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Legal intermediation is an emerging theoretical concept developed to grasp the importance of the process and actors who contribute to legal endogenization, in particular in the field of economic activities and work governed by various public regulations. This chapter proposes to extend the analytical category of legal intermediary to all actors who, even if they are not legal professionals, deal on a daily basis with legal categories and provisions. In order to deepen our understanding of these actors and their contribution to how organizations frame legality, this chapter investigates four examples of legal intermediaries who are not legal professionals. Based on field surveys conducted over the past 15 years in France on employment policy, industrial relations, occupational health and safety regulation, and forensic economics, I make three contributions. First, the cases show the diversity of legal intermediaries and their growing and increasingly reflexive roles in our complex economies. Second, while they are not legal professionals per se, to different degrees, these legal intermediaries assume roles similar to those of legal professionals such as legislators, judges, lawyers, inspectors, cops, and even clerks. Finally, depending on their level of legitimacy and power, I show how legal intermediaries take part in the process of legal endogenization and how they more broadly frame ordinary legality.

This article explores how legal intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change. We suggest the increasing complexity and ambiguity of legal rules coupled with the shift from government to governance provide legal intermediaries greater opportunities to influence law and social change. Drawing from new institutional sociology, we suggest rule-intermediaries shape legal and social change, with varying degrees of success, in two ways: (1) law is filtered through non-legal logics emanating from various organizational fields and (2) law is professionalized by non-legal professionals. We draw from case studies in the United States and France to show how intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change.

Since the 1990s, the French government has offered tax exemptions for people who buy property and rent it out for at least nine years. This legal framework, centered on incentives, can be considered a new kind of (de)regulation of housing policy, triggering a multiplication of private intermediaries devoted to finding clients for tax exemptions. Based on interviews with 28 investors who feel they have been abused (many of them have started legal proceedings against professionals from whom they bought a property), this study provides a new entry for analyzing legal intermediation, showing that it does not affect all laypeople in the same way, especially when looking at the latter’s social and economic resources. We analyze how and with what devices professionals, whose commercial practices are not fully regulated by law, rely on the law for the success of their transactions, especially with taxpayers who have money to become investors but who are not rich enough to pay for the services of a tax professional. We argue that the ability to resist the appeal of putting money into investments that turned out risky depends on investors’ social and economic resources. Finally, we analyze how the process of legal intermediation described in this chapter impacts investors’ legal consciousness and creates distrust toward the law.

On the basis of corporate governance and agency cost theory, using the fifth sub-indicator of Fan et al. China Marketization Index as the regional investor protection index (IPI), the purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of equity incentives and regional investor protection on corporate payout policies and corporate performance.

This paper establishes ordinary least squares regression model to examine interactions between the effects of equity incentives and regional investor protection upon firms’ dividend payouts. In addition, the authors also explore whether the joint effects on payouts are altered in the presence of growth opportunities, and investigate the effects of interactions between equity incentives and regional investor protection on corporate performance.

The authors observe that firm managers appear to abuse equity incentives by increasing dividend payouts. However, regional investor protection can potentially restrain such behavior. The restraining effect depends on the firms’ growth opportunities, on the basis of which the effect on cash (stock) dividends is found to be weaker (stronger) in high-growth firms – and stronger (weaker) in low-growth firms. Further evidence indicates that the restraining effect of regional investor protection on selfish dividend-related behavior encouraged by equity incentives may also prove valuable in encouraging exploitation of these incentives so as to enhance corporate performance.

Since reforming investor protection laws and improving judicial quality are difficult and lengthy at a country level. Improving regional levels of investor protection, however, seems more feasible and effective. Through measures encouraging the development of intermediaries, increases in the number of lawyers – all of which seem likely to constrain behavior harmful to the interests of investors – the provincial administrations can reasonably expect to contribute toward improvements in the performance of firms and the development of the economy in their region. This paper provides encouragement to regional policy makers in China and in other developing countries.

This paper uses a regional index of investor protection to study the impact on corporate dividends and performance, in contrast with most previous studies, which have examined these issues at country or individual firm levels. The use of a regional-level investor IPI in this paper therefore fills a gap by coming in between the country- and firm-level indicators typically used in previous research, thus providing a new perspective on investor protection issues.

When the time comes to look back at the last two decades of the 20th century, a future historian would be forgiven for thinking we were almost obsessed with organised crime, corruption and money laundering. Of course, when one considers the ignominious fall from favour of so many world leaders, in circumstances where serious corruption was at least alleged, if not self‐evident, the exposure of rampant financial malpractice in intergovernmental organisations, the penetration of entire economic and political structures by, for what of a better notion, we describe as organised crime, then perhaps our historian's impression might not be too far from the truth. Although it is possible to find the odd comment in international meetings, about the serious implications of economic crime and the like, before the 1980s, these a few and far between. Most are related to complaints from developing countries about the unwillingness of developed countries to assist in the enforcement of exchange control laws. In fact, it was not until November 1980 that the Commonwealth, an organisation or rather association of states whose justification has increasingly been based on its ability to recognise and address problems related to small and relatively fragile economies, began to concern itself, at governmental level, with the implications of what appeared to be a growth in serious economic abuse. At the Commonwealth Law Ministers' Meeting in Barbados in that year, the ministers accepted the recommendations of a report, commissioned a year earlier by the then Director of the Commonwealth Secretariat's Legal Division, Mr Kutlu Fuad, and written by the present author, which led to the instigation of a Commonwealth programme against serious economic crime. It is interesting to note that certain Commonwealth governments had expressed concern during the 1970s not so much about abusive conduct on the part of conventional criminals, but on the part of those seeking to ‘bust’ the economic sanctions that had been imposed on Rhodesia and later South Africa. Indeed, it was claimed by some that, for example, South Africa was deliberately attempting to destabilise the economies of the ‘front‐line states’ through a programme of economic sabotage and crime. In those days, there was little talk, even in such organisations as ICPO‐Interpol, about the threat of organised crime. Terrorism, whether by individuals or by state agencies, was then considered to be a matter almost beyond the remit of traditional law enforcement agencies. It was much later that most came to recognise that organised crime and terrorist organisations may well be one and the same.

With the advent of the FATF blacklist and the US FinCen advisories, the problem of perception and reality has been exacerbated. The international financial centres (IFCs) claim that the legislation and infrastructure are in place, and that money laundering, which still takes place largely in the metropolitan centres, is under control in their jurisdictions. The mainland countries perceive that money laundering is taking place in the IFCs. The situation is not unlike the story of two blindfolded men touching an elephant: the first held the tail and thought that it was something dry and sinewy; the second touched the tip of the trunk and thought the creature was something moist and flexible. The truth was somewhere in the middle.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the concept of a fair balance between conflicting fundamental rights in the context of intermediary liability for third party copyright infringement.

European Legal Method.

Fair balance is the appropriate conflict resolution mechanism in cases of fundamental rights clashes. Balancing is in essence a call for rational judicial deliberation. In intermediary liability, balancing excludes the imposition of filtering obligations on intermediaries for the purpose of copyright enforcement, but allows blocking.

An in-depth look at a complicated, vague and underdeveloped area of law with significant practical effect.

Adopting an intra-organizational viewpoint is essential to grasp legal intermediation. To deepen our understanding of such phenomena, this chapter proposes a qualitative and “multi-level” approach drawing on insights from the neo-institutional literature, policy ethnography analysis and the research on legal intermediaries. Such a perspective is particularly suited to capture the complexity and the depth of institutional change. Using the 12-hour work legal mechanism of derogation in the context of French public hospitals as an example, this chapter highlights how both macro-level actors (actors of a “reform network”), and micro-level ones (hospital directors) contribute to the shaping and framing of legality in French public hospitals. Results show that variation in how those actors use law depends on the local configuration. Second, results demonstrate that the legal games they play are not merely based on symbolic and superficial compliance with the law, but also on outright manipulations and conscious rule-breaking.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of intermediary platforms, such as Pandora and Spotify, in reducing piracy of digital music.

The authors modify a predator-prey theoretical framework of copyright piracy to account for the impact of intermediary platforms on the consumption of original works and illegal copies.

The theory shows that an increase in the number of legal alternative platforms available to consumers of digital music results in an unambiguous increase in the consumption of legitimate music and an unambiguous decrease in the consumption of unauthorized copies.

The results suggest that policies to encourage entrepreneurship by intermediary platforms in the music industry serve as a complement to other policies currently being employed to combat piracy of digital music.

The paper is the first of its kind to analyze the important role of intermediary platforms in reducing piracy of digital music while encouraging innovation by artists. Historically, entrepreneurship in this field has been controversial, given the gray areas surrounding what is and is not copyright infringement in the ever-evolving digital age. This paper highlights that once copyright laws are clearly defined, business growth in this area can be a highly effective solution to the piracy problem.