Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper documents an emerging trend at the intersection of national and international lawmaking: the economic review of legislation. This trend demonstrates that a systematic, institutionalized set of practices constraining discretion by rule need not necessarily be judicial in nature. In today's globalizing spaces, where territorially based legal rules have the 'last word' to a lesser and lesser degree, economic rationality is an increasingly powerful constraint upon discretion, particularly legislative discretion. The paper three instances of emerging regimes for reviewing economic legislation in an international context. independent bureaucratic agency; quasi-judicial review; and peer review. It argues that these developments demonstrate varying modes of emergent nonjudicial legality, and as such institutionalize an emergent 'rule of economics' that shares interesting analogical characteristics with the rule of law.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This article reports the results of a study that uses social network analysis to compare the persuasiveness of legal precedents in the diffusion of the strict liability rule for manufacturing defects. This new study tests which of four reference groups were most influential and also whether certain state judicial variables influenced the diffusion process. The results are striking. The federal circuit regions appeared to define a dominant reference group in the diffusion process and social network effects dominated economic and political variables. In addition, the de facto separation of powers in the enactment of new state legislation appeared to influence courts’ propensities to adopt the strict liability rule. When the executive and legislative branches were dominated by the same political party – regardless whether it was the Republican or Democratic Party – state courts were more inclined to adopt the strict liability rule. This last result contradicts an economic hypothesis that predicts courts should be less inclined to exercise discretion when the de facto separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches is narrower.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper shows that legal and judicial reforms tied to lending programs of international organizations help governments to make visible and costly commitments to building stable and predictable legal and judicial environments, which encourage FDI.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper proposes and tests a new account of the law’s effect on judicial decision making, which has the potential for breaking the current impasse between Attitudinalist and New Institutionalist scholars. First, I propose a synthesis of existing judicial decision-making literature, social constructionist political theory, and language philosophy. Expanding on the pioneering work of John Brigham, I posit that judicial training and socialization gives legal doctrine both “world-disclosing” and “creative-evolutionary” functions for judges. The facts and circumstances of individual cases only make sense to a judge in light of relevant legal frameworks, which act as a kind of linguistic lens constituting the judge’s reality for that particular case. Further, as with all linguistic phenomena, users of legal language transform existing frameworks to deal with new situations. When combined with the judiciary’s socially constructed institutional mission, these two functions of law provide judges with the practical tools necessary to do their job. Second, I explore several empirical hypotheses drawn from this “Internal-Institutional” account with a sample of five federal and state judges. Using largely ethnographic methods, I examine the consciousness of the judges regarding the cases they decide. The resulting data largely confirm the major elements of my theory in a reliable way, but more research is necessary to expand and fully test it.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper compares how the legal academies in Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand shaped the roles that their respective courts assumed under the Canadian Charter, the British Human Rights Act, and New Zealand?s new bill of rights.