False Profits: Why Product Counterfeiting is Increasing

Product counterfeiting has grown in scope, scale and complexity in the last two decades, and now affects many areas of manufacturing and retailing from clothes and CDs to items such as shampoo and vehicle components. Based on a wide range of interviews in the UK, this article argues that despite recent legislative change and increased criminal penalties for counterfeiters, enforcement is haphazard, resource problems often dictate that no criminal prosecution is undertaken, and actual penalties remain low. Moreover, questions of whether or not a particular item is counterfeit have become greatly complicated by the development of outsourcing and the rise of parallel trading. These points suggest that counterfeiting is likely to grow in the future.     

Lawyers, Legislation and Social Welfare

Efficiency considerations have played an increasing role in the development of legal doctrine over the last decades. Our paper investigates the consequences of the efficiency doctrine for the long run allocation of human resources between the legal profession and other professional activities. It is argued that a short run pursuit of the efficient scope of legislation may create an inefficient oversupply of lawyers under free entry into the legal profession. Self-regulation of entry into the legal profession by the bar association may provide higher aggregate welfare. Liberalization of professional entry can explain both the expansion of legislative activity and the unprecedented growth rate of the legal profession in many countries.     

规范性文件的法律问题--谈规范冲突及适用原则

规范冲突时,选择适用规范不当易造成行政侵权。因此,选择适用规范要对规范的有效性进行审查鉴别,做出正确、合法的选择,以准确适用法律。     

论我国反垄断立法的目标模式选择

目标模式是反垄断立法的关键。有效竞争理论能极大地优化竞争结构 ,有效地创造一个经济效率与竞争强度协调统一的竞争状态。因此 ,选择有效竞争理论作为我国反垄断立法的目标模式是适宜的。     

论制作、贩卖、传播淫秽物品罪的立法完善

制作、贩卖、传播淫秽物品罪就是传播淫秽物品的行为犯罪。现行刑法关于淫秽物品犯罪的规定存在不足,应从罪名确定、法定刑配置、过失罪取消、走私罪调整等方面予以完善。     

死刑的司法与立法限制--量刑情节的制约

立足云南省死刑适用的司法实践,结合实务部门判处死刑考虑的量刑情节,对如何从实际数量上减少死刑适用并进而从立法上减少死刑罪名提出一些实用性思路.     

试论我国商标犯罪中的商标范围

对商标犯罪对象的甄选 ,反映了立法者的认识能力、立法时的犯罪态势以及立法者对社会利益的综合衡量。目前我国刑法中商标犯罪的犯罪对象均为注册商标 ,对未注册商标不予保护。在注册服务商标的保护方面 ,我国刑法仍然存在漏洞。借鉴WTO规则以及其他国家和地区的相关规定 ,结合我国商标犯罪的现状及发展趋势 ,进一步扩大商标犯罪之“商标”范围。但同时应注意刑事司法应当恪守罪刑法定原则 ,不能超越刑事立法任意扩大犯罪圈。     

Parliamentary Scrutiny of Delegated Legislation: Lessons from Comparative Experience

Recent years have seen an increase in the use of delegated legislation to implement major policy decisions in the UK. This has exacerbated the longstanding criticism that Westminster lacks sufficiently robust procedures for parliamentary scrutiny of delegated legislation. However, the UK is not the only country to use delegated legislation, or to face the challenge of ensuring it receives adequate parliamentary scrutiny. This article therefore places the UK system in wider context by comparing it to six other national parliaments. We highlight one comparative strength of the UK system, two weaknesses it shares with the other six cases, and one way in which the UK might learn lessons from elsewhere. Overall, our evidence suggests that no one country offers a clear template for more rigorous parliamentary scrutiny of delegated legislation. Successful reform of the UK's system is likely to require creative procedural innovation.     

Participation in welfare legislation—A poverty-aware paradigm

Public participation, responsive regulation, and other policy formulations are intended to draw governments down from their ivory towers and into engagement with the people. However, they paint at best, a hazy picture of who “the people” are. This superficial representation is felt, among other collectives, by people living in poverty, who not only face hunger, often accompanied by poorer health and lower life expectancy, but whose social exclusion typically goes unrecognized by the authorities. The legal framing of poverty—and, as a result, states' policy approaches to its alleviation—focuses on the material core, representing a very thin conceptualization that fails to address the social dimension. Furthermore, practical avenues for incorporating citizens' views into lawmaking—which might enrich understanding—are lacking when it comes to people in poverty. Combined with a blatantly hegemonic stance, the resulting ignorance around poverty and “the poor” generates welfare laws that are woefully out of touch with reality, and legislative thinking that perpetuates, rather than alleviates, poverty. This paper seeks to make a twofold contribution: (i) to demonstrate this situation with a deep empirical inquiry into the legislative process of one legal provision within the Israeli welfare law regime, juxtaposed against qualitative field-research findings and (ii) to introduce the inventive and groundbreaking “poverty-aware” paradigm, constructed in social-work discourse, to illuminate and explain the empirical findings and point to potential procedural–institutional reform, to pave the way for poverty-aware legislation.     

新安全视角下美国政府的气候政策

"人类安全"逐渐成为一种新的安全理念,环境气候问题等各种影响人类安全和福祉的非传统安全问题日益引起广泛关注。全球性安全威胁的严重程度则取决于治理框架的反应能力。包括气候政策、法律和机构在内的气候环境治理框架能够最大限度地削弱全球化冲突的根源,避免影响的发生或减缓其进程。奥巴马上任以来美国新政府能源、环境和应对气候变化政策出现较大调整,大力推动新能源法案来减缓气候变化。这一政策转向具有深刻的历史动因和政治基础,并将给美国经济复苏和美国企业的国际竞争力带来压力,加剧美国对外贸易摩擦和削弱其在国际气候环境合作中的领导地位。