Search results for "Empirical legal studies"

"Legislative Inflation" - An analysis of the Phenomenon in Contemporary Legal Discourse

2011

The law and the risks of stability and integrity for financial institutions

2011

Purpose – There are ever growing relations and mutual influences between law and global economic context: so, there arises the need for them to be investigated in a legal perspective, which is the aim of this paper.Design/methodology/approach – The method used tries to combine the empirical observation of the legal and economic reality in today's world and a few essential theoretical foundations such as the freedom to dispose of one's rights by wave of contractual instrument.Findings – The dramatic crisis that the global world has had to face over the past few years compels legal scholars to revisiting process of traditional categories in order to adapt them to society's changing problems.R…

Harmonisation of European contract law and legal translation: a role for comparative lawyers

2007

The problem of harmonizing the contract in Europe has caught the interest of law professors, researchers and the European institutions. After years of debates, the European Union is aware that a lack of uniform legal terminology prevents any kind of unification and harmonization of European Contract law. The need for a uniform legal terminology clashes with the multilingual legal terminology of European law. In Europe there is not just one, but many legislative and administrative languages, and each of them is an official language of the European institutions. In accordance with the principle of linguistic equality, the European Community (EC) recognizes that all legal instruments have to b…

On the Role of Inequalities in Legal Systems: A Tocquevilian View

2008

The present paper proposes to interpret the differences in legal systems between common-law and civil-law nations as arising from the importance given to adjudication in comparison with statute laws. It focuses on the relative costs of legal change by adjudication (case law development) when compared with legislation (statutory law development). The main argument is that the public concern with equality is a major determinant of the relative cost of adjudication in a legal system. We develop a model of the legal process that illustrates Tocqueville's fundamental intuition with regard to the uniformity of legal rules, and as a consequences, the relative importance of adjudication and legisla…

What Can Plans Do for Legal Theory?

2012

In his book, Legality (2011), Scott Shapiro puts forward what he claims to be "a new, and hopefully better" (better, namely, than the ones given so far) answer to "the overarching question of ‘What is law?’ - The central claim of this new account - the "Planning Thesis" - is that "legal activity is a form of social planning" -. "Legal institutions plan for the communities over which they claim authority, both by telling members what they may or may not do, and by identifying those who are entitled to affect what others may or may not do. Following this claim, legal rules are themselves generalized plans, or planlike norms, issued by those who are authorized to plan for others. And adjudicat…

The Third Theory of Legal Objectivity

2013

The question of the objectivity of law rotates around the determination of the status of the norms that constitute the major premise of the practical syllogism representing the formal scheme of the justification of judicial decisions. Those who deny the objectivity of law believe that the existence and meaning of legal norms depend on the opinion of judges and jurists considered individually. The different versions of the objectivity of law reject this sceptical conclusion. The strongest versions of objectivity accepted by the different doctrines of natural law presuppose metaphysical realism and rule out the idea that what seems correct to someone can determine what is effectively correct;…

On Legal Cooperation and the Dynamics of Legal Convergence

2010

In this paper, we study the dynamics of legal convergence and the comparison between the different instruments of legal convergence based on cooperative strategies (i.e., harmonization and unification) or not. To study these questions we use a model with two nation-states which is inspired in part by that used in Carbonara and Parisi (2008) where preferences of each nation-state are such that it is costly to change the law, but it is also costly to have a different legal system from the other nation-state. We show that legal unification could be achieved in the long-run through small step by step changes despite the existence of huge harmonization costs in the short run. We also show that l…