Volume 8, Issue 1

The interface between bioethics and law is a current reality regarding the discussion of the use of stem cells and the status of the human embryo in biomedicine. In this scenario, economy and health care are part of this discussion. Historical lines show how the idea of value changed over time, a change that was reflected in the idea of health and in its practice. Culture and profit are two items that also have to be balanced in the connection between market process and human process.In this context, the use of stem cells and the dilemma regarding the status of the human embryo prompt the discussion concerning the conflict that the market can bring to humanity. The idea that justice can be an important organizing principle for public health is a way to shed light on this new market that is growing in the biomedical field. The current challenge is to understand this genetic movement that represents a constant evolution, not only of the biomedical development, but also a changing of social practice.

La Revolución independentista en América Latina significó la incursión del Estado Republicano y la consiguiente proclamación de un nuevo orden. Pero de modo diverso al acontecimiento europeo, la Revolución no tiene como origen la lucha entre la burguesía comerciante y la nobleza propietaria de las tierras, sino un ideal romántico, libertario y nacionalista. La idea de una propiedad individual, libre y abstracta se coloca, por lo tanto, en las raíces del programa de las primeras manifestaciones del nuevo escenario político, adquiriendo una relevancia constitucional, según las formulaciones ya realizadas en Francia y en los Estados Unidos. El presente estudio pretende ilustrar, en un primer enfoque general y sucinto, las oscilaciones ideológicas y normativas de la propiedad colectiva a la luz de los textos constitucionales de cuatro países de la zona andina: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile y Perú. Se trata del análisis del proceso de reconocimiento de la propiedad colectiva, fenómeno jurídico e histórico, pero sobretodo antropológico, reflejo de los valores de una civilización agraria. Dicha forma de propiedad permanece históricamente escondida, aislada y fuera de la teoría jus- política oficial no obstante su evidente cualidad reflexiva de la realidad social andina. La reducción del instituto propietario a una concepción simple e individual establecida por las primeras cartas constitucionales, hace del instituto un producto pobre, fruto de una ideología ya superada. El fenómeno del colectivismo propietario pertenece a la América colonial pero aún con mayor intensidad a aquella indígena colocándose en las raíces del derecho vivo. La tarea del jurista andino es enorme, se trata de recorrer vía ya transitada por el antropólogo, por el sociólogo y por el historiador, insertando estas formas de apropiación en su programa. En el camino sabrá enriquecerse si es capaz de comprender que el fenómeno de la propiedad no permanece nunca aislado en el nicho del derecho estatal, ni encerrado en el formalismo del discurso jurídico. Esperamos en las siguientes líneas contribuir a la iniciativa.

This paper argues that, after its accession to the WTO, Chinese administrative law has been transformed. Four elements are of great importance in this transformation process: the domestic constitutional function of the WTO law; the constitutional significance of China's Accession Protocol where the right to trade and the obligation to provide independent judicial review are explicitly referred to; China's perception as an impetus to widen and deepen its economic reforms, and subsequent legal reforms; and political pressures from other members of the WTO. Besides, owing to special features of the TRIPS agreement where detailed procedural and substantial requirements are included, the discretionary power of domestic administrative agencies is greatly narrowed down and thus controlled. This paper argues that detailed procedural and substantial rules provided in the TRIPS agreement can effectively act as a body of Global Administrative Law, which further controls the discretion of domestic governmental agencies. After the theoretical analysis of this "inevitable" transformation, this paper examines existent practices in Chinese administrative law. It starts with a general evaluation, and goes further to examine some case-laws in Chinese courts so as to evidence this transformation.

Beyond the recent debates of WTO development issues, the Doha failure in particular, this paper extends its critical enquiry to past law and development scholarship to reveal the intertwining relationship between the international trading regime and the development failure. The paper's examination of the development paradigm's evolution from an economic-growth-oriented to multi-dimensional framework indicates that law plays a key role in the development failure. Further analysis discovers that the development crisis lies in its self-sufficient legitimacy deficit where the developed, as the model of development, bears its own legitimacy and the developing are framed in the fate of catching-up. The paper argues that this self-sufficient development deficit can be further traced back to the Enlightenment's notion of progression that implies a constant return to origins. Through this origin-obsessive mechanism, while law's past determines its present through the power of precedent in the system of modern law, the present of the developed as the development model determines the future of the developing in the development paradigm. Through taking up the contemporary intellectual property issue in WTO compliance, the paper's examination of the impact of the WTO intellectual property regime on developing countries demonstrates how the intersection of development failure and modern law's myth of origin reveals itself in WTO compliance. Building on this finding, the paper proposes a jurisprudential reconstruction to break through the development impasse, and argues that a rethinking of the development paradigm at the same time must be a reconstruction of the contemporary jurisprudence.

The analysis in this writing starts with an investigation on the position of customary law in the system of legal sources, both in the Justinean legal system and in the Argentinean one. The results of this analysis are used as a basis for further, wider considerations on the structure of the legal system in the civil law tradition; and, as well, on the possibility of finding today, in Latin America, an epiphany of the system of ius commune which has been in force in the late Roman Empire, medieval and early modern continental Europe.A survey is made of how legal doctrines attempted, through the centuries, to interpret the presence in the Justinean corpus of the different fragments related to the consuetudo (customary law) and to its relation with the lex (statutory law), mostly D.I,3,32 e C.8,52, in order to make sense of what has seemed for centuries to be an evident antinomy within the Justinean Corpus Iuris . A subsequent similar investigation is then done for the Argentinean legal system of sources of law, which features peculiar elements allowing similar questions.Some conclusions will be drawn from these analyses and used to propose a different reconstruction of the legal system of Latin America (not just Argentina) in an ius commune perspective.This paper is meant to be a contribution to the research on the viability of a modern system of ius commune. Or, at least, to propose a different reading of civil law legal systems, based on the recognition of a legal model – if latent or recessive – based on ius commune, operating in a dialectic confrontation with the prevalent, modern civil law model accepted in the European legal science.

Once colonised by the British, Malaysia inherited the British political and legal system, as well as written and judge-made laws. We trace the development of the law on the shareholders' oppression remedy in Malaysia, and compare it with the development in England. We found that the influence of English case laws is still very pervasive in the courtroom. The reasons for this includes, among others, the use of a company law statute based on the British statute, the reliance of English case laws and other legal materials, the legal training of members in the legal profession, as well as the use of the English legal tradition and the English language in the Malaysian courtroom. We conclude that despite a similarity in the written law, the sharing of a common legal heritage and a propensity by Malaysian lawyers and judges to use English laws, the laws as applied by the courts in Malaysia is not identical to the law in England. There was a desire to keep up with English developments, but in the whole the Malaysian courts have not been able to keep pace. In the courtroom, the lack of resources and expertise are probably the main factors contributing to the underdevelopment of the law. The propensity to rely on the reforms in other countries with little emphasis to the peculiarity in the local environment has undermined law reform. We argue that an effective law-making process and legal institutions are as important as the law itself.