法律意识缺乏,问题的根源在于"出嫁女户口跟着男方走"的习俗存在着深刻的社会基础。法院对出嫁女案从最初的不受理到最终受理的发展过程,是法院面对民间法与国家法的激烈冲突,根据双方力量对比情况的变化所采取的从妥协、回避到侍机而动,积极应对的调适国家法与民间法关系的过程。     

我国电信业政府监管机构重构研究

目前我国电信业政府监管机构存在监管职能分散、专业性欠缺、法治化程度低等突出问题,基于"三网融合"的趋势,有必要成立直接隶属于国务院的通信监管委员会,对电信、广电、互联网等实行一体化监管。     

挑战与应对:民行检察监督制度的新发展

民行检察监督制度获得强力推进的基本依据便是司法实践中不断增长的监督诉求,监督的范围在逐渐扩大,内含于监督中的观念性因素也在此过程中悄然转变,监督理念的现代化更新为监督制度的可持续发展提供了新的泉源基础。目前所需着力实现的制度转轨集中表现在从有限监督到全面监督、从实体监督到程序监督以及从诉讼监督到社会监督等三大转向之上,由此呈现出民行检察监督制度新发展的完整风貌。     

浅议农村土地补偿费分配纠纷的受案范围

近年来,土地补偿费分配问题导致的农村基层纠纷日益成为法律冲突中的焦点,司法机关如何在尊重农村集体经济组织分配自主权与保护农民合法权益之间进行取舍,也日益成为难点。其中,法院应否受理农村土地补偿费分配纠纷,由于法律法规的规定不尽明确,司法解释亦不一致,导致不同地域法院的受理情况各不相同。根据最高人民法院有关农村土地补偿费分配纠纷案件的最新司法解释,目前可从补偿费用分配纠纷的内涵和民事法律关系两个角度,来分别确定该类纠纷的受案范围。     

Reproducing plantation society: Women and land in colonial South Carolina

Some women in colonial South Carolina inherited, possessed, and sold real property. This article examines how and why women took on roles as landowners. Such practices were part of a range of innovative strategies designed to hand down plantation capital to the next generation. High mortality rates in the region challenged white families as they sought to establish their children within the planter class. Recent scholarship on women in South Carolina has identified instances in which “female planters” wielded control over land and slaves, temporarily assuming authority otherwise reserved for men. Tracing the presence of female landowners in land records, plantation advertisements, and court records reveals that although women made up only a small minority of landowners, they performed an important role in transmitting land and bringing it into production. Unlike their counterparts in other slave societies, white women in the Lowcountry were engaged directly in managing the domestic economies of plantation businesses. Even the archetypical female planter, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, conceived of her influential experiments with indigo production as an extension of her primary, domestic responsibilities as a planter's daughter and as a planter's wife. Such intensive and extensive domestic experience accounts for the unusually active roles South Carolina women undertook as family agents tasked with reproducing plantation society.     

Brokering power and property in China's townships

Abstract

This paper concerns the process of power at the periphery of state bureaucracy with a focus on township governments and their land development projects in the last two decades. I argue that townships at the bottom of the state bureaucracy operate like power brokers between the state and the village. When dealing with the formal party–state system above them, the township's delegated power is highly uncertain. Townships choose to maneuver in the unspecified legal and administrative zone to bypass the scrutiny of the supervising government. When it comes to the village below them, the township's power is under-defined, and therefore can be stretched to intensify and centralize the grips over village resources and land. In both cases, township officials strategize to maximize their control of village land and profit from the booming land-lease market in China's fast industrializing and urbanizing areas. Townships' land deals reflect the general power process of decentralization. Their brokerage of power corresponds directly with that of property rights in post-reform China.     

Comment on Anthony Downs's “Have Housing Prices Risen Faster in Portland Than Elsewhere?”

Abstract

Forms of urban containment are found in more than a hundred jurisdictions across the United States. The lightning rod for the debate over urban containment is metropolitan Portland, OR, which has had an urban growth boundary for a generation. In the early 1990s, housing prices there soared, providing fodder to interests opposed to public interference in the private development market. Downs contributes to the debate by finding that over the long term, metropolitan Portland's housing prices are more in line with its West Coast and national contemporaries than not.

This comment first reviews some of the literature associating growth controls and growth management with housing price changes. I then examine how Oregon's and metropolitan Portland's particular institutional measures ameliorate potential price effects, offering lessons for containment programs everywhere. I caution that urban containment is here to stay and that the best way for development interests to protect themselves from undesirable outcomes is to advocate Portland‐style urban containment.     

Comment on Carl Abbott's “The Portland region: Where city and suburbs talk to each other—and often agree”

Abstract

The Portland, OR, area's urban growth boundary is an idea whose benefits to the region may depend on a willingness to expand the boundary occasionally. The parable contained in this comment suggests that the declared unwillingness to expand the urban growth boundary could have contributed to Portland's recent sudden increase in housing prices. It further suggests that an inflexible attitude toward the boundary could cause long‐run losses in employment in the Portland region, with few if any offsetting environmental benefits. Other regions should be aware of the potential drawbacks of installing such a boundary.     

Some realities about sprawl and urban decline

Abstract

Many urban analysts believe suburban sprawl has become an important issue because it helps generate two types of problems: growth‐related difficulties like rising traffic congestion, and high concentrations of poor minority households in core‐area neighborhoods. However, a careful regression analysis of measures of both sprawl and urban decline shows no statistically significant relation between these two conditions.

The basic nature of the American urban development process would cause core‐area poverty concentrations even if sprawl were replaced by more compact growth forms. But sprawl does aggravate growth‐related problems. Those problems could be attacked through either alternative overall growth strategies—such as high‐density, tightly bounded growth—or specific anti‐sprawl tactics, such as regional tax‐base sharing and regional coordination of land uses. But no feasible policies are likely either to alleviate traffic congestion much or cause most American regions to abandon sprawl.