Legal Research

Legal Resources News & Notes

Here are some new or updated legal resources that have recently been announced:

Do Legal Origins Have Persistent Effects Over Time? A Look at Law and Finance around the World c. 1900
Author: Aldo Musacchio: Abstract: How persistent are the effects of legal institutions adopted or inherited in the distant past? A substantial literature argues that legal origins have persistent effects that explain clear differences in investor protections and financial development around the world today (La Porta et al., 1998, 1999 and passim). This paper examines the persistence of the effects of legal origins by examining new estimates of different indicators of financial development in more than 20 countries in 1900 and 1913. The evidence presented does not yield robust results that can sustain the hypothesis of persistence effects of legal origin, but it is not powerful enough to reject it either. Then the paper examines if there were systematic differences in the extent of investor protections across countries, since that is the main channel through which legal origin affects financial development, and shows that all the evidence supports the idea of relative convergence in corporate governance practices across legal families circa 1900. The paper concludes that, if the evidence presented is representative, the variation observed in financial development around the world today is likely a product of events of the twentieth century rather than a consequence of long-term (and persistent) differences occasioned by legal traditions.
Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-030.pdf

Merlin Information Systems: Carole Levitt and Mark Rosch, authors of The Lawyer's Guide to Fact Finding on the Internet, introduce Merlin Information Systems, a useful database for skip-tracing, marshalling assets, and backgrounding people. Lawyers and law firms should take note of the special offer at the end of the article. This article originally appeared in the ALI-ABA newsletter, Internet Fact Finding For Lawyers (Jan/Feb 2008).

A Pocket Guide to the Classified Information Procedures Act: Keeping Government Secrets: A Pocket Guide for Judges on the State-Secrets Privilege, the Classified Information Procedures Act, and Court Security Officers is available from the Federal Judicial Center: "Most federal judges come into contact with classified information infrequently, if at all, but when they do, they are faced with the dilemma of how to protect government secrets in the context of an otherwise public proceeding. This pocket guide is designed to familiarize federal judges with statutes and procedures established to help public courts protect government secrets when courts are called upon to do so. The guide provides information about the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), information security officers, and secure storage facilities."

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Full post as published by LexLibris on February 07, 2008 (boomark / email).