Volume 12, Issue 1 -

Legal scholars distinguish two modes of international legal cooperation: minimum legal harmonization and full harmonization ( i.e . legal unification). These cooperative choices imply more or less stringent requirements and are opposed to non cooperative, unilateral legal changes. This paper is an attempt to model these alternative modes of legal adjustments and to compare their properties regarding legal convergence. We show that all arrangements can lead to legal uniformity. We also show that decentralized processes can be better than more centralized arrangements.

Mainstream economic analysis of Tort Law assumes that efficiency cannot be formally assured by allocating liability according to causal apportioning. In this paper we will present some ways to escape from the full scope of this claim. We start by reviewing the standard conception of causality in the economic analysis of Tort Law, to show how some underlying assumptions influence the currently held view on the relation between causal apportioning and efficiency. Then, we revisit those assumptions to see how plausible they actually are. In the light of this discussion we introduce an alternative framework of causal reasoning in Tort Law. We will show how our model yields a way of allocating liability in terms of a causal apportioning rule. The outcomes obtained through this procedure are closer to efficiency than those prescribed by the mainstream.

We test the Portia Hypothesis – that a more masculine name improves a woman’s legal career – using primary data that we collected so that we can control for an arguably important, but previously omitted, confounding factor: the woman’s parents. In theory, a correlation between nominal masculinity and success may be due to a common cause: parents’ ability to advance their children’s career prospects and the more able parents having an irrelevant preference for masculine names. We control for the family’s wealth by using their child’s educational debt at the time of graduating from law school and for the family’s reputation, within the legal profession, by using the probability of being a lawyer conditional upon their last name. We find robust evidence that a more masculine name improves a woman’s earnings as a lawyer, even when we control for her parents’ wealth and reputation.

A utility maximising framework for criminal behaviour is developed and a number of precise functional forms considered for the utility function of a representative criminal. The Kahneman–Tversky form seems to fit current empirical evidence, expressed mainly as the ratio of certain elasticities, better than some other candidates but a more general Markowitz function, centred at current wealth, is another possibility. The criminal’s optimal level of crime is obtained and comparative statics derived to help suggest how crime might be controlled. The solution involves an upper limit on the odds against detection of the criminal. Further empirical work is encouraged to ascertain if crime is a favourable bet and to elicit the utility function of a representative criminal in this analytical framework.

This paper contributes to the existing literature on court performance by providing an empirical study about the performance of Egyptian First Instance Courts (FICs). A panel data model on 22 courts for 9 years is estimated to answer the following questions: (1) did the 2007 judicial reform improve the performance of Egyptian FICs? (2) What are the determinants of court output? Our results show tshat the 2007 reform has generally contributed to improving the overall resolution rate in Egyptian FICs. Delay problems related to the resolution of civil cases are however still persistent. Courts with a relatively higher load of criminal cases appear to be more productive while those with a higher load of civil cases still lag behind. Furthermore, higher levels of judicial turnover are associated with lower rates of court output, whereas the computerization of courts leads to higher resolutions. Finally, judicial seniority and the number of judges with higher academic degrees do not affect the resolution rate in FICs.

Entrepreneurship has been considered a way to implement interpersonal authority, i. e., to convince other persons to use their resources in an alternative way to the optimal one in accordance with their beliefs. This paper presents a theoretical model that relates the above assumption with the following two questions: (i) how and why financial constraints can prevent the implementation of entrepreneurial projects; and (ii) how creditors’ priorities provided by the different legal forms of the business can reduce the financial requirements for implementing the firm. The attractiveness of such an explanation lies in its capacity to justify a wide array of features of firms (entrepreneur origin, property rights, authority, financial constraints and creditor priorities) from a single basic assumption: agents have different beliefs about how production should be organized.

The New Business Tax System (Debt and Equity) Act established a set of criteria by which convertible securities could be classified as “debt-like” or “equity-like” for tax purposes. Using data on 256 convertible issues made in Australia between 2001 and 2012, we show that there is a strong relation between, on the one hand, a convertible’s ex ante classification determined at issuance using the tax criteria and, on the other hand, its ex post classification based on the conversion premium at maturity. We conclude that the criteria have been an efficient means of classifying convertibles. We also find an industry effect where debt-like convertibles are more likely to be associated with the resources, metals and mining firms, whilst equity-like are mainly issued by the finance sector. This finding is consistent with the solution to a finance-sequencing problem in the former case, and the impact of capital adequacy regulation in the latter.

In this paper we construct an index of constitutional commitment to social security (CCSS) in seven areas: Old Age, Survivors, Disability, Unemployment, Sickness, Work Injury, and Income Support. We have found a positive connection between our measure of constitutional commitment to social security and the extent and coverage of actual measures of social security laws. The constitutional text of each nation seems to play a role in explaining the large variations in welfare state coverage around the world.