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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states in 2018 that safeguarding “civil liberties is critical” to their official duties. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS, as its website explains,

reviews and assesses complaints from the public in areas such as: physical or other abuse; discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability; inappropriate conditions of confinement; infringements of free speech; violation of right to due process … and any other civil rights or civil liberties violation related to a Department program or activity.

My chapter tracks the centrality of deportability in shaping the civil liberties and rights that DHS is tasked with enforcing. Over the course of the twentieth century, people on US soil saw an expanding list of civil liberties and civil rights. Important scholarship concentrates on the role of the courts, state and federal governments, advocacy groups, social movements, and foreign policy driving these constitutional and cultural changes. For instance, the scholarship illustrates that coming out of World War I, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect something the Justices labeled “irresponsible speech.” The Supreme Court soon changed course, opening up an era ever since of more robust First Amendment rights. What has not been undertaken in the literature is an examination of the relationship of deportability to the sweep of civil liberties and civil rights. Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, federal immigration policymakers began multiplying types of immigration statuses. A century later, among many others, there is the H2A status for temporary low-wage workers, the H2B for skilled labor, and permanent residents with green cards. The deportability of each status constrains access to certain liberties and rights. Thus, in 2016, when people from the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS act, they are not enforcing a uniform body of rights and liberties that applies equally to citizens and immigrants, or even within the large category of immigrants. Instead, they do so within a complicated matrix of liberties and rights attenuated by deportability, which has been shaped by the history of the twentieth century.

Purpose – This study examines country-level attributes that impact on Corporate Governance Disclosure (CGD) depending on the emerging market country's legal system.

Methodology/approach – We evaluate CGD level using 749 annual reports (year ended 2006) in 57 emerging market countries. We develop a CGD determinants model that compares differences in country level attributes between common law and civil law emerging market countries. Our model builds on a multiple regression and assumes interaction between the origin of the legal system and country-specific attributes.

Findings – Common law emerging markets have substantially higher levels of CGD than civil law ones. CGD is positively associated with the size of the capital market for the entire sample of emerging markets and for the sub-samples of common law and civil law countries. Law enforcement also has a strong positive influence on CGD in common law emerging countries, whereas it has no influence on CGD in civil law emerging countries.

Practical implications – Providing CGD levels for emerging markets helps to a better understanding of the corporate governance characteristics that prevail in each country. Decision makers (international investors, market authorities, standard setters, etc.) should be aware of how country level attributes may interact with the legal system (common law or civil law) to influence CGD.

Originality of the paper – This is one of the few papers to present evidence of the impact of country level attributes on CGD. This study contributes to identifying the attributes that influence CGD with reference to common law and civil law emerging markets.

A balance between environmental protection and sustainable development of the energy industry is fostered in the majority of nations. China’s economic growth has been rapid in the past few decades, with the unfortunate side effect of environmental pollution and ecological deterioration in the country. In this chapter, we provide a study of Chinese legal rules about civil liability for environmental damages in the light of objectives of sustainable development of the energy industry.

The research approach is based on the Regulatory Impact Assessment.

International funds and private investors, especially those working in FDI, have to cope with the legal framework more or less favorable to investment and innovation deriving from experimentation and development of new energy products and processes. In each jurisdiction, the mechanism of civil liability is crucial in determining such a legal framework.

The real functioning of civil liability as applied by the doctrinal and judicial interpretation has to be taken into account for minimizing the mass damages for the environment and individuals.

Different from other assumptions based on administrative rules or policy issues, the balance between environmental protection and sustainable development is considered in this chapter under a view that emphasizes the role of legal rules from a civil law perspective.

This chapter explores the relationship between disability identity, civil rights, and the law. Twenty-five years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the question remains why disability rights legislation does not go far enough toward addressing access, stigma, and discrimination issues. People with disabilities have found empowerment from disability rights laws, but these laws are also restrictive because they define people in relation to medical aspects of their disabilities and narrowly define society’s obligation for inclusion. The successes and failures of disability rights laws are an important contribution to the study of conceptions of difference.

The purpose of the research is to determine the essence and notion of economic violation of law and their varieties, and to determine the reasons that lie in the basis of this negative social phenomenon. The authors use the philosophical law of integrity and struggle of contradictions and rather-legal, historical and legal, and formal and legal methods of scientific cognition. Such laws of dialectics and transition of quantitative changes into qualitative changes, negation of negation, and others are used. Signs and types of economic violations of law are analyzed and their predetermination by the conflict character of economic relations is noted. Comparison of economic violations of law that are peculiar for administrative and market models of economy is performed. The universal character of economic relations as objects of legal protection is shown. Classification of economic violations of law, based on the level of their public danger and spheres of distribution, is provided. Special attention is paid to civil and legal violations of law as a variety of economic violations of law, based on not anti-social settings of the subject but conflict with the borrowed system of values, which is alien to most members of society. The notion “economic violation of law” is of the collective character and includes illegal actions regarding economic relations, and the latter are of the conflict character due to different interests of subjects, the existing competition, and striving for obtaining profit. Economic violation of law is an illegal form of solving the existing conflict, which leads to application of measures of legal responsibility. The causes of economic violations of law could be overcome by implementation of the values and ideals of justice in the legal norms. They should be based on historical, cultural, spiritual, and legal traditions. All that is imposed artificially is destined for rejection and creation of new conflicts, including economic violations of law.

Collateral consequences (CCs) of criminal convictions such as disenfranchisement, occupational restrictions, exclusions from public housing, and loss of welfare benefits represent one of the salient yet hidden features of the contemporary American penal state. This chapter explores, from a comparative and historical perspective, the rise of the many indirect “regulatory” sanctions flowing from a conviction and discusses some of the unique challenges they pose for legal and policy reform. US jurisprudence and policies are contrasted with the more stringent approach adopted by European legal systems and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in safeguarding the often blurred line between criminal punishments and formally civil sanctions. The aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to contribute to a better understanding of the overreliance of the US criminal justice systems on CCs as a device of social exclusion and control, and (2) to put forward constructive and viable reform proposals aimed at reinventing the role and operation of collateral restrictions flowing from criminal convictions.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

Codes of conduct have been adopted very broadly on both sides of the Atlantic in the last two decades. They have been introduced for both elected representatives and appointed officials. Though the accountability mechanisms vary, elected politicians prefer self-policing and enforcement. For appointed officials who carry out specialized functions with exposure to particular, clearly identifiable, ethical risks, where the need for public trust and confidence is great, it is important but also relatively straightforward to develop codes of practice. For generalist public servants, the situation is different. The range of ethical risk to which civil servants are exposed is broader. It is less easy to be specific about the risks involved.

In this short chapter, we seek to begin to understand what it might mean to ‘interrupt the legal person’. We do this in two parts. In the first part, we begin with the phrase itself and interrogate its components. Interrogating these components leads us to think of the legal person as a technical and grammatical question that varies across different legal traditions and jurisdictions, i.e., across different ways of living and speaking law (recall that juris-diction says to speak the law). In the second part, we briefly explore four versions or declinations of interruptions, each corresponding to a different kind of juris-diction or legal tradition. We see this chapter as itself a friendly interruption in (or of) a broad and rich conversation so as to encourage ourselves to be struck again by some things we may take for granted.