Academic

Mae Kuykendall: "E-Marriage--Emerging Trends Meet the Law"; Panel Presentation at the 2011 AALS Annual Meeting

Posted on January 02, 2011
Every year for the last several years, the leadership of the Association of American Law Schools  solicits  panels for presentation on is judged to be sufficiently timely and important issues of general importance to merit special presentation...

The U.N. Guiding Principles: Participate in the Online Forum for the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General (SRSG) for business & human rights.

Posted on January 01, 2011
There is a great change coming to the regulation of business, especially as it touches on the effects of economic activities on human rights.  This change recognizes the extraordinary change in the fundamentals of governance that has been one of the unavoidable consequences of the implementation of the current system of economic globalization...

Andreas Engert on Transnational Hedge Fund Regulation

Posted on December 27, 2010
Andreas Engert, Professor of Business and Tax Law at the University of Mannheim, Germany, has just published an article well worth reading.  Andreas Engert, "Transnational Hedge Fund Regulation," European Business Organization Law Review 11:329-378 (2010)...

Complicity in Human Rights Violations and Sovereign Wealth Funds--The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund and Myanmar Investments

Posted on December 23, 2010
Complicity is becoming an important weapon in the "soft law" arsenal, even as its utility as "hard law" is increasing both as applied within the domestic legal orders of states against private entities, and against states themselves (either as sovereigns or market participants) under domestic or international law systems...

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LI Hong on "Depoliticization and Regulation of Sovereign Wealth Fund: A Chinese Perspective": Global Accountability, National Needs

Posted on December 21, 2010
I have recently noted the enormous importance of an inward turn by Chinese academics, and its potential effects on global engagement in the structuring of the production of knowledge.  Larry Catá Backer, Fracture, Translation or Substitution in Knowledge Production: 19th Century European Ethnic Nationalism With 21th Century Chinese Characteristics, Law at the End of the Dy, Dec...

Bureaucratization, Emulation and Internationalization--Welber Barral on The Driving Forces of Brazilian Development (Burocratização, Emulação e Internacionalização - Welber Barral considera as forças motrizes do desenvolvimento brasileiro)

Posted on December 17, 2010
There are a number of people in a number of developing states worth watching carefully.  They are that handful that are currently shaping the form and substance of international trade and trade policy for the coming generation.  While most  coverage focuses influential people within the "usual suspect states"--the U...

Oleksandr (Alexander) Merezhko: Towards a Psychological Theory of International Law

Posted on December 15, 2010
Oleksandr (Alexander) Merezhko, Head, International Law, University of Economics and Law, Kyiv, Ukraine is currently visiting the United States as a  Fulbright-Kennan Scholar at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars...

Michael Komesaroff on China in Africa--State Duty, Corporate Responsibility and the Changing Face of Economic Globalization

Posted on December 13, 2010
Michael Komesaroff, principal of Urandaline Investments, a consultancy specializing in China?s capital intensive industries, and recently executive in residence at the School of International Affairs, Pennsylvania State University, has written an  excellent analysis of a  China's implementation of its natural resources policies in Africa...

Professor Nichola D. Gutgold: Justice Sonia Sotomayor Communicates Without Doubt

Posted on December 10, 2010
My colleague, Nichola D. Gutgold is a global leader in the study of women's communication styles in male dominated fields. She currently serves as Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Pennsylvania State University.  Professor Gutgold is author of a number of important books in this field...

Fracture, Translation or Substitution in Knowledge Production: 19th Century European Ethnic Nationalism With 21th Century Chinese Characteristics

Posted on December 09, 2010
Over the past several years, Hong Kong Baptist University has offered a number of excellent programs.  A recent program sponsored by its Department of Government and International Studies provides some insightful food for thought.  A recently announced program puts a spotlight on an interesting development in the scientific development of the reality structure within which ideas are produced and then used to manage populations and the institutions through which they are organized...

Projecting Brazilian Political Power in the Middle East

Posted on December 05, 2010
For too long all things Latino/a in the United States, as in many other places, was cultivated as something inward looking and in its essence effectively self referential.  Stereotype assumed a cultural dimension with political effect--the only thing of interest to the Latino/a community and by extension their "home" states, were issues affecting Latino/as as a consequence of this or that action of powerful "others...

Ruminations XXXV: Blaspheming Law

Posted on December 04, 2010
It has long been supposed that law--understood as binding pronouncements from some apparatus of state legitimately vested with the power to make such pronouncements, and enforce them--is successfully implemented only with the collusion of the population that is the object of its command...

Professor Melissa Tatum on Anita Blake's Vampire Hunter Series

Posted on November 30, 2010
Melissa L. Tatum is a Research Professor and the Associate Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona?s James E. Rogers College of Law. Much of her teaching and scholarship focuses on the intersection of minority groups, individual rights, and the criminal justice system...

The Public Official and the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF): Four Models of Public Governance in Search of Coherence--Presentation at the ENA Brasil Seminário International de Governança Pública

Posted on November 21, 2010
The French École National d'Administration has a long and well earned reputation as a professional training for civil servants in France and abroad at a variety of stages of their careers.    Created by General de Gaulle in October 1945, the founding principles of the Ecole nationale d?administration are to broaden access to the highest executive levels of government service, and to provide professional training for senior civil servants...

National Day of Black Consciousness in Brazil

Posted on November 20, 2010
Today many civil society elements will be celebrating November 20th as the National Day of Black Consciousness in Brazil.   I happened to watch the street celebration of the event in Florianopolis, a city in the South of Brazil.   Zumbi sculpture...

Avoiding Corporate Complicity in the Human Rights Violations of States--Microsoft and Software Licensing

Posted on November 14, 2010
Traditionally, the conventional wisdom centered the regulatory function in states, and the form of governance in "law" understood narrowly as the product of legitimately constituted legislatures or delegated to legitimately constituted regulatory agencies, to the extent the "law" so enacted fell within the delegated authority vested in such entities...

Encircling China or Embedding It?

Posted on November 08, 2010
For a considerable period of time, Chinese officials have been focusing on the possibility that the United States intends to surround it to prevent it from more forcefully asserting its own interests in the region. Echoing similar concerns of the Russians, the Chinese suggest that American policy has been to engage China economically while creating an effective military encirclement that would enhance the American position in the event of conflict...

Ruminations XXXIV: The Faculty of Civility and Honor's Dishonor for Individuals and States

Posted on November 07, 2010
I have been  observing the patterns of behavior of university faculty for a long time.  Like other communities, faculties tend to use language as a code--to hide what they do not have the courage to utter publicly, or to mask what prudence might counsel against bringing suggesting bluntly...

ALBA, Latin American Integration, and the Construction of Regional Political Power

Posted on November 06, 2010
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Ruminations XXXIII: Self-Destructive Contradictions of the Interpretive Ideologies of Form and Function in American Constitutional Law

Posted on November 02, 2010
My students have been wrestling with the problem of interpretive ideology, especially in the construction of legitimating systems of constitutional interpretation.  They have come to understand the power of text and intent as frameworks to apply text  to the specific context in which its application appears required as these notions have been elaborated in the conventional writings of jurists and academics...

Internationalism at its Limit, Nationalist Prerogative Tested--Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Peace Prize

Posted on October 28, 2010
China and the West have been having increasingly more complex and frustrating conversations since the turn of the current century.  There are many reasons for the complexity and frustration.  The recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo illustrates a particularly difficult aspect of these conversations...

Michael Komesaroff on China and Global Minerals Markets

Posted on October 27, 2010
Michael Komesaroff, one of the most astute observers of China's natural resource policies and practices and its effects on global markets recently reported the following: The consequences of a recent collision between a Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese coast guard vessel in the East China where Beijing is alleged to have suspended shipments of rare earths to Japanese companies, has, once again, drawn attention to the world's dependence on China for its supply of rare earths...

Operationalizing Cuba's New Economic Model: The New Regulations Are Published

Posted on October 26, 2010
 TRABAJO Y SEGURIDAD SOCIALRESOLUCION No. 35/2010POR CUANTO: Por Acuerdo del Consejo de Estado de la República de Cuba, de 2 de marzo de 2009, la que suscribe fue designada Ministra de Trabajo y Seguridad Social.POR CUANTO: Conforme al Acuerdo No...

Cuba's Global Engagement--Joint Venturing Biotechnology

Posted on October 23, 2010
While much global attention has been focused on the ramifications of Cuba's potentially sharp reconstruction of a portion of its economic model, many have been oblivious to the steady march of Cuban state sector businesses into high end usually Western dominated markets...

Measuring Interdisciplinarity in Scientific Research

Posted on October 22, 2010
My colleague at the School of International Affairs, Caroline Wagner, has just published a n insightful study, Caroline S. Wagner, J. David Roessner, Kamau Bobb, Julie Thompson Klein, Kevin W. Boyack, Joann Keyton, Ismael Rafols and Katy Börner, Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature, Journal of Informetrics (in Press, corrected proof, available online 16 October 2010)...

Ideological Fears and Cuba's New Economic Model: Fear of the Chinese Approach and of Globalization

Posted on October 17, 2010
I have written recently about the much discussed efforts by the Cuban leadership to effect what may be substantial changes in the traditional centrally planned economic model model which Cuba has been managed since the early 1960s.  See Larry Catá Backer, Cuba Responds to Globalization and Reorganizes its Political Economy: Revolution, Retrenchment or Small Steps Towards Market Engagement Within a Marxist Framework Under the Leadership of a Vanguard Party Apparatus,  Law at the End of the Day, September 24, 2010...

Virtual Student Communities and Legal Education

Posted on October 17, 2010
One of the most interesting changes in the landscape of education  is technology driven.  Not the use of sophisticated techniques for conveying knowledge, or even changes in pedagogy (however ideologically driven).  Rather, the greatest change has been in the reduction of isolation for law students...

Introducing a New Essay Site on Chinese Law by Zhiwei Tong

Posted on October 16, 2010
My colleague Zhiwei Tong has recently started an excellent essay site which those of you with interests in Chinese law and politics might find useful: ???[?????]The essays are all in Chinese.  For those who do not read Chinese, a variety of translation services can provide a quick if crude translation into English...

Manuél Delmestro on Judicial Reform in China

Posted on October 16, 2010
The Association of Chinese Professors of the Social Sciences in the United States is holding its 16th Annual Conference at Harvard University: Engaging China: Sino-American Relations, Sustainable Development, and Beyond. ACPSS (????????????) is an academic organization founded in 1995 with its first annual international conference held at the University of Maryland at College Park...

The Power of Soft Law in Japan: Voluntary Codes, The Power of Non-State Based Authority and the Regulation of Business Behavior in Japan

Posted on October 16, 2010
 I have written about the evolution of corporate social responsibility in Japan.  See, Larry Catá Backer,  Japanese Approaches to Corporate Social Responsibility (????????) and Global Human Rights--Between the Law-State and Corporate Culture, Law at the End of the Day, September 14, 2010...

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