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Law at the End of the Day 
Comments on current legal issues focusing on institutions, and the ways in which (1) public law norms are critical for the development of the law of economic organizations; (2) the democratic principle finds expression in the public law of states and the private law of corporations; and (3) the ways in which public, private, economic, and religious institutions clash and cooperate.
Post Frequency: 23.8/day Last Entry: November 10, 2009 at 08:36:00 Recent Entries: 262
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Escape Velocity From the Orbit of the State: Is Governance Without Government/Government Without the State Possible?
Posted on November 10, 2009Set out below are some preliminary thought on the question posed by the title of this essay--is it possible to reach escape velocity from the orbit of the state, and state-law systems? In other words, is it possible to conceive of governance without government, or better put, government without the state? While there appear to be no clear answers to me (for those with different or more elaborate views I welcome comments), I explore the possibility of such a state of "statelessness" in the materials that follow...
Disciplining Education
Posted on November 08, 2009It has long been true that the control of educational institutions have been a principal site for the control of social, cultural and political norms within a society. Everyone, from John Dewey to Fidel Castro and John Paul II, has understood that education is less about the production and dissemination of knowledge than it is about the production of citizens fully (to the extent possible) assimilated to whatever objective is required of its "pupils...
Who Owns the Name of God? The Malaysian Government Knows!
Posted on November 05, 2009Who Owns the Name of God? One would at first suspect that the answer is that the Divine Presence owns its own name, or at least all of the variations through which humans attempt to provide a means of communicating about the Divine Presence (or speaking of it with reference to the religious traditions of others)...
Part II: The OECD, Vedanta, & the Indian Supreme Court?Polycentricity, Transnational Corporate Governance and John Ruggie?s Protect/Respect Framework
Posted on November 03, 2009In Part I of this essay, Larry Catá Backer, Part I: The OECD, Vedanta, and the Supreme Court of India?Polycentricity in Transnational Governance--The Issue of Standing, Law at the End of the Day, Nov. 1, 2009, I posited that the state system remains stubbornly grounded in a monocentric view of law and regulation, even as it implements polycentric governance systems through intergovernmental and other international organizations...
Part I: The OECD, Vedanta, and the Supreme Court of India?Polycentricity in Transnational Governance--The Issue of Standing
Posted on November 01, 2009The state system remains stubbornly grounded in a monocentric view of law and regulation, even as it works to construct increasingly relevant multi-level systems of soft governance. ?Here the great difficulty is defining the scope of the obligations to be imposed, formally and socially, on enterprises...
Transnational Constitutionalism Triumphant: The End of the Honduran Constitutional Crisis
Posted on October 31, 2009?A constitution without legitimacy is no constitution at all. It is outside the law in the sense that it ought to be respected by the community against which it is applied. . . . Legitimacy is a function of values, which in turn serve as the foundation of constitutionalism...
Curriculum Reform and Emerging Class Structures in Legal Education
Posted on October 28, 2009Curriculum reform continues to occupy much thinking within the American legal academy. For a review of some contemporary issues and distinct approaches to resolving them, see, e.g., Larry Catá Backer, Georgia State University Hosts International Conference on the Future of Legal Education, Law at the End of the Day, Feb...
Remodeling Kenya's Political System on a Chinese Foundation
Posted on October 24, 2009I have suggested the importance of the Chinese model of state organization for both constitutionalist theory and the organization of states on the basis of a rule of law order quite distinct from that natural in the West. See, Larry Catá Backer, The Rule of Law, the Chinese Communist Party, and Ideological Campaigns: Sange Daibiao (the 'Three Represents'), Socialist Rule of Law, and Modern Chinese Constitutionalism...
Podcast of Presentation at Penn State: "The Party as Polity"
Posted on October 21, 2009I recently presented my paper, ?The Party as Polity, the Communist Party, and the Chinese Constitutional State: A Theory of State-Party Constitutionalism,? as part of Pennsylvania State University Law School's Scholarly Dialogue's program. In this work I sought to apply emerging principles of constitutional theory to the party-state model of governance in China, and to articulate a way that state-party governance and the traditional western understanding of a constitutional guarantee of the rule of law can co-exist...
On Challenges to Operationalizing a Transnational Framework for Business and Human Rights--the View From Geneva
Posted on October 13, 2009"On 5-6 October 2009, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) held a consultation: "Operationalizing the framework for business and human rights presented by the Special Representative" -- the "Protect, Respect, Remedy" framework [PDF] proposed by Special Representative Ruggie in his 2008 report to the UN Human Rights Council...
On the Malleability of Genocide--Turkey Between Armenia, Israel and China
Posted on October 12, 2009Genocide has proven to be an elastic concept since the Second World War. It has become a powerful accusation that can serve to de-legitimate regimes who are successfully accused of the practice. Its meaning, once thought to be fairly clear has assumed something of a political overlay as communities of states fight with each other to keep members of their respective camps from being accused of acts of genocide...
Rewarding the American State Apparatus for Good Behavior: Understanding and the Awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mr. Obama
Posted on October 09, 2009This blog site joins the great chorus of people and institutions in raising a loud hosanna to the genius of the global community now manifested in the form of the recent decision of the Nobel organization to award its prize for peace to the American President, Barack Obama...
Al-Qaida in China
Posted on October 08, 2009The Jerusalem Post recently reported that al Qaeda appears to have assessed itself strong enough to take on the Chinese in Xinjiang.Al Qaida spokesmen announced on Thursday that the organization's militants would soon begin to work towards "freeing their Muslim country," referring to China...
When Collectivist Economies Meet Sovereign Investing: Dubai Ports in Cuba
Posted on October 04, 2009Over the last decade, Cuba has sought to revivify the concept of state to state economic activity. As one of the last bastions of organization on the model of the old Stalinist collectivist state apparatus, Cuba has long sought to convince others that this form of economic organization, substantially discredited after the fall of the Soviet Union and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, can be efficient enough...
On Autonomy and Complexity in the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund
Posted on October 02, 2009China Investment Corporation, and changes to dividend policies. Larry Catá Backer, On SWF Autonomy: Restructuring the China Investment Corporation, Law at the End of the Day, September 20, 2009- I reported that "to accomplish its national development goal and to actively manage its sovereign wealth fund and state-owned enterprises, China?s Ministry of Finance recently reached an agreement with CIC to treat the $200 billion US Dollars that was originally used to finance CIC as CIC?s assets rather than a debt...
From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: The Rise and Fall of Shoe Throwing as a Media Sanctioned Political Event
Posted on October 01, 2009The use of the media for the projection of potent political speech is a dangerous business. News cycles are short; and the power to ridicule is as great as the power to elevate symbolic speech. So it is with shoe throwing. For a brief moment, when the media campaigns favored decisive action against the then sitting President of the United States and the reformulation of American policy in Iraq, shoe throwing became a grand political gesture that earned the appearance of weighty thought, and perhaps even thinly disguised approval...
"Diana: A Celebration": Celebrity as a Status Power Marker in an Age of Mass Democracy
Posted on September 29, 2009The Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau recently announced:Even more than a decade after her untimely death, Princess Diana remains an adored and admired figure. In the fall of 2009, the National Constitution Center hosts Diana: A Celebration, a tribute to the Princess of Wales, remembering her inspirational and magical life that captivated people from every walk of life, everywhere in the world...
The Financial Stability Board and Global Financial Governance After the September 2009 G20 Conclave
Posted on September 26, 2009The Financial Stability Board, a little known inter governmental amalgamation of economic regulatory authorities from G20 states has come into it own with the release of three significant reports at the end of the September meeting of the G-20 recently concluded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...
The Other Shoe Drops--Brazilian Interventionism in Honduras
Posted on September 23, 2009I had suggested yesterday that the miraculous entry of Mr. Zelaya into Honduras and his equally fortuitous admission into a Brazilian Embassy in the Honduran capital just when coincidentally enough the bulk of the Brazilian staff was elsewhere suggested that these events were being orchestrated by Brazil to topple the Honduran state and replace it with a person more to Mr...
Democracy Part XVIII-- Constitutional Caudillismo: End Games in Honduras
Posted on September 22, 2009There is something refreshing about international relations when old patterns are embraced by actors new to their roles. The freshness intensifies where those patterns also hearken back to more traditional days yet point forward to new notions of constitutional hierarchy...
Transnational Corporate Constitutionalism?
Posted on September 21, 2009I was fortunate to have recently participated in the excellent program, The Constitutionalization of the Global Corporate Sphere?, hosted by the International Center for Business and Politics, and its director, Lars Bo Kaspersen, of the Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 17-18, 2009...
A Chinese Perspective on Cuban Economic Reform
Posted on September 20, 2009It it commonly understood that China may not be a good model for Cuban economic reform. See Larry Catá Backer, Cuban Corporate Governance at the Crossroads: Cuban Marxism, Private Economic Collectives and Free Market Globalism. Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, Vol...
On SWF Autonomy: Restructuring the China Investment Corporation
Posted on September 20, 2009The China Investment Corporation, the Chinese sovereign Wealth Fund, is the principle organ of Chinese sovereign investing. I have suggested the nature of that investing in recent work. See, Larry Catá Backer, Sovereign Investing in Times of Crisis: Global Regulation of Sovereign Wealth Funds, State Owned Enterprises and the Chinese Experience, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, Vol...
From Narrative to Narrator: Remarks at "Business Law and Narrative Symposium" at MSU
Posted on September 16, 2009It was my great privilege to have participated in the recently concluded conference, "Business Law and Narrative" sponsored by the Michigan State University College of Law, September 11, 2009., organized by MSU's Mae Kykendall Larry Ribstein has written of portions of that conference, centered on his most interesting engagement with the cultural management of the financial crisis and its implications for regulations as well as for conceptions of the normal in American business...
On the Horizen--Brazil-China Trade Competititon in a Complex BRIC Relationship
Posted on September 12, 2009In traditional developed states elites, and their media outlets, tend to think about the so-called BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) as some sort of monolith. Each serves as a separate strand that together is bound to do any number of things with or to developed states...
The Chinese Communist Party and the Governance Structures of SWFs and SOEs: ?Unswervingly Upholding the Party's Core Political Status in SOEs"
Posted on September 01, 2009Western commentators continue to have a fairly parochial view of the governance frameworks that must be understood for the construction of satisfactory governance regimes for sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and state owned enterprises (SOEs) that seek to operate outside the national territory of their public owners...
Judging the Honduran Constitutional Order Beyond the State?An Interrogation of the View From the Transnational Sector
Posted on August 29, 2009There was a time when international law played little role in the way in which a sovereign nation-state ordered its constitutional system, and then applied that ordering internally. That was especially the case with respect to the application of the process rules of a nation?s constitution, and the division of authority between the two principal elected branches of state?the executive and legislature?and the judicial power to oversee that division...
Democracy Part XVII: On the Legislature as an Aggregation of Interests and the Role of the Electorate in Representative Democracies
Posted on August 28, 2009Some of the best contemporary political theory is being developed by those without oblivious to the role they play. A very real sense of both the source and content of modern political theory of representative government in the United States was much in evidence in a recent report circulated in that influential news periodical--Time Magazine...
Is Shar?ia Only for the Poor and Illiterate?: On Customary, Positive and Higher Law in Mali
Posted on August 23, 2009Law has been assuming an increasingly protean character as we move into the 21st century. Though for the greater part of the last century global elites have been seeking to educate the masses, on whom political rights have been increasingly vested, that there is a hierarchy of law that must be understood and respected...
ISO 26000: Working on a Common Global Language of Corporate Social Responsibility
Posted on August 21, 2009A new governance environment requires a common language. The entity that controls the construction of that common language will, effectively, also control the underlying parameters and normative framework which that language describes. The power of concepts are encapsulated in the words and standards chisen to describe them...
Converging State and Economy: Further Reflections on the Rio Tinto Executives Arrest in China
Posted on August 19, 2009The arrest of four Rio Tinto executives this summer has produced a significant amount of consequences for people interested in international relations, law, foreign investment and corporate governance. See, Larry Catá Backer, From Political to Economic Wrongs--The Rio Tinto Prosecutions in China, Law at the End of the Day, Aug...
Caritas in Veritate: Developing a Roman Catholic Doctrine for Globalization, and a Values Based Corporate Social Responsibilty Framework
Posted on August 15, 2009Ever since the 1980s and his personal confrontation, as Cardinal Ratzinger, with Catholic Marxist-Leninism in the form of Liberation Theology, Benedict XVI has been especially sensitive to the importance of a values based approach to economic organization and its implications within Church doctrine...
From Political to Economic Wrongs--The Rio Tinto Prosecutions in China
Posted on August 13, 2009I have written about the arrest of Stern Hu, general manager of Rio Tinto's Shanghai office and three of his Chinese co-workers Liu Caikui, Ge Minqiang and Wang Yong. See Larry Catá Backer,State Owned Enterprises and the Integrity of Private Markets and Commercial Activity: On the Arrest of the Rio Tinto Executive, Law at the End of the Day, July 10, 2009...
A Conversation About Three Represents (????), Harmonious Society (????), Scientific Development (?????) in Chinese Constitutional Development
Posted on August 11, 2009My former student, Jason Buhi and I have been debating the relationship and importance of the three important theories growing out Mao Zedong thought and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. These three concepts, three represents (????), harmonious society (????) and scientific development (?????), are foundational to Chinese political discourse...
Postponing the Cuban Communist Party Conference
Posted on August 06, 2009I have written before tat it is possible to build the foundations of rule of law constitutionalist states within the normative framework of Marxist Leninist states. See Larry Catá Backer, The Party as Polity, the Communist Party, and the Chinese Constitutional State: A Theory of State-Party Constitutionalism, Journal of Chinese and Comparative Law, Vol...
Moving Legal Education into the On Line Age--On the Production of Knowledge and Education Through the Internet
Posted on August 06, 2009The number, scope and quality of on line institutions of higher education is growing quickly in the United States. They have become more important as the democratization of higher education has reached larger segments fo the population and technological advances have made remote and asynchronous education not merely feasble but effective...
Democracy Part XVI: Empathy and Hubris: America in Africa
Posted on August 06, 2009The representatives of the American political elite have found it expedient, both in massaging their media image and in appearing to be empathetic, to make pilgrimages to Africa. They have been met by wildly enthusiastic crowds, crowds humbled by what appears to be the mark of respect that these visits represent...
Some Thoughts at the Start of Curriculum Reform Season in American Law Schools
Posted on August 03, 2009As Summer wanes and American Law Schools begin their preparations for another academic year, curriculum reform remains very much in the air. In particular, the shape and character of first year legal education appears to continue to elicit concern. Faculties worry about the goals should be achieved by the 1-L curriculum, the construction of ideal curricula, the extent of curricular control by faculty rather than students, and a significant concern about measurement--of strengths, weakness, comparative advantage, satisfaction, and the like...
Sovereign Investing in Times of Crisis: Part V, The Case of China
Posted on July 31, 2009This is the FIFTH of a multi-part series exploring the rise of a new form of integrated sovereign investing. The focus will be on the regulatory framework that is being developed in the West and the reality of innovative sovereign investing being implemented in China...
Sovereign Investing in Times of Crisis: Global Regulation of SWFs, SOEs and the Chinese Experience--Part IV, Regulatory Dissonance
Posted on July 30, 2009This is the FOURTH of a multi-part series exploring the rise of a new form of integrated sovereign investing. The focus will be on the regulatory framework that is being developed in the West and the reality of innovative sovereign investing being implemented in China...
Sovereign Investing in Times of Crisis: Global Regulation of SWFs, SOEs and the Chinese Experience--Part III, Complexity, Coordinationand the SOE
Posted on July 27, 2009This is the THIRD of a multi-part series exploring the rise of a new form of integrated sovereign investing. The focus will be on the regulatory framework that is being developed in the West and the reality of innovative sovereign investing being implemented in China...
Sovereign Investing in Times of Crisis: Global Regulation of SWFs, SOEs and the Chinese Experience--Part II, Projections-Public Power,Private Form
Posted on July 26, 2009This is the SECOND of a multi-part series exploring the rise of a new form of integrated sovereign investing. The focus will be on the regulatory framework that is being developed in the West and the reality of innovative sovereign investing being implemented in China...
Sovereign Investing in Times of Crisis: Global Regulation of Sovereign Wealth Funds, State Owned Enterprises and the Chinese Experience--Part I, Intro
Posted on July 25, 2009This is the first of a multi-part series exploring the rise of a new form of integrated sovereign investing. The focus will be on the regulatory framework that is being developed in the West and the reality of innovative sovereign investing being implemented in China...
Emine Tahsin on ALBA (The Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America) and the Cuban Economy
Posted on July 21, 2009Outside of Latin America, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) has been treated as something of a joke. It is the mad product of nondemocratic regimes, the only output of any consequence of which has been photo opportunities...
How Not to Engage in Braodcast Warfare: On the Failings of TV Martí
Posted on July 17, 2009In 1979, John Spicer Nichols explored the power of broadcasting as a weapon in warfare. The object of his study was the insurgency that would, after 1959, be known as the Cuban Revolution.WHEN CUBAN REVOLUTIONARIES Fidel Castro and Ernesto (Ché) Guevara discussed Guevara's proposal for establishing a rebel radio station, the guerrilla movement was faltering...
The Other Side of State Manipulation of Economic Markets: The United States, Israel and India
Posted on July 11, 2009I have suggested that state owned enterprises continue to affect the development of normative frameworks through which private markets are conceived and thus regulated. The role of state owned enterprises in such markets suggest the leading edge of what may be the merger of politics and economics in the construction of future markets for goods and services...
Opening Up the Process of Reforming China's State Secrets Law
Posted on July 11, 2009I have written recently on the use of China's state secrets law to project public regulatory power in private market economic relations, especially where economic contests involve state owned enterprises. See Larry Catá Backer, State Owned Enterprises and the Integrity of Private Markets and Commercial Activity: On the Arrest of the Rio Tinto Executive, Law at the End of the Day, July 10, 2009...
State Owned Enterprises and the Integrity of Private Markets and Commercial Activity: On the Arrest of the Rio Tinto Executive
Posted on July 10, 2009Over the last decade states have aggressively projection of state power into private markets. But they have also evidenced a desire to preserve the legal and political divisions between their role as sovereigns and as actors in private markets. The object, of course, is to preserve a monopoly of political power in states while allowing the leaking of this state power within the private markets in which individuals and juridical persons (corporations and other aggregate entities) might assert power...
Reflections on the Declaration of Independence: From a Crisis of U.K. Constitutionalism in the Americas to a Global Constitutional Crisis in Honduras
Posted on July 05, 2009The 4th of July is traditionally used as a day to celebrate the first formal acknowledgment of a rupture within a nation state, one that led to violent separation and the recognition of the autonomy of one territorial unit from out of what had been an integrated territorial kingdom, formed in a manner that was conventional for the time...
Governance Without Law: Assessment and Transparency in the Construction of Social and Political Institutions
Posted on July 02, 2009I have suggested that regulatory power has become fractured. Its assertion both by public and private bodies is well known. Less well recognized is that the expression of this regulatory power has been fracturing as well. No longer confined to positive regulation or judicial decision, the techniques for enforcing regulation are substituting for regulation itself...
Disciplining Harmonization: Pablo Lerner on Common Principles of Comparative Law and the New Ius Commune
Posted on June 30, 2009Pablo Lerner, of the Center of Law and Business (Ramat Gan, Israel), has recently published an article whose arguments are worth considering. Pablo Lerner, "The Relationship Between 'Common Principles', Comparative Law and the 'New Ius Commune', " (2008) 16 European Review of Private Law 6...
Yelling Loudly and Carrying a Small Stick: The Nation State and the Enforcement of Global Human Rights
Posted on June 30, 2009Nation states continue to jealously guard their authority to discipline the juridical persons subject to their control. Many of them also encourage the incorporation of human rights, environmental and other social concerns in the operation of multinational corporations...
Of Somali Pirates, Global Corporations and the State: Governance Without Government, Government without a State and Military Power
Posted on June 28, 2009Recently I have been considering the issue of the construction of governance orders in the 21st century. I have suggested that political power is no longer necessarily the highest form of effective power, that states have become more limited as projections of power outside the territorial borders of these political units become easier, and I have suggested that both the division between public and private power and the hierarchical arrangement of power pursuant to that division have also softened...
Governance Without Government OR Government without a State?: Gunther Teubner on Complications of Umooring Corporate Governance From Corporate Law
Posted on June 25, 2009In a simpler time, about a generation ago, the fictional divisions into which social, cultural and legal life were segmented, were both simple and powerful methods for organizing communal life. It was especially straightforward with respect to the construction and control of fictional persons, and especially fictional actors organized for the purpose of conducting economic activity...
Constitutionalism and the Single Party State: On the Value of Localized Experiments in Shenzhen
Posted on June 23, 2009I have suggested that it may be possible to construct a rule of law state adhering to principles of popular participation without adherence to the mass democratic principles increasingly popular in the West. This development is particularly characteristic of developments in China...
Tenure and the Minority Law Professor in the United States: Teaching Against the Demons
Posted on June 21, 2009The Association of American Law Schools held a Workshop for Pretenured Minority Law School Teachers on June 17-18, 2009, in Washington, DC. The conference organizers described the purpose of the event:From their first day of teaching until tenure, minority law teachers face special challenges in the legal academy...
Governance Without Government: A Preliminary Overview
Posted on June 17, 2009Before the 16th century in Europe, states were an important component of a complex system of governance, over territory, individuals, beliefs, customs and the like. From the 16th century on a territorial principle was introduced cuius regio, eius religio, which by the 20th century had metastasized into the notion that political control of a territory subsumed within it the ultimate authority by the political apparatus of the state to control every aspect of life (and otherwise) within those borders?at least to the extent those borders could be defended...
Brazil and China: A More Intimate Military Relationship?
Posted on June 13, 2009Traditionally, Brazil and Japan have had close relations. The Japanese foreign ministry reports that it has loans of 326,500 million yen, grants of 1,955 million yen and technical cooperation programs valued at 97,700 million yen (2006) with Brazil. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA), Japan-Brazil Relations...
Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. and the Purchase of Hummer From General Motors
Posted on June 13, 2009The transformation of General Motors from an independent multinational corporation that once commanded great power (including the power to influence smaller states) to a mere state owned enterprise of the United States has many ramifications. One of the more interesting, of course, is the way the United States is revolutionizing the construction of systems of political control of economic enterprises while simultaneously attempting to regulate the private markets in which these operate...
China, India, Pakistan, The United States and the Taliban: Tangled Webs and Trip Wires
Posted on June 11, 2009The relations between China, India, Pakistan, the United States and the Taliban has been is a dynamic and interesting constellation of contradictions and aspirations. One can get a sense of the complexities, and volatility, of these relationships, by considering the movements and counter movements among these parties in the context of recent troop movements by India...
Democracy Part XV: The European Parliament Elections and Downdraft Federalism
Posted on June 08, 2009Over the last twenty or so years it has become almost established dogma among European intellectual circles to point to and decry the "democratic deficit" in the construction and operation of the institutions of the European Union. See, e.g., Fritz W...
It is All About the Universal: Anwar Ibrahim on the American "New Beginning"
Posted on June 07, 2009It has become clear that within legal and political frameworks grounded in substantive values, the ability to control the content and interpretation of those substantive values is critical to assertions of power and influence. I speak not merely of an amorphous power and control, but the specific mechanics for the expression of power in law...
Mr. Obama Speaks in Egypt: "Islam is a Part of America"--The Ummah Wahida, and the State in Two Distinct World Orders
Posted on June 05, 2009"So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America." Barack H. Obama, Remarks by the President On a New Beginning, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009. So Mr. Obama declared to his audience at Cairo University on June 4, 2009. This declaration, both profoundly optimistic and incomprehensible, serve as the best and most enigmatic part of Mr...
Sri Lanka and the Application of Global Humanitarian Law
Posted on May 29, 2009Little noticed this week, the "United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday dropped a Swiss-EU draft resolution calling for an investigation into possible war crimes during Sri Lanka?s recently-concluded war on terrorism and adopted Sri Lanka?s counter resolution with some of the proposals in the Swiss-EU document incorporated into it...
Mr. Obama on Guantanamo: Of Power and Politics in Time of Crisis
Posted on May 21, 2009One of my favorite scenes from opera is the delightful first act of Jacques Offenbach's Contes d'Hoffman (Tales of Hoffman). Hoffman, the artist, tries without success to embrace the love as imperfectly incarnated in three women. The first act focuses on a youthful and virtuoso love, of a certain sort...
Residencia en la tierra I: Pablo Neruda and the Tyranny of Despair
Posted on May 17, 2009This is another in a series of essays on the poetry of Pablo Neruda.The subject of these essays is Neruda's Residencias en la tierra (translated usually as "Residence on Earth"), an enormously influential set of poems published in three batches -- Residencias I in 1933; Residencias II in 1935 and Residencias III in 1947...
On Fidel Castro's May Day Address 2009
Posted on May 16, 2009The elections this past November in the United States brought with it a great excitement. The global media suggested, and the incoming administration did little to disavow, the notion that the change of administration was essentially revolutionary in character...
Residencia en la tierra I: Pablo Neruda Between Past and Future Part I
Posted on May 15, 2009This is the first of a series of essays on the poerty of Pablo Neruda.The subject of these essays is Neruda's Residencias en la tierra (translated usually as "Residence on Earth"), an enormously influential set of poems published in three batches -- Residencias I in 1933; Residencias II in 1935 and Residencias III in 1947...
On ALBA--Cuba at the Center of a Challenge to Dominant Modalities of Trade
Posted on May 13, 2009I have recently mentioned the excellent conference: The Measure of a Revolution: Cuba, 1959-2009, held May 7-9, 2009 at the lovely campus of Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario CANADA. The conference was jointly organized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Havana University, Boston University and Queen?s University...
Cuban Conference: The Measure of a Revolution Cuba 1959-2009
Posted on May 12, 2009I have just returned from an excellent conference, The Measure of a Revolution: Cuba, 1959-2009, held May 7-9, 2009 at the lovely campus of Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario CANADA. The conference was jointly organized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Havana University, Boston University and Queen?s University...
Desperation Federalism in the United States: The Search for a Structural Solution to a Political Problem
Posted on April 29, 2009One of the great curiosities of American federalism is that the term is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution itself. More curious still is that it appears nowhere protected from incursions by either the apparatus of state or general governments. But it is not that the founders were unaware of the need to include strong structural protections to guard the division of authority between newly subordinate state and a limited but powerful general government...
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Public Power: The Case of Norway Part V (Regulatory Implications of Santiago Principles Approach and Activist SWFs)
Posted on April 28, 2009This is the fifth of a series of five (5) essays in which the nature and character of sovereign wealth funds are considered. Specifically the essays explore whether a sovereign wealth find can form itself to the ideals expressed in emerging regulatory regimes, like the Santiago Principles, one based on the idea that states may be treated like private entities with respect to their enterprises, formally sovereign but functionally private, as long as they conform to a set of behavior expectations which are said to distinguish sovereign from private behavior...
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Public Power: The Case of Norway Part IV (SWF and State Policy in Action: CSR, Israel, Burma and India)
Posted on April 27, 2009This is the fourth of a series of five (5) essays in which the nature and character of sovereign wealth funds are considered. Specifically the essays explore whether a sovereign wealth find can form itself to the ideals expressed in emerging regulatory regimes, like the Santiago Principles, one based on the idea that states may be treated like private entities with respect to their enterprises, formally sovereign but functionally private, as long as they conform to a set of behavior expectations which are said to distinguish sovereign from private behavior...
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Public Power: The Case of Norway Part III (History, Legal Structure, Ethics Guidelines)
Posted on April 26, 2009This is the third of a series of five (5) essays in which the nature and character of sovereign wealth funds are considered. Specifically the essays explore whether a sovereign wealth find can form itself to the ideals expressed in emerging regulatory regimes, like the Santiago Principles, one based on the idea that states may be treated like private entities with respect to their enterprises, formally sovereign but functionally private, as long as they conform to a set of behavior expectations which are said to distinguish sovereign from private behavior...
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Public Power: The Case of Norway Part II (Concepts and Regulatory Framework)
Posted on April 25, 2009This is the second of a series of five (5) essays in which the nature and character of sovereign wealth funds are considered. Specifically the essays explore whether a sovereign wealth find can form itself to the ideals expressed in emerging regulatory regimes, like the Santiago Principles, one based on the idea that states may be treated like private entities with respect to their enterprises, formally sovereign but functionally private, as long as they conform to a set of behavior expectations which are said to distinguish sovereign from private behavior...
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Public Power: The Case of Norway Part I
Posted on April 24, 2009This is the first of a series of five (5) essays in which the nature and character of sovereign wealth funds are considered. Specifically the essays explore whether a sovereign wealth find can form itself to the ideals expressed in emerging regulatory regimes, like the Santiago Principles, one based on the idea that states may be treated like private entities with respect to their enterprises, formally sovereign but functionally private, as long as they conform to a set of behavior expectations which are said to distinguish sovereign from private behavior...
Professor Beth Farmer on the Evolution of Chinese Merger Notification Guidelines
Posted on April 22, 2009My colleague, Susan Beth Farmer has written an excellent analysis of the Chinese merger notification guidelines. I have included the Introduction, Part V (Questions and Issues), and Part VI (Conclusion) to that article here. The entire article may be downloaded at the Social Science Research Network website...
Universal Jurisdiction, Universal Law, Prosecurtorial Discretion
Posted on April 13, 2009Legitimacy was once thought to be achieved at the point of a gun. Certainly human history confirms the importance of military power in conferring legitimacy to political desire, and legal ends. And not just military power. "Dubai police on Sunday accused Chechen Vice-Prime Minister, Adam Delimkhanov, of ordering the murder in Dubai on March 28 of the former Russian army commander from Chechnya, Sulim Yamadayev...
Phryne and A Lame Beggar, Disinherited
Posted on April 12, 2009A Lame BeggerI am unable, yon begger cries,To stand, or move; if he say true, hee lies.John Donne, A Lame Begger, in The Works of John Donne: The Complete Poems 88 (Rosslyn, NY: Black's Readers Service Co., 1932) (before 1617).And thus our banks, so eager to suck at the public teat, cried to all within earshot of their difficulty standing or moving...
Urbi et Orbi--Easter 2009
Posted on April 12, 2009Following a long tradition, the pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church delivered an Easter message--Urbi et Orbi; Easter 2009. While much of the Western press coverage focused on the usual--hopes for peace in the Middle East and the like, the address, understood as a whole, was meant to convey more than a simpleminded statement of political hopes...
Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: The View From Iowa and in Global Contexrt
Posted on April 05, 2009An exciting conference was recently held at the University of Iowa College of Law, April 2-4, 2009. The Conference, entitled, CRT 20: Honoring Our Past, Charting Our Future, was the collective product of a number of institutions in the United States:Sponsored by: The University of Iowa College of Law Co-Sponsored by: The University of California, Berkeley School of LawThe University of California, Davis School of LawThe University of Connecticut School of LawDenver University, Sturm College of LawThe University of Miami School of LawSouthern Methodist University, Dedman School of Law Contributing Race Centers Fred T...
The Public Prosecutor and the Subversion of the Republic: A Reverie on Representative Ted Stevens Just Past Time Rehabilitation
Posted on April 02, 2009While all attention is paid to the new American President and the great political tasks that await him, a number of events are occurring in the background that, despite the best intentions of the individual who now serves as president, will shape the institutions over which he presides and the system which he represents in ways well beyond his control...
Here We Go Again: Mr. Lieberman's Wrongheaded Grandstanding in the Israel-Palestine Wars
Posted on April 01, 2009It appears that the foreign Minister of Mr. Netanyahu's new government in Israel, as short lived as it is expected to be, has already staked out a claim to difference from the prior government's position. Israel FM Reject Annapolis Deal, BBC News Online, April 1, 2009...
Sovereign Wealth Funds as Regulatory Chameleons: Views From a Georgetown University Law School Symposium
Posted on March 31, 2009On March 30, 2009, the Georgetown Journal of International Law (GJIL) held an important symposium, entitled Sovereign Wealth Funds, focused on legal issues related to sovereign wealth funds at the Georgetown University Law Center. Ahmed Mousa and Kevin Goldstein of the GSIL and the GJIL staff are to be congratulated on putting together an excellent program...
Anwar Ibrahim: Unity in Diversity in Malaysia Going Forward
Posted on March 20, 2009A little over a year ago, during early March 2008, what might have seemed impossible a decade earlier had occurred--"Malaysia?s governing coalition, which has run this multiracial country without any major challenges for the past four decades, suffered a string of election defeats on Saturday, losing control of three major states and all but surrendering urban areas to the opposition...
Palestinians: More Jewish (and Less Muslim) than the Jews of the Middle East?!
Posted on March 18, 2009I have always been interested in what tends to lie hidden beneath the pretty words and other absurdities that has constituted the multi-generational participatory theatre of the Middle East and a significant diversion for politicians, academics, religious communities, lawyers and others from around the globe with many axes to grind and many agendas (hidden or otherwise) to further...
Preserving the Sheep in Contests for Control Among the Shepards: The Emerging Shape of International Humanitarian Law Based Management of Conflict
Posted on March 15, 2009It has become clearer since the start of the Great Power adventurism that produced in the late 20th century the numerous states sundered out of Yugoslavia (itself a construct cobbled together in the early 20th Century by a coterie of predecessor Great Powers), that law has become an instrumental framework through which violent conflict is managed...
It is Hardly Ever About the Economy: On the G-20 and Global FInancial Crisis
Posted on March 14, 2009The next set meetings of the G-20 has commenced in the midst of what is possibly the early stages of the current economic downturn. G-20 Ministers Meet Aid Divisions, BBC News OnLine, March 14, 2009. According to its own self conception: "The G-20 now has a crucial role in driving forward work between advanced and emerging economies to tackle the international financial and economic crisis, restore worldwide financial stability, lead the international economic recovery and secure a sustainable future for all countries...
Women and Labor in Times of Economic Crisis: Ideology, National Policy, the Media and the Molding of Public Perception
Posted on March 08, 2009Reality, and especially the reality of the current political situation it seems, is in large part a creature of the desires of the state and its media outlets. Facts are deployed to construct a reality that suits the ideological objective, policy goals, and motivational framework for the control of the masses...
The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Corporations: Using Soft Law to Operationalize a Transnational System of Corporate Governance
Posted on March 05, 2009Sovereign Wealth Funds and Global Crisis: Conference at the University of Iowa College of Law
Posted on March 03, 2009Ruminations XXVIII: The Archeology of Knowledge and the Certainty of Law
Posted on February 28, 2009Ruminations XXVII: On Modernity, the State and the Great Migrations of Peoples
Posted on February 27, 2009Ruminations XXV: The Other Rule of Law
Posted on February 25, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XXIV: AIG and the New Face of Controlled Economies
Posted on February 24, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XXIII: An Ancient Basis for Creating Modern Non-State Regulatory Systems
Posted on February 23, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XXIII: The Other Rule of Law
Posted on February 23, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XXII: Business Power, State Power and the Enforced Infantilization of the Individual
Posted on February 22, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XXI: Empathy
Posted on February 21, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XX: Liberty, The Will and Act
Posted on February 20, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XIX: Monkey Shines
Posted on February 19, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XVII: The Separation of Ownership and Control in the Public and Private Sectors
Posted on February 18, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XVI: Fundamentalisms
Posted on February 16, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XV: Exposure Draft Chinese Overseas Investments Rules
Posted on February 15, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XIV- Democracy Part XIV: On the Gesture and Substance of the Legislative Function in Advanced Democracies
Posted on February 14, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XIII: Beating Education into Teachers
Posted on February 13, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XII: Mother's Milk
Posted on February 12, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations XI: The Cirminalizaton of Politics and the Judicial forms of Warfare
Posted on February 11, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations X: On a Fundamental Rule of International Relations
Posted on February 10, 2009Gaius Valerius Catullus (84 B.C. - 54 B.C.) may have inadvertently provided a most insightful statement of a fundamental rule of international relations, and especially the relations between the creditor and debtor states.AVT sodes mihi redde decem sestertia, Silo,deinde esto quamuis saeuus et indomitus:aut, si te nummi delectant, desine quaesoleno esse atque idem saeuus et indomitus...
Ruminations IX: Liebestod Hugs
Posted on February 09, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations VIII: Surveillance, Praetorianism and the End of the public-Private Divide
Posted on February 08, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations VII: On Aggregations of Public/Private Power
Posted on February 07, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations VI: On Flags
Posted on February 06, 2009This is another in what I hope to be a month long series of aphoristic (?????????) essays, meant to provoke thought rather than explain it. The hope is that, built up on each other, the series will provide a matrix of thoughts that together might lead the reader in new directions...
Ruminations V: False Inferences in Shoes
Posted on February 05, 2009Nietzsche once notedThe art of drawing inferences. The greatest progress men have made lies in their learning how to draw correct inferences. That is by no means something natural, as Schopenhauer assumes when he says: 'Of inference, all are capable; of judgment, only a few...
Ruminations IV
Posted on February 04, 2009A sign of the power of mass democracy, and its maturity, is the privileging of gesture as a basis of policy. The greater the number of direct participants in the deployment of participatory political power, the simpler the expression of policy and the greater the need to hide its reality in complex documents, regulations, policies and processes that remain opaque to the electorate and that insulate elected officials from responsibility...
Ruminations III
Posted on February 03, 2009The Divine is said to be able to see everything be everywhere, understand everything, judge, punish, forgive and direct. The Divine, now incarnated through man, has become an aggregation of recording devices. The spark of the divine is now measured in access to this recorded memory, and its control and use the mark of the strength of the connection to Truth...
Ruminations II
Posted on February 02, 2009Vienna is a city of many profound insights. One of the greatest is expressed in its architecture. As the Empire for which it served as a capital expanded abroad and rotted within in the 19th century, the architectural expression of that outward form of the state reached an apogee of grandeur that continues to draw tourists from all over the world...
Ruminations I
Posted on February 01, 2009All conduct is now moral, in the sense that it is measured and judged. The new moral conduct is the outward expression of an inner fear--of exposure, of being recorded, observed, of the fear of the consequences of being caught failing to confess, to report to expose oneself...
State Owned Enterprises and Sovereign Investment in Foreign Economic Entities
Posted on January 28, 2009Much attention has recently been devoted to the rise of sovereign wealth funds. These entities present great difficulties in the application of current legal frameworks because they straddle the traditional divide between public and private law, between states as market regulators and market participants...
Smart Power and Soft War: Egypt Versus Syria and Qatar in Gaza
Posted on January 27, 2009I have written of the great change in American approaches to the management of the its role in the world on the ascendancy of the administration of President Obama. I have suggested how the many aspects of liberal internationalism touched on in that speech suggest great possibilities for advancing an American agenda...
Embracing Networked Managerialism in the Service of a Global (American) Power
Posted on January 26, 2009The American periodical Foreign Affairs recently congratulated itself for its role in serving as midwife to what appears to be the political line to be taken by the incoming Secretary of State, Mrs. H.R. Clinton. The Origins of Clinton's Soft Power, Foreign Affairs Newsletter, Jan...
Democracy Part XIV: ?For Now We See Through A Glass, Darkly; But Then Face to Face?; On President Obama's Inauguration Speech
Posted on January 21, 2009The Christian Bible?s New Testament remains a powerful source of guidance in times of trouble in the United States. Recourse to its insights, molded to the tastes of the speaker, have been a hallmark of political speech since the founding of the Republic, especially on the cusp of revolutionary times...
Glimmerings of Rule of Law Through the Party Apparatus in Cuba: Raul Castro Speaks
Posted on January 18, 2009I have been suggesting that it might be possible to construct a legitimately constitutionalist state grounded in single party governance. Backer, Larry Catá, The Party as Polity, the Communist Party, and the Chinese Constitutional State: A Theory of State-Party Constitutionalism (January 10, 2009), Journal of Chinese and Comparative Law, Vol...
Employees, the Enterprise and the State: Professor Mary Kreiner Ramirez on Whistleblower Protection
Posted on January 14, 2009Professor Mary Kreiner Ramirez of Washburn University Law School has published an article well worth reading, "Blowing the Whistle on Whistleblower Protection: A Tale of Reform," 76:1 University of Cincinnati Law Review 183 (2007).Professor Ramirez has taken on a difficult problem in Blowing the Whistle, harmonizing the objectives of general framework legislation with the distinct imperatives of the specific regulatory contexts in which such a framework must be effectively implemented...
Global Economic Collapse and the Search for Sources of Values in Economic Theory: The Role of Religion, a Catholic Perspective
Posted on January 07, 2009The following paper was presented on January 7, 2009 at the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting at the extended section program hosted by the Section on Socio-Economics in a Panel entitled: Socio-Economics and Faith in a Higher Power. The mwwting was held in San Diego, California...
Journalism and Self Referencing Systems
Posted on January 05, 2009There is nothing like reading a good screed to get one thinking along different lines. One of the more bracing modern extended tirades I have run across is William Gaddis, Agapê Agape (New York: Penguin Books, 2002). The work is an extended tirade on the contradictions between the few and the many, the elite and the mob, the production of culture and its mechanical reproduction, and the hierarchy of those binaries...
On the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution
Posted on January 01, 2009It has been half a century since the present government of the Cuban Republic was established. That half century has seen great changes on the Island. It has also seen perhaps even greater changes in the United States, that turned from a de facto controller to an enemy of the regime, and which provided a safe haven for a vibrant segment of Cubans in a new land--from which they continue to prosper...
Fear: A Look Forward to 2009
Posted on December 31, 2008In this final day of 2008, Friedrich Nietzsche provides the thought for the day, and a reminder of the ambiguities that may plague the year to come:"In the last analysis, 'love of the neighbor' is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary-illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor...
Guest Essay: Jason Buhi on Sovereign Wealth Funds
Posted on December 28, 2008My former student, Jason Buhi, has recently written an excellent and provocative working paper on Sovereign Wealth Funds. He will be publishing the final version of the essay soon.Mr. Buhi graduated from Penn State Law School in 2006, and received an LL...
From Pedophiles to Retail Securities Con Men: On the Pathologies of Criminality and its Relation to the Public Policy of Legal Responses
Posted on December 24, 2008Over the course of the last century, the movement to conflate criminality and pathology?to construct categories of mental illness and then to use that construction as a basis of controlling anti-social behavior beyond the criminal law, has continued to gain strength...
Neither Here nor There?Islamist or Transnational Constitutionalism in Pakistan and Egypt
Posted on December 22, 2008div style="text-align: justify;"I have suggested that constitutionalism, as a legal and political subject can be understood as a world view. (Backer 2009). That world view produces an ideology that can be divided into five parts: br /blockquoteConstitutionalism is: (1) a system of classification, (2) the core object of which is to define the characteristics of constitutions (those documents organizing political power within an institutional apparatus), (3) to be used to determine the legitimacy of the constitutional system as conceived or as implemented, (4) based on rule of law as the fundamental postulate of government (that government be established and operated in a way that limits the ability of individuals to use government power for personal welfare maximizing ends), and (5) grounded on a metric of substantive values derived from a source beyond the control of any individual...
The Party as Polity, The Communist Party and the Chinese Constitutional State: A Theory of Party-State Constitutionalism
Posted on December 11, 2008What follows is a working draft of the paper I presented as part of the panel, "Constitutionalism in China (Practice) (II)" held as part of the excellent conference, "Constitutionalism in China in the Past 100 Years and Its Future," sponsored by the Centre for Chinese and Comparative Law (RCCL) School of Law, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, and its director Dr...
Castro on Obama: Class and Intellectual Allegiances Trump Race
Posted on December 09, 2008One used to speak of President Bush as a "teflon" president--a man against which little scandal attached. President elect Obama appears to have inherited a similar quality, especially among his natural critics in places like Cuba. One gets a great sense of both the reticence of forwign leaders to criticize the incoming President and also the dismay at what they see as a return not to "change" but pre-Bush business as usual, in the recent quirte disappointed but restrained reaction of the former Cuban President to the announcement of Mr...
Scientific Development (?????) and Deepening CCP Governance at the Local Level--The Challenge
Posted on December 06, 2008I have previously discussed the importance of so-called ideological campaigns to the development of Chinese political norms. See Larry Catá Backer, The Rule of Law, the Chinese Communist Party, and Ideological Campaigns: Sange Daibiao (the 'Three Represents'), Socialist Rule of Law, and Modern Chinese Constitutionalism...
Theatre of the Absurd: The "Blockade" of Gaza
Posted on December 04, 2008Much has been made of blockades in recent years. Sometimes they are viewed as valuable efforts in the service of some worthy cause that brings about change--the isolation of apartheid South Africa is a case in point. Sometimes, and especially in highly contested political battles, where there is no consensus, blockades are viewed as less positive...
Mumbai Massacre: Parsis, Jews and the Rise of Warfare for the Masses
Posted on November 27, 2008People complain about the religious intolerance of the West. And in particular they point to the rising Islamophobia of Western culture. And they are right to worry about such mindlessness in the development of cultural attitudes and the conduct of overt and covert political activity...
A Post Colonial Spectacle: Carving Up Zimbabwe
Posted on November 25, 2008I like opera, especially European opera of the 18th through 20th centuries. There is nothing like it for its power to fuse distinctive musical forms within a theatrical experience in which all human proclivities are intensified and exaggerated to illuminate their reality, and its pathos...
A Constitutional Court for China Within the Chinese Communist Party: Scientific Development and the Institutional Role of the CCP
Posted on November 20, 2008There are great shifts in constitutional thinking taking place today in China among elite Chinese constitutional scholars. Among its elite constitutional law scholars, Ho Jintao's concept of scientific development (?????,) has taken a concrete turn in the advancement of theories of Chinese constitutionalism under its current normative framework...
Report From the National Feedlot: Looking at the U.S. Investments in Banks Under EESA 2008
Posted on November 18, 2008My research assistant, Sandra Gonzalez del Pilar prepared the following update on activity under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:The Troubled Asset Relief Program (?TARP?) originally contemplated under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (?EESA?) ?enacted into law on October 3, 2008- has mutated and will likely continue to morph...
Castro and the G-20 Meeting Remaking Global Finance--Betrayal or Socialization in the Culture of Power?
Posted on November 17, 2008<div style="text-align: justify;">There is nothing like a little betrayal to sharpen the mind. . .and the pen. So Fidel Castro, working diligently for over a year to prepare his allies, principally Lula of Brazil, to serve as the Cuban proxy at the G-20 meeting, has found that money and power (and the allure of admission to the highest levels of inter-governmental political community) can trump ideology...
Cuban Puritanism and American Internationalism on the Road to the Global Financial Estates General of 2008
Posted on November 11, 2008"On October 22, the White House announced that President Bush invited the heads of state of the Group of 20 (G20) to join him for a summit on November 15 to discuss the current global financial and economic crisis. The G20 includes 10 major emerging economies of the world?including Brazil, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa among others?along with the members of the G8, Australia and the European Union...
Brazil and the Washington Consensus
Posted on November 10, 2008Over the last several weeks, Brazil's leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has been lobbying critical actors in the financial regulatory arena for the upcoming international convocation of richer nations to discuss the world financial crisis. This week he has been to Italy...
Skunk: Israel Advances Non-Lethal Methods of Social Control, The Palestinian Government May be the First to Purchase It
Posted on November 08, 2008For years,the Israeli government has been criticized severely for the way it which it deals with both insurgency and protest. It has become something of a truism within the European media class and certain elements of European civil society that the Israeli's are always to be criticized in this respect...
The American Elections and the Perceptions of the Developing World, Part II: India's Jitters, Pakistan's Prize
Posted on November 07, 2008The American media, like its Western European cousins, would like to have us all believe that the entire world outside of Europe and the United States is not only ecstatic over the election of Mr. Obama to the American presidency, bit will now, like the proverbial lion and lamb, abandon their traditional and current agendas, even their aggressive ones, and play nice with the new American President whose skin color embraces the world...
Fidel Castro on the American Elections: Obama's Partiality and the Perceptions of the Developing World
Posted on November 04, 2008Sometimes the most trenchant analysis comes from unexpected sources. And so it may be for the American presidential election which is being held this day. As my election day contribution to this great republic, I draw on the perspective of an unusual source, but one whose knowledge of and fascinated antipathy for the American political system might provide more valuable insights, even if only perversely so, than the slew of media sycophants and "players" that tend to dominate the narcissistic and involved Western media...
Military Cooperation Beyond the West: China and India, and Pakistan Lurking
Posted on November 02, 2008I have written about the increasing confidence of the People's Liberation Army,and the willingness of the Chinese state to permit the PLA to project power well beyond the borders of the People's Republic. See Larry Catá Backer, China?s People?s Liberation Army at 80: Projecting Power and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Law at the End of the Day, August 1, 2007...
Guest Essay: Professor S. Beth Farmer on Competition Law
Posted on October 31, 2008My colleague, Professor S. Beth Farmer, has recently written an excellent and provocative essay on competition law. Professor Farmer has graciously permitted me to post the essay here. She will present this essay at an important competition law conference, the Korean Competition Law Association--International Conference, held in Seoul, Republic of Korea November 7, 2008...
China and Its African Problem: Anarchy, Natural Resources and the Congo
Posted on October 30, 2008China has spent the greater part of the last decade catching up. It has moved aggressively to develop its infrastructure, industry and economic and social institutions. China has begun to project its power abroad. And China has become a great consumer of resources...
Bank Bailout Ball: Using Federal TARP Funds for Acquisition Financing
Posted on October 26, 2008My reserarch assistant, Sandra Gonzalez del Pilar, has kindly provided a summary of the terms of the bank bailout portion of the federal government's efforts to control the effects fo the current financial crisis. After the enactment of EESA on October 3, 2008 the Bush administration?s implementation of the Troubled Asset Purchase Program (TARP) under EESA has taken a different approach...
A Mania for Pathology: The Science of Behavior and American Governance
Posted on October 25, 2008Every culture has its own orientation--that framework from which it understands the reality around it, and which serves as a basis for choices about the form of social organization that are constructed from out of it. For some, religion supplies the compass for navigating and organizing reality...
India Enacts a Limited Liability Partnership Bill and Soon a New Company Law in the Wake of a Likely Regulatory Turnaround in the Financial Sector
Posted on October 24, 2008The Indian Upper House of Parliament has enacted a much studied Limited Liability Partnership Bill (Bill No. CXI of 2006) 2008. The Bill, introduced in 2oo6 in the Rajya Sabha (Parliament of India) was referred to a parliamentary standing committee, whose report was issued last year...
Sovereign Wealth Funds and the Financial Crisis: Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Funds, India, and the Rising Private Power of Public Organizations
Posted on October 23, 2008We are all well aware of the current financial crisis--a very slow train wreck almost a decade in the making, ignored (and indeed encouraged) by certain elements of the private sector with the collusion of states and now burst well beyond the capacity of any state to contain it...
The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act in Its Own Words: Complexity, Confusion and Open Questions
Posted on October 15, 2008The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 has been enacted (Public Law No: 110-343 [GPO: Text, PDF]) . . .and in near record time. That, in itself is a wonder, given its girth and complexity. It is hard to believe that the Act represents the frenzied efforts of people in the Administration and Congress over the very short period of time that the economic crisis went from barely a mention to a media orchestrated climax...
Forbidden Cities
Posted on October 15, 2008This is a spin on an old tale: There is a certain trans-cultural element to architecture of a certain kind. There is certainly what appears to be a universal approach to an architecture to power. That architecture should serve as a lesson to those who tend to like to wield it...
A Short Philosophy of Teaching
Posted on October 08, 2008I was recently asked about my teaching philosophy. An excellent question. Here is a first attempt at an answer:Guide but not lead, suggest but not compel, challenge but not frustrate, inspire but not indoctrinate, ground in accepted wisdom but not inhibit from individual exploration, provide tools for a lifetime but not ignore the satisfaction of even the smallest steps in learning: these serve as the basic principles of my philosophy of teaching...
(Un?)Intended Regulatory Consequences of the Financial Crisis: Multinational Corporations and Sovereign Wealth Funds
Posted on October 05, 2008Anyone who does not want to see what is lofty in a man looks that much more keenly for what is low in him and mere foreground--and thus betrays himself.Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Walter Kaufmann, trans...
Does a Board of Directors Have a Fiduaciary Duty to Honor Contracts Greater than Its Duty to Its Shareholders
Posted on October 04, 2008The current financial crisis is likely to produce new law in a number of areas. One of the more interesting in these legal eddies may remake the understanding of fiduciary duty in the United States. That is certainly what might happen if Citigroup Inc...
Monkey See, Monkey Do: The European Union and the Financial Crisis
Posted on October 02, 2008As the United States lurches toward a "solution" to its financial crises, it merits a moment to remember that the crisis is beginning to affect Europe as well. Like the Americans, the Europeans appear prepared to throw money at the problem--that is to throw money at those responsible for the problem, in the hoes that they might fill the rest of us with the confidence to forget and forgive the incompetence and miscalculation of those who helped bring this crisis about...
The Financial Crisis--Boom Days for the Market for Academic Theorizing
Posted on September 25, 2008The present financial crisis has gotten everyone energized--from the political, to the media to the economic sectors--everyone seems to believe that this is the point of instability in which might be seized for advantage at home or abroad. Academics too sense the upside potential of participating in this market...
Jiyo to Hanei no Ko: Japan's New Prime Minister Taro Aso
Posted on September 24, 2008The conservative turn in Japanese politics continues unabated. In a mockery of the American obsession with youth, and the American media's criticism of one of the current crop of presidential contenders for having survived to seventy two, sixty eight year old Taro Aso was elevated to the post of Prime Minister of Japan...
Corporate Global Citizenship
Posted on September 20, 2008I recently had the privilege of reading an advance copy of a working paper written by Grahame Thompson, to appear as a Copenhagen Business School Working Paper. The following are some observations generated from the insights developed in that paper.The convergence of public and private law has emerged as one of the great legal issues of the 21st century...
From Cuba to the United States: Santería and the Construction of Religious Liberty in the United States, the Untold Story
Posted on September 16, 2008This is the untold story of the way in which the religion of Cuban slaves, forged within the crucible of Spanish intiolerance and cultural marginalization in the homeland, played a critical role in the evolution of the protection of religious liberty in the United States...
AIG and American Corporatist Socialism
Posted on September 16, 2008By now the dust has settled on the "salvation" of the corporation American International Group, AIG, the multinational insurance giant through the last minute intervention of the American government, which generously opened its coffers for the benefit of this private multinational entity...
"¡Váyanse al carajo, yanquis de mierda": ALBA Grows, Free Trade Reactionism and American Ideological Politics Beyond Globalization
Posted on September 12, 2008ALBA, the command economy alternative to the free trade model of globalization, has acquired a new member--Honduras. According to the Cuban press, "The ALBA (Spanish acronyms meaning DAWN) was launched by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and supported by Cuba as an alternative to the failed US-led Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)...
Democracy Part XV: In Which Elections Serve as a Prelude to Carving Power in Democractic States
Posted on September 08, 2008Elections in some democratic states appear to be a prelude to real political change than its marker. In some states, elections are meant to substitute or amplify the para military campaigns among and between political followers that tend to serve as the real field on which elections are determined...
Brazil, China, Sugar, Ethanol and Politics
Posted on September 04, 2008It is with some interest that I note the recent trade mission sent by Brazil to China. The mission was potentially important enough to earn a notice by petroleum interests. See China wants Brazilian technology in ethanol, Brazil-Arab News Agency, July 8, 2008 (Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum)...
Democracy Part XIV: Of Political Corpses and Global Vampires
Posted on September 02, 2008Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has described his Georgian counterpart as a "political corpse", saying Moscow does not recognise him as president. "President Saakashvili no longer exists in our eyes. He is a political corpse," he told Italy's Rai television...
Russia and the New Medievalism in the International Law of States
Posted on September 01, 2008A short reverie on Labor Day on the labor of nations:Today we are informed that "European Union leaders have agreed to suspend talks on a new partnership agreement with Moscow until Russian troops have withdrawn from Georgia." EU Suspend Talks on Russia Pact, BBC News Online, September 1, 2008...
End and Goal: On Reports of Corruption in China From a Domestic and Foreign Perspective
Posted on August 28, 2008Corruption is a terrible thing. It is inefficient. At its core it represents a personal diversion of wealth from the principals of the state (its citizens) to individuals (those who are the beneficiaries of corruption). It serves as a fraud and a misuse of power...
Sovereign Wealth Funds: A Smattering of Opinions that Count But Perhaps Ought Not
Posted on August 22, 2008I have suggested that Sovereign wealth Funds represent a critical nexus point for the convergence of public and private law. Larry Catá Backer, The Private Law of Public Law: Public Authorities as Shareholders, Golden Shares, Sovereign Wealth Funds, and the Public Law Element in Private Choice of Law...
International Law or Principles of Convenience--On the Transfer of Control of Bakassi to the Cameroons
Posted on August 14, 2008Western international law theorists make of the notion that the world has moved beyond ethnos as an ordering principle of the constitution of nation states. Since the disastrous flirting with the concept in 19th and early 20th century Europe, the idea that for every ethnos there must be a state has given way to a pluralistic view of demos (embracing the inhabitants of a state with political rights) based on the privileging of values and characteristics of membership in a polity...
On the Cuban View of the Russian Invasion of Ossetia/Georgia
Posted on August 11, 2008XII En el bote iba remando Por el lago seductor, Con el sol que era oro puro Y en el alma más de un sol. Y a mis pies vi de repente, Ofendido del hedor Un pez muerto, un pez hediondo En el bote remadorJosé Martí Versos Sencillos (1891)...
On the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies: A Contrast in Self Image
Posted on August 08, 2008The opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, was set for a most propitious time in Chinese numerology (8-8-08). See Olympic Number Symbolism: Eights Across the Boards, Britannica Blog August 8, 2008. It was certainly beautiful and impressive. See Beijing Games Opening Ceremonies, Sports Illustrated, Aug...
Cuba and the Development of Odious Debt Doctrine
Posted on August 07, 2008It was my pleasure to present the following paper at the recently concluded 18th Annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) held August 5-7 in Miami, Florida. My thanks to the organizers and the conference participants for their comments and observations...
Institutionalizing Politics: Neutrality and Choice in the Construction of Public and Private International Legal Regimes.
Posted on August 02, 2008The current debate over the relationship of ?politics? and international law hearkens back to the more fundamental question posed by Marxian theory and investigated by critical legal theory about the extent to which legal systems organized around particular political interests can come to transcend their limitations for the benefit of the wider polis...
Merlin's Prophesy: Egypt's Copts
Posted on July 31, 2008Merlin's ProphesyThe harvest shall flourish in wintry weatherWhen two virginities meet together:The King & the Priest must be tied in a tetherBefore two virgins can meet together.William Blake, "Merlin's Prophesy," from Poems from the Rosetti MS, in William Blake, The Works of William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose 61 (Roslyn, New York: Black's Readers Service Company 1953)...
Paraguay's New President and Ex-Bishop: Reform, Religion, and Constitution
Posted on July 30, 2008It was reported today that the Holy See has "concedeu a redução ao estado laical ao presidente eleito do Paraguai, o ex-bispo Fernando Lugo, anunciou nesta quarta-feira (30) em Assunção, o núncio apostólico, Orlando Antonini." Santa Sé concede estado laical ao presidente eleito do Paraguai, O Globo July 30, 2008 (the Papal Nuncio Orlando Antonini announced today in Asunción that the Holy See has agreed to reduce to lay status Paraguay's President elect, the former Bishop Fernando Lugo)...
Emerging Trends in the Convergence of Public and Private Law
Posted on July 30, 2008Emerging Trends in the Convergence of Public and Private Law: Sovereign Wealth Funds, the Regulation of Sovereign Golden Shares, and the Regulation of Multinational CorporationsNotes of Address Given at the Istanbul Chamber of Industry Istanbul, TurkeyJune 24, 2008Special thanks to my hosts for the event at the Istanbul Chamber of Industry: Mete Meleksoy, its Genel Sekreter, the law firm of Çaga & Çaga (and especially Av...
On the Convergence of State and Corporation in a Post Marxist-Leninist World: The Russian State Corporation
Posted on July 30, 2008My colleague William E. Butler has produced an excellent short examination of what he describes as a "remarkable step taken by the Russian Federation of endowing an individual state corporation with various powers in treaty making, including the right to conclude treaties with foreign states or their departments...
Theocratic Constitutionalism Part IV: Religious Constitutions, Theocratic Constitutionalism, an Application of Theory to Reality
Posted on July 24, 2008Coming soon. . . stay tuned.
Theocratic Constitutionalism Part III: Towards a Theocratic Constitutonalism
Posted on July 23, 2008Stayed tuned. . . coming soon.
Theocratic Constitutionalism Part II: From Constitution to Constitutionalism
Posted on July 22, 2008Will be posted soon, stay tuned!
Theocratic Constitutionalism: Part I, An Introduction
Posted on July 20, 2008I have been exploring the nature and character of theocratic constitutionalism. A fuller examination will appear in published form as Larry Catá Backer, Theocratic Constitutionalism: An Introduction to a New Legal Global Order, 16:1 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies ? (forthcoming 2009)...
Creeping Toward Theocracy Without Constitutionalism in Indonesia: Using the State to Suppress Competitor Religions
Posted on July 07, 2008Once upon a time, the state had, among its many duties, the suppression of heretical sects and the policing of the good behavior of tolerated religions. In 1500 Europe, for example , monarchs were expected to serve as the secular enforcers of the religious orthodoxy of the one true and only version of Christianity...
Happy Birthday: A Reverie on the Road from the American to the Kosovo Declaration of Independence
Posted on July 04, 2008As is customary on July 4th, Americans dutifully pay lip service to their Declaration of Independence (Declaration of Independence (The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America) (July 4, 1776)), a document crafted by the lawyers of colonial bourgeois elites and served on their betters in London...
Democracy Part XI: Mass Democracy and the Dynamics of the Market for Corporate Control
Posted on June 30, 2008Individuals as political participants are really only good for one thing, that is they serve one purpose extremely well--voting. That is their principle connection with the mechanics of state organization. Groups, on the other hand, are good for governance...
Democracy Part XIII: Anwar Ibrahim Flees Malaysia's Democracy
Posted on June 29, 2008Democracy is flourishing in Malaysia lately. After returning in triumph following a vindication on the charges of sexual corruption, Anwar Ibrahim and his political allies appeared poised to become a potent force in Malaysia--perhaps even strong enough to overturn the politics of preference and strong arming that had marked Malaysia throughout the term of his predecessor and former mentor Mahatir Muhamed...
Democracry Part XII: On Sham Democracies
Posted on June 27, 2008The issue of democratic legitimacy has been much on people's minds over the last century. Once again, the global governance community--that is, those elements of public and civil society given legitimacy by media coverage in the press, television and the internet by institutional news organs--s worried about the proliferation of "sham" democracies and the preservation of legitimate democracy...
The Male Female in Albania and Other Tales of Gender
Posted on June 23, 2008Like many others, I have suggested that gender and sex are not the same thing. My focus has been on the ways in which attributes are gendered, and those gender divisions strictly maintained. More importantly, tose divisions not only serve to discipline the attributes or characteristics of biological sex, but serves to naturalize those gender attributions...
The EU Lifts Sanctions Against Cuba: Implicit Recognition for the Legitimacy of the Raúl Castro Regime; The US is Left Out in the Cold
Posted on June 20, 2008The EU today announced that it was lifting sanctions against Cuba. While the practical effects may be enough to notice--the symbolic effects are far greater. The object is to bolster the regime of Raúl Castro while at the same time using this critical passage before the new regime becomes entrenched to flex what muscle the EU has...
Democracy Part X: In Which Vote Counting is Merely a Factor in the Production of Governance
Posted on June 18, 2008I have written much recently about the foibles of democracy as expressed in its 21st century form. I have been impressed by the way in which, as Aristotle suggested millenia ago, republics can so easily transform into democracies that degenerate into something else--something less laudable...
MERCOSUR: It's Alive!
Posted on June 17, 2008Regional trade associations are all the rage. Most states belong to at least one. They are meant to suggest an outward looking and progressive approach to trade in the current context of market oriented globalized economic activity. But appearances can be deceiving...
Politics and the Irish Vote on the Treaty of Lisbon: A Silly Politics to Bad Effect
Posted on June 13, 2008So, the Irish have voted to approve the Lisbon Treaty, which essentially imposes the terms of the failed Constitutional Treaty of 2004 in the form of an intergovernmental agreement striped of the word "constitution." The vote was required by the Irish constitution, and necessary for the effectiveness of Treaty of Kisbon, which required approval by all Member States...
Blogging and Voluntary Codes: A View From the E.U.
Posted on June 10, 2008There has been a certain uneasiness with blogs for a long time. Especially among governments increasingly used to asserting control over every facet of life, blogs appear a disorderly and there a potentially dangerous area of unregulated life. And the answer has to be regulation of some sort...
Ainu to be Granted Indigenous Status in Japan
Posted on June 08, 2008The recently passed United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has contributed to a variety of activity since its passage in September. For some states, the Declaration has proven to be a means to reaffirm the indigenous character of the naitonla population,...
Sovereign Wealth Funds And Hungry States: Adjusting the Borders of Public and Sovereign Activity Across Borders
Posted on June 06, 2008It is always refreshing to see what hunger, or the fear of hunger, does. Not only to people--the effect is well enough explained in thousands of years of literature; much more interesting is the consequences of a fear of recession within the company of rich, bloated developed states...
Constitutional Crisis in Turkey
Posted on June 05, 2008The Turkish Constitutional Court has held that the law, passed by the governing religious party--the AK Party (the darling of the United States and the EU)--that would ease the ban on the wearing by women of Muslim head scarves violated the secular principles built into the Turkish constitution...
Theocratic Constitutionalism: Buddhist Constitutionalism in Sri Lanka
Posted on June 01, 2008The 20th century has seen a fundamental shift in the ways in which constitutions are understood. Moving away from the idea that constitutions were merely internal expressions of social choices, however odious, by the middle of the 20th century there emerged the notion, articulated first successfully in the German and Japanese post War constitutions, that not all constitutions were legitimate, and that legitimate constitutions shared a number of common characteristics...
The KMT Returns to China
Posted on May 31, 2008Kuomintang (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung has been visiting Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party has ensured that such a gesture be rewarded. Hu Jintao met with the KMT Chairman in a lavishly staged photo-op session. The CCP organ reported "Hu Jintao (R), General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, shakes hands with Kuomintang (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, on May 28, 2008...
State Subsidies and the Character of the Market Transactions of Sovereigns: The Case of EADS
Posted on May 29, 2008The twin pillars of emerging European regulation of the participatory (rather than the regulatory) activities of state sovereigns in economic markets are the jurisprudence of free movement of capital provisions of the European Community Treaty (Art. 56 EC) and the regulation of state subsidies to business under the Competition provisions of the European Community Treat (Art...
Fiduciary Duty for Directors in Canada--From Shareholders to Debt and Equity Holders?
Posted on May 28, 2008Traditionally, at least in common law countries, corporate boards of directors owed a single minded fiduciary duty to its shareholders. Actually, more like a triple duty of care, loyalty and (sometimes) disclosure. At times the courts phrased that duty as one owing to the corporation...
Human Dignity and Fundamental Value Systems in the International System, A Comment on Jan Smits, Human Dignity and Uniform Law
Posted on May 25, 2008Michel Foucault, in explaining his notions of archeology famously described the framework of knowledge in two forms, as savoir (underlying knowledge) and as connaissance (formalized or formulated knowledge). In a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores?all refer to a certain implicit knowledge (savoir) special to this society...
Brazil Builds a Sovereign Wealth Fund and Norway Flexes Its Muscles: Private Participation in the Market or Regulation by Other Means
Posted on May 24, 2008There was a time when states minded their own business. They tended to act through formal lawmaking (regulatory) authority?either in the form of positive law or through the imposition of customary law through judicial systems designed for that very purpose...
On Israel's 60th Anniversary of Statehood: Views From the Empire and the Caliphate
Posted on May 16, 2008Sometimes, when reviewing the mountain of talk about the situation in that portion of the euphemistically described "Middle East" (understood to encompass that portion of what had been the dar al-Islam whose control has reverted to the people of Israel), one gets the sense of a certain deja vu...
ETA and the Management of Revolution in a Bureaucratic World
Posted on May 14, 2008Modern revolutionary movements--whether separatist movements like those in Sri Lanka, Kosovo or Tibet, irredentist movements like those in Ireland, political movements like those in the Philippines, or ethnic/religious/colonialist movements like those in Iraq--have shifted in tactics to suit the conflict management model of international relations in vogue today...
Neo Colonialism in Civil Society Clothing or the Rise of Human Dignity as the First Supra National Principle of Internaitonal Law?
Posted on May 13, 2008As the Burmese government continues to keep its borders tightly closed, the international community has increased the tempo and volume of its call for an intervention in Burma. U.N. Calls for Burma Aid Corridor, BBC News Online, May 13, 2008. I have already suggested the way in which these calls for intervention without consent on the basis of a relatively new and potentially powerful international principle of "responsibility to protect" will begin to further shift the distribution of power between states and the "collective of states" currently operating within the United Nations framework...
Manging the Warfare of the Oppressed--Containing the Exuberence of Darfur Warriors
Posted on May 11, 2008I have written of the current turn in a certain turn of international relations and law--one grounded in a managerial approach to difference and conflict. See Larry Catá Backer, The Devil?s Advocate: The West, the Invincible Guerrilla, the Value of Violence and the Rise of a Management Model of War, Law at the End of the Day, August 7, 2006...
Disaster in Burma: Bad Government Response, Worse Resort to International Law
Posted on May 07, 2008The Burmese disaster has grown from small to staggering. The recent cyclone has caused a tremendous amount of damage. Like all such natural disasters, the Burmese cyclone serves as a harbingers of additional, man made, disasters. I will mention two...
An Apartheid for All Seasons: Bolivia and its Autonomy Movements
Posted on May 03, 2008Almost 2,500 years ago Thucydides reminded us, in describing a bitter intra-ethnic way among the Greeks, that even the most powerful and evocative political terms, could be so stretched and distorted as to lose all meaning."Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals...
The Panopticon in Space: Holland and the Domestic Spy Eye in the Sky
Posted on April 29, 2008It was only a matter of time before technology brought the oppressive hunger for control of many states--especially democratic states--a new toy. As I have suggested in a longer work, Larry Catá Backer, Global Panopticism: States, Corporations and the Governance Effects of Monitoring Regimes, 15 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies -- (forthcoming 2007), states are moving toward systems of regulation not through law but with surveillance...
Soft Islam in Egypt: Does the Testimony of Two Women Equal that of a Man and Other Questions
Posted on April 27, 2008Al Ahram ran an interesting story recently on movement within Shari'a in Egypt. Reem Leila, In Her Favour, Al Ahram Weekly, May 1-7, 2008. The report provides a window not only on the way that even Shari'a modulates in the face of changes in popular thought, but also reveals the constraints of the language employed in the service of change...
The Irony of Press Freedom in Malaysia: Anwar Ibrahim Buys a Newspaper
Posted on April 20, 2008In many places, press freedom is assured by strictly separating press ownership from the political elites. An independent press is said to provide that objectivity that ensures the presentation of a variety of views. When the press is controlled by the state--or by the principal political actors within a system of government--the information provided is said to be less useful to readers...
Ecce Homo: Reflections of Benedict XVI's Careful Comments to the United Nations
Posted on April 19, 2008In hope we were saved (spe salvi facti sumus) (Rom 8:24)). So Benedict XVI chose to begin an encyclical delivered on November 30, 2007. Benedict XVI, Encyclical, Spe Salvi, Nov. 30, 2007. I was reminded of a critical portion of that encyclical on the occasion of Benedict XVI's address to th United Nations...
¡Qué difícil es ser breve en la batalla de ideas!
Posted on April 17, 2008Castro is worried. The pace of Sinification might be accelerating. People are talking--that is, people that count are talking. That is people who are read by the Cuban elite are talking. And what they appear to be talking about are those fundamental changes to the character of the Cuban revolution that, while it may not satisfy the right wing of the Miami Cuban community, will drive the Stalinist wing of the Cuban establishment mad...
Has Fidel Castro Taken a Turn for the Worse?
Posted on April 10, 2008Fidel Castro's last column, appearing online in what is the closest thing to a blog since his illness, Reflections of the Commander in Chief, last appeared on February 22, 2008. See Fidel Castro Ruz, Reflections By Comrade Fidel Who Wants To Be In The Garbage Dump?, Feb...
"Fitna" and the Muslim Mind in Egypt, A Remembrance of Things Past
Posted on April 06, 2008As one might expect nowadays, the reaction within the dar al Islam to the distribution of that questionable little film, "Fitna" was hysterical. In the West there was fear. The official site of the film http://fitnathemovie.com was blocked by Network solutions, the site host, who posted this notice: "This site has been suspended while Network Solutions is investigating whether the site's content is in violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy...
Extraterritoriality and Corporate Social Responsibility: Governing Corporations, Governing Developing States.
Posted on March 27, 2008Describing the current direction of norm making for multinational corporations, John Ruggie recently noted, ?[t]he state-based system of global governance has struggled for more than a generation to adjust to the expanding reach and growing influence of transnational corporations...
Sex and Politics--America's "Jerry Springer" Moment
Posted on March 25, 2008"This is my Jerry Springer moment. I don't want this moment to die." (This is My Jerry Springer Moment, Jerry Springer, The Opera, Act. 1, No. 14 ). So goes politics in the United States. The American public reveled in its political bathos recently with the sexual voyeurism among the political classes in New York...
Redefining Market Failures: Bear Stearns and the Class Element in Market Discipline
Posted on March 15, 2008We have been told that " The Federal Reserve took the extraordinary step yesterday of providing emergency funding to one of Wall Street's venerable firms, Bear Stearns, after it ran out of cash to repay its lenders." Neil Irwin and Tomoeh Murakami Tse, Fred Comes to the Rescue as Wall Street Giant Slips, The Washington Post...
Kosovo: A Threat to China and Russia; a Great Benefit to Israel
Posted on March 14, 2008The impending independence of Kosovo has produced both elation and consternation. This event provides a window on the difficulties and opportunities of that set of great movements that had their origins in the anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements of Central Europe and Latin America in the 19th century...
The End of Golden Shares in the EU: The EU Commission Takes a Step in its Abolition, It Ought to Harmonize the Rules of Sovereign Investments
Posted on March 09, 2008The European Commission has at last made explicit, what the European Court of Justice has been suggesting implicitly since it began to consider the issue in 2002?the Member States of the E.U. no longer have the capacity to invest in or restrict the investment in it own domestic corporations...
Abdullah Badawi, Anwar Ibrahim and the Politics of Race , Ethnicity and Affirmatice Action in Malaysia
Posted on March 09, 2008People, especially people in the developing world, like to point to the state of race and ethnic relations in the United States as symbolic of the evils of a subordinating race or ethnic privileging culture. Those systems of subordination, of social constructions of race and ethnic hierarchy, people believe, are at the root of flawed legal systems, and through them, of flawed approached to international law and governance...
Cuba and Brazil Part IV: Bringing Lula Into the Cuban Orbit; Bringing Cuba Into the Brazilian Orbit?
Posted on March 07, 2008We have been considering the multi part efforts by Castro to woo the Brazilian President Lula. That effort ends now with this fourth part. The first of the essays provided the set up for the discussion, establishing to deep-rooted commonalities binding Brazil and Cuba, Castro and Lula...
Venezuela-Columbia-Ecuador: A Melodrama for International Law
Posted on March 04, 2008My favorite part of the book Animal Farm is the last section, when the pigs all join in a pleasant meal in the farmhouse they now call their own. To those watching from outside, there appears to be little difference between the pigs and the humans they succeeded...
On Seeking Closer Relations With Brazil--Must Cuba Choose Between China and Brazil?
Posted on March 02, 2008One of my students at Tulane, Jacob Welch, had some insightful comments about my suggestion that Cuba was seeking to establish stronger relationships with Brazil. He was unconvinced that there was much benefit to Cuba cozying up to Brazil, especially if that occurred to the detriment of Cuba?s relationship with China...
On the Micro Economics of Efficiency: Suicide in India and the Politics Amelioration
Posted on February 29, 2008One of the great things about democracy is its responsiveness to crisis. Unfortunately, the motivating crisis tends to center on the re-election of a government. Likewise, the greatest benefit of free (more or less) markets, are the long term aggregate wealth maximization that serves as its (aggregate) social reward...
Cuba and Brazil Part III: Cuba and Brazil in Parallel Strokes
Posted on February 24, 2008We have been considering the multi part efforts by Castro to woo the Brazilian President Lula. That effort now stretches to four parts. The first of the essays provided the set up for the discussion, establishing to deep-rooted commonalities binding Brazil and Cuba, Castro and Lula...
Georgia State University Hosts International Conference on the Future of Legal Education
Posted on February 22, 2008The Georgia State University College of Law has just hosted an excellent conference: an International Conference on the Future of Legal Education, February 20 - 23, 2008.This conference, a major event in the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the GSU College of Law, will take as its point of departure a highly critical report on American legal education recently issued by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: Educating Lawyers...
Fidel Castro Steps Down: On the Importance of Gesture and Opportunities for Friends and Foes
Posted on February 19, 2008Fidel Castro announced that he would no longer seek to serve his country in an official capacity, as President of the Cuban Republic. In delivered remarks he declared his retirement. The physical demands of the job were too much for him, given the present state of his health...
The Private Law of Public Law: Public Authorities as Shareholders, Golden Shares, Sovereign Wealth Funds, and the Public Law Element in Private Choic
Posted on February 13, 2008I recently participated in an excellent conference hosted by Ralf Michaels. The conference was entitled The New European Choice-of-Law Revolution: Lessons for the United States? and was held at the Duke University Law School on February 9, 2008. Download Conference PosterI served on the panel on Corporate Law, and presented the following talk, which will serve as the introduction to the longer paper that will follow...
Alternativa Bolivariana Para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA): A Summary of the 6th Summit of Member States
Posted on February 11, 2008My research assistant at Penn State, Augusto I. Molina Ramon (Penn State Law 2009), has helped prepare the following summary of the events at the just concluded 6th summit of ALBA that concluded January 27, 2008. The summary provided in the Boletin ALBA No...
Cuba and Brazil Part II: Castro Continues His Wooing of Lula
Posted on February 10, 2008In his January essay series, Fidel Castro focused on Cuba?s connections with Brazil and Castro?s personal connection with that prodigal son of Marxist-Leninist determinism?Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current President to Brazil. Written in three parts, the first part served as a set up of sorts...
A Critical Reading of the Carnegie Foundation's Study of Legal Education: "Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law"
Posted on February 06, 2008Over a century ago influential members of the public began to worry about the social order. In the face of large numbers of immigrants with no cultural connection to English social and political values (Morton 1984; Condliffe Langemann 1992), and significant class distinctions arising as a consequence of the great revolution in American business and industry (Mink 1986), all sorts of groups arose to help ?fix? the problems that might have been viewed as threatening the Republic...
The Church of England Speaks to the Relationship Between Law and Religion
Posted on February 04, 2008The Church of England has been quite restive of late. For a long time a sleepy place, theologically speaking, it wore like an old shoe. No more it seems. The Church of England has become a much more interesting site of development of notions about law , religion and the state...
From Moral Obligation to International Law: Disclosure Systems, Markets and the Regulation of Multinational Corporations
Posted on January 31, 2008The following paper, still in rough form, will be presented at the upcoming Symposium sponsored by the Georgetown Journal of International Law, Global Responsibility: Myth or Reality, to be held at Georgetown University Law School on Feb. 5, 2008:The topic of the 2008 Georgetown International Law Journal?s symposium is how international law can influence international business to work toward ?public? goals, for example reducing corruption and protecting the environment, when entering into international transactions...
The Holocaust in the Sambadrome: On the Protection of History and the Law
Posted on January 31, 2008The media carried a story about a case decided on the eve of the annual Carnival celebration in Rio de Janeiro, See Rio Judge Bans Float on Holocaust, BBC Online, Feb. 1, 2008. The case involved the creation of a holocaust themed float (click here for picture as posted on the BBC site); Pedro Fonseca, Judge Bans Holocaust-Themed Carnival Floats, The Washington Post, Jan 31, 2008...
Democracy Part IX: Participation and Ethnic Rifts in Kenya
Posted on January 28, 2008It is always amusing to be reminded of race hierarchies--especially when presented by an institution self consciously dedicated to a never ending proof that it is beyond such the internalization of such racialized systems of dominance and subordination, civilization and barbarity...
Cuba and Brazil, Part I: Castro Lectures Lula da Silva
Posted on January 26, 2008The relationship between Cuba and Brazil has always been close. The two nations do not share a language, but in many ways are more culturally compatible than they are with other states in Latin America. Brazil has become, in many ways, the engine of Latin America...
Symposium Introduction: Reifying Law--Rule of Law, Government, the State and Transnational Governance
Posted on January 21, 2008What follows is an introduction to a Symposium to be published by the Penn State International Law Review (Vol. 25). The contributions to the symposium include the following papers:Larry Catá Backer, Reifying Law: Understanding Law Beyond the State, 25 PENN STATE INTERNATIONAL LAW REVIEW ? (forthcoming 2007)...
Values Morality and the Regulation of Transnational Economic Activity
Posted on January 19, 2008The ethicist Randy Cohen, whose column appears weekly in the New York Times Magazine, recently wrote on the ethics of transborder economic transactions. Both the problem and the advice suggest the radical changes that have been occurring below the level of formal regulation in the development of ?community standards? for expected behavior amongst business enterprises...
On the Dynamism of American Political Culture
Posted on January 16, 2008Politics in 19th century America can be divided into two great epochs, separated by that great Second American Revolution, the American Civil War. The period ending with the Civil War began after the First American Revolution and the adoption of the federal Constitution in 1789...
Values Economics and Theology: The Contribution of Catholic Social Thought and its Implications for Legal Regulatory Systems
Posted on January 12, 2008At the Association of American Law Schools 2008 Annual Meeting, held this year in New York City, the Section on Socio-Economics presented its annual meeting program on Thursday, January 3, 2008 , co-Sponsored by the Sections on Jurisprudence, Minority Groups, Poverty Law, and Women in Legal Education...
Democracy Part VIII: Aristocratic Democracy and the Pakistan People's Party
Posted on December 30, 2007On of the great things about democracy, we are told, is how it opens the avenues of political power to all members of the polity. Unlike aristocracies, monarchies or dictatorships, democracy (in whatever form practices) permits any citizen to strive for the highest elective offices of the state apparatus...
Nehru Inverted: Building a Model for Theocratic Constitutionalism in India.
Posted on December 23, 2007People have sometimes looked to India as an example of the possibility of constructing a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious state from out of a collection of culturally related peoples. Europeans, in particular, have been looking to pluralist, multi-ethnic states, other than the United States, to overcome current objections to a European state based on the ?no demos? idea...
On Tony Blair's Conversion to Catholicism and the Religious Character of States
Posted on December 22, 2007It appears that Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and sometime representative of the Global elite in its perpetual management of the war between the People of Israel and Islam, has left the Anglican Church to embrace the religion of his wife and children--Roman Catholicism...
The Surveillace State: Monitoring as Regulation, Information as Power
Posted on December 21, 2007In many ways, the idea of the all powerful regulatory state has been passing into history. In its place is arising the monitoring state--a political organization whose functioning depends on its ability to observe, and through observation, manage the behavior of the community of its members, all of whom can be expected to behave because they have internalized the idea that they are constantly watched...
The Global Media and the Scripting of Fidel Castro's Exit
Posted on December 18, 2007It is a truism of sorts, that the media has been engaging more and more directly in the creation of a reality they can then report as news. Since the late 18th century in the West, the media has been as much an active creator of news as its reporter...
Markets in Infants: The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions, National Reform Efforts in Guatemala and Consumerism in the United States
Posted on December 11, 2007Everything has always been for sale in the global entrepots that serve the master classes of global society--whether they be Western matrons or high ranking members of a nomenclatura, or the scions of plantation cultures in search of new amusements. The difference between this and earlier ages, perhaps, is the ease with with such transactions may occur...
Democracy Part VII: Constitutionalism and Indigenous Peoples in the Bolivian Constitution
Posted on December 09, 2007Democracy has many fetish objects. I have suggested a number of them--elections (Democracy Part VI), voting (Democracy Part IV, Democracy Part II), factions (Democracy Part III), representation of the popular will (Democracy Part I) and public assembly and agitation (Democracy Part IV)...
On Freedom, the Individual, the Collective and the State: Gunnar Beck, Fitche and Kant on Freedom, Rights, and Law (2007)
Posted on December 08, 2007The great questions of any age in transition are ontological. Yet, such questions are generally lost amidst the large number of academic technicians who, even as the foundations of social organization shift?and shift dramatically?continue to work feverishly to fill in all of the details of a system quickly moving from vigor to decadence and ultimately to irrelevance...
Hadaka no Mochitsuki: On Ritual, Tradition, and Law
Posted on December 06, 2007The Asahi Shimbun reminded its English language readers of an important event that occurs on December 5 every year in Japan--Hadaka no Mochitsuki. Traditional 'Mochi' Makers Grin and Bare It, Asahi.com, Dec. 5, 2007.In a centuries-old ritual, young men hoist freshly made "mochi" to the ceiling of Sengenji temple in Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture, on Tuesday in gratitude for a good rice harvest...
Democracy Part VI: Elections, Representative Democracy and Hong Kong
Posted on December 02, 2007Full, free and direct elections. That is the essence of legitimate expressions of the political will of the masses. Its absence stokes the flames of arguments touching on "democratic deficits" (especially in Europe) and fueled the elitist political movements of the early part of the 20th century in the United States that eventually produced the 17th Amendment and the direct election of Senators (freeing them from the influence of machine--that is immigrant--driven local politics)...
Being a Part and Standing Apart: On the Culture of Law Faculties
Posted on November 26, 2007What follows is a message delivered to the members of the Section on Minority Groups, Association of American Law School's as part of the 2007 Section Newsletter. It might be of interest to those who like to think about the institutional aspects of academic life...
Democracy Part IV: Managing Popular Expression and the Democratic Impulse in Sudan
Posted on November 25, 2007Governance elites like to point to happy (unhappy and even indifferent) citizens voting as the essence of democratic organization. Larry Catá Backer, Democracy Part II, LAW AT THE END OF THE DAY, Nov. 16, 2007. And not just citizens of Anglo-European style democratic constitutional states...
Democracy, Part III: On Popular Participation in the Electoral Process in the United States
Posted on November 22, 2007CityArthur Rimbaud I am an ephemeral and a not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern, because all known taste has been avoided in the furnishings and the exterior of the houses, as well as in the lay out of the city. Here you would find no trace of any monument of superstition...
¿Por qué no te callas?
Posted on November 19, 2007In an exchange little noted outside the Spanish and Portuguese speaking Americas, Hugo Chavez and King Juan Carlos of Spain engaged in a dialog of sorts at the Latin American Summit held in Santiago de Chile during the second week of November 2007. As reported in the English press, during a speech at the Latin American SummitMr Chavez, the outspoken Left-wing leader who called President George W...
Democracy Part II: Voting Among the Unruly Masses
Posted on November 16, 2007The Mirror A hideous man enters and stares at his Reflection in the looking glass. ?Why do you look at yourself in the mirror, when your reflection never gives you any pleasure?? The hideous man replies: ?Sir, according to the immortal principles of 1789, all men have equal rights; therefore I have the right to look at myself; and whether with pleasure or with displeasure, concerns only my own feelings...
Democracy Part I: Democracy, Gesture and Power
Posted on November 11, 2007The world has seen a fair amount of democracy over the last eight years. President Bush made it a cornerstone of his foreign policy. "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world...
Announcing Book: Harmonizing Law in an Era of Globalization: Convergence, Divergence, Resistence
Posted on November 05, 2007I am happy to announce the publication of a collection of essays: Harmonizing Law in an Era of Globalization: Convergence, Divergence, Resistance, published by Carolina Academic Press. I include a short abstract and the opening materials of the book below...
The Treaty of Lisbon and E.U. Constitutionalism: Valery Giscard d'Estaing Makes a Good Point About Rule of Law and the Treaty of Lisbon
Posted on October 30, 2007One has to admire the English press in general, and the BBC, in particular. They have never lost the culture of aggressive objectivity in the service of a cause that was their hallmark from the Second World War. It is a shame that it is more difficult to get consensus on an enemies list in this conflicted age...
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