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Jonathan Baker
In 2013, a federal district court found that Apple had orchestrated a cartel agreement involving it and five major book publishers three years earlier, when Apple opened the iBookstore in conjunction with the introduction of its iPad tablet computer. According to the court, Apple organized collective action by the publishers to take away ebook pricing authority from Amazon, an aggressive discounter, and to raise the retail prices of ebooks.
This chapter describes the case from an economic point of view. It examines the competing views of the government and Apple over the competitive impact of various provisions in the iBookstore’s distribution agreements with the publishers, evaluates possible economic reasons why competition may not have been harmed even if Apple’s conduct led to higher ebook prices, and considers what Apple could have done differently to enter without harming competition.
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Janie Chuang
In the decades following the globalization of the world economy, trafficking, forced labor and modern slavery have emerged as significant global problems. States negotiated the Palermo Protocol in 2000 under which they agreed to criminalize trafficking, primarily understood as an issue of serious organized crime. Sixteen years later, leading academics, activists and policy makers from international organizations come together in this edited volume and adopt an inter-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to revisit trafficking through the lens of labor migration and extreme exploitation and, in the process, rethink the law and governance of trafficking. This volume considers many key factors, including the evolving international law on trafficking, the relationship between trafficking, slavery, indenture and domestic migration law and policy as well as newly emergent techniques of governance, including indicators, all with a view to furthering prospects for lasting economic justice in a globalized world.
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Jennifer C. Daskal
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Amanda Frost
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Jacqueline Lainez-Flanagan
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Benjamin Leff
Social enterprises are business enterprises that seek to pursue social goals. In order to do that, they need to be able to make binding commitments to a variety of stakeholders that they will indeed pursue such goals. At least since Henry Hansmann wrote his seminal works on nonprofit organizations in the early nineteen eighties, it has been widely understood that a significant value of the nonprofit organizational structure is the ability of the "nondistribution constraint" to serve as just such a commitment mechanism. In the case of for-profit social enterprises, where the nondistribution constraint does not apply, what mechanisms might we expect to be useful or necessary for the organization to make commitments to stakeholders?
This chapter applies some insights from Hansmann's "agency theory" to the for-profit social enterprise context. It observes that very different commitment mechanisms are useful depending on which stakeholders the organization wants to commit to. It also distinguishes between negative and positive commitments and why the distinction between the two is so important to the likely success of any commitments mechanism. -
Benjamin Leff
It is conventional to think of not-for-profit organizations as inhabiting a sector distinct from the private business sector on one side and the government sector on the other. One of the traditional goals of law in the nonprofit sector has been to distinguish entities in the nonprofit sector from those in the business sector--to define and police the boundary, both so governmental benefits can be provided to not-for-profit entities and so stakeholders can understand which organizations are bound by the nondistribution constraint. Therefore, when there are legal reforms that complicate or alter the boundary, these reforms should be evaluated not only with respect to whether they adequately protect the government's interest in providing benefits to worthy enterprises, but also whether the new reforms promote or detract from the sector's ability to communicate clearly with stakeholders.
This chapter (i) introduces the two primary ways that the law of nonprofit organizations attempts to regulate the boundary between the nonprofit and business sectors, (ii) roots commercial activity by nonprofits in the long history of fee-for-service nonprofit organizations that operate very much like for-profit businesses, and (iii) introduces and evaluates a number of new legal forms created for for-profit social enterprises. -
Jeffrey Lubbers
This book offers a comparative introduction to the most important aspects of administrative law in various EU Member States (France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom), at the level of the EU and in the United States of America. It aspires to contribute to the ætransboundaryÆ understanding of different regimes related to actions and decisions of the administration.
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Fernanda Giorgia Nicola Dr.
During the twentieth century, the center of production of legal ideas shifted from France to Germany and then to the United States. Here, the dominant legal reasoning framed the law as a phenomenon of social organization that was not confined to a specific legal system. There were both external and internal factors influencing U.S. legal thought which explain this change of wind from continental Europe to the United States. Externally, after World War II the United States garnered influence by positioning itself for political and economic global leadership. Internally, the critique of social purpose functionalism articulated by the legal realists provided new problem-solving approaches integrated in a reconstructive and pragmatic understanding of law called positive-sociology functionalism. Finally, legal diffusion occurred through public law disciplines based on U.S. constitutional law theories of rights, neo-formalism, and balancing conflicting policy analysis.
The diffusion of legal education takes place through law schools, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international financial institutions (IFIs) and other avenues, and with different political agendas, often in conjunction, for instance, with law and development reforms or more broadly due to the prestige of U.S. legal training and academia. U.S. legal thought reached Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa through the transplant of legal institutions. The diffusion of U.S. legal styles often changed the process rather than the content of legal education, which resulted in local curriculum reforms that reflected the more pragmatic U.S. education style. Some scholars have harshly criticized the export of U.S. legal thought for its distinct adversarial judicial process that decentralizes power and privatizes disputes while creating advantages for the powerful and wealthy, expanding inequality and social stratification. Others have instead claimed that the diffusion of teaching methods geared to the adoption of U.S.-based clinical legal education aims at informing, adapting, and promoting social justice in a way that addresses the contextual realities of the importing country.
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Fernanda Giorgia Nicola Dr. and Daniela Caruso
The propensity to engage in a sustained critique of EU law marbles several contributions in this Volume and certainly animates this chapter. This generally critical stance takes the present stage of legal Europeanization as a fact and aims to make full use of the possibilities for political and social justice it can currently support, but at the same time it decries its many structural and dynamic drawbacks. In doing so, this critical project borrows liberally from CLS without fear of misreading or misappropriation. Irreverence in this context is a feature, not a bug. The CLS toolkit is clearly useful to European scholars, but there is no pretense here of fidelity to the original CLS conception. Transformations can be productive on EU soil, and there is no reason not to utilize, albeit in a different epistemic environment, the motivational force of lessons drawn from far-away places or times.
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Diane Orentlicher
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Lindsay Wiley
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Kenneth Anderson
An international public debate over the law and ethics of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) has been underway since 2012, with those urging legal regulation of AWS under existing principles and requirements of the international law of armed conflict, on the one side, in argument with opponents who favor, instead, a preemptive international treaty ban on all such weapons, on the other. This Chapter provides an introduction to this international debate, offering the main arguments on each side. These include disputes over defining an AWS, the morality and law of automated targeting and target selection by machine, and the interaction of humans and machines in the context of lethal weapons of war. Although the Chapter concludes that a categorical ban on AWS is unjustified morally and legally — favoring the law of armed conflict’s existing case-by-case legal evaluation — it offers an exposition of arguments on each side of the AWS issue.
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Jennifer C. Daskal
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Angela J. Davis
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Robert Dinerstein
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Christine Farley
The current divide within the international community over the appropriate level of protection for geographical indications (GIs) is epitomized by the conflict between the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) in the context of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP). While GIs receive extensive protections that go beyond international treaty standards within the EU, the US (along with other "New World" countries) has repeatedly opposed strengthening the existing international GI protections.
The US's resistance to strong protection of GIs has become a popularized account. The history of the US's interest in GI protection, however, is more complex. Since 1929, the US has been bound by a little-known international convention that ensures strong protection of GIs: the General Inter-American Convention for Trade Mark and Commercial Protection (Inter-American Convention). The Inter-American Convention is a regional agreement that was instituted by the US with several countries in the Americas. At the time in which the Convention went into force, the provisions on GIs in the Inter-American Convention were the most developed and strongest protections available in any international agreement. And remarkably, these provisions were developed by the US.
This history of the protection of GIs in the US remains enigmatic. Few scholars and lawyers are aware of the Inter-American Convention, let alone its chapter on GI protection. Why was such a chapter included, and why were similar provisions not included in the 1946 Trademark Act or subsequent international agreements? The treatment of GIs both in this convention and in the US Trademark Act is largely the result of the work of Edward Rogers and Stephen Ladas, two of the leading practitioners of US trademark law in the twentieth century. These two men had as sophisticated an understanding of US common law and international obligations as anyone at that time. The resulting texts of the Inter-American Convention and the Trademark Act - both of which they were instrumental in drafting – were no accident.
As the Inter-American Convention is still in force, it indicates the minimum standards for the protection of GIs in the US, at least with respect to beneficiaries of the Convention. It is also arguably a self-executing treaty in the US. Understanding this agreement therefore offers more than historical insight; it may offer an alternate approach to the protection of GIs. The Inter-American
Convention also offers lessons for developing GI protection standards in other regions, such as Asia. One reason for the Convention's inconspicuousness is that it was primarily intended to be used by US business in Latin America; it was not designed for the equal benefit of all member states. In addition, it was negotiated without the benefit of any experience protecting GIs on the part of the Latin American trading partners. Perhaps, it is not surprising then that the largely theoretical origins of the protections have resulted in the absence of a robust practice of applying them.
While the focus of this book is to consider GIs in Asia, this chapter will examine a particular historical moment in the legal protection of GIs that will expose a different view of the American approach to the protection of GIs. The reason to introduce this history is to offer policy makers in this region alternative approaches to GI protection beyond the current models advanced by the EU and the US. The short story is that the EU favors strengthening the current protections of GIs - it is said to be one of their greatest assets – while the US disfavors the development of additional protection for Gls beyond those offered by trademark law. The Inter-American Convention certainly complicates this story and provides a possible alternate approach. -
Jeffrey Lubbers
Jeffrey S. Lubbers, Is the U.S. Supreme Court Becoming Hostile to the Administrative State?, prepared for the Administrative Law Discussion Forum held at the University of Luxembourg, July 1-2, 2015; published (with other papers) by Carolina Academic Press in Comparative Perspectives on Administrative Procedure Global Papers Series Volume III pp. 31-50 (Russell W. Weaver, et. al. eds 2017). Draft available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2645036
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Fernanda Giorgia Nicola Dr.
The impact of European Union (EU) law and policy on social groups has been examined in important scholarly work on European Law. Mainstream European legal scholarship, however, makes seldom use of a ‘law and society’ methodology, committed to an understanding of law, its internal logic and its practice yet influenced by external political and social forces. By means of two different theoretical perspectives, American legal realism and Amartya Sen’s idea of comparative justice, this chapter focuses on the impact of European decision-making on social groups and local actors embracing different conceptions of justice from below. Lawyers, judges and policy-makers in the EU appear more concerned with institutional demands of justice rather its social realization as revealed by local actors with conflicting visions of justice. The chapter uses distributive justice as a means to reconcile such different visions of the good life.
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