Academic

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, 2009
Western 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, 2009
There 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, 2009
Some 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, 2009
Law 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...

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ISO 26000: Working on a Common Global Language of Corporate Social Responsibility

Posted on August 21, 2009
A 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Ever 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
My 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
Outside 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
Over 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
Pablo 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, 2009
Nation 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, 2009
Recently 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
I 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...

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