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As the number of imitator brands has risen, so too have legal actions for trademark infringement and passing off, because of consumer confusion, unfair misappropriation of brand owners’ intellectual property, and lost sales revenue. However, recourse to the law is time‐consuming, expensive, and can be unpredictable because of the highly subjective and inconsistent ways in which brand confusion is measured and proven. The formulation of more standard measures of marketplace confusion would have significant time and cost advantages for market researchers and lawyers. Using data from key informant interviews with expert legal professionals, critiques the current measures of consumer confusion and shows that in UK law confusion must result in mistaken behavior and any measure of behavior must be taken in situ within shopping environments. Shows most important legal measures of confusion, namely, subjective judicial analysis and witness testimony, to be methodologically flawed. Discusses implications for manufacturers, brand owners and legal policy and practice.

Directors help determine the strategic direction of a corporation and are responsible for ensuring the institution has a good system of internal control. Banking institutions without a strategic direction emphasizing sound lending practices that promote the long-run financial health and viability of the institution will be sued more frequently than peer institutions. Institutions that do not have a good system of internal control will also be sued more frequently. Hence, legal expense is a bank corporate governance measure. We compare the performance of bank legal expense and a widely cited corporate governance index in a regression framework to determine which better predicts bank performance. The regressions indicate legal expense is a much better predictor, hence a better measure of bank corporate governance. Regulators should require legal expense reporting and rank institutions by the ratio of legal expense to assets to help identify institutions with weak governance. Seven case studies illustrate the role of legal expense in corporate governance.

This study aims to examine the effect of state-level legal risk on audit fee pricing in the USA. This study hypothesizes that auditors are more likely to charge higher audit fees to clients headquartered in states with higher legal risk in terms of probability of being sued, expected size of damages allocated to the auditors and breadth of third parties able to claim damages.

This study hypothesizes that higher state-level legal risk leads to higher audit fees. To test this, this study estimates ordinary least squares regressions of audit fees for 56,576 company years from 2001 to 2018 with the three measures of state legal risk and other factors known to affect audit fees.

This study finds that state-level legal risk is positively associated with audit fee pricing for two of three measures. Interestingly, the third measure, breadth of third parties able to claim damages, is negatively associated with audit fees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper fulfills an identified need and is the first study to comprehensively test the association between state-level differentials in legal risk and audit fees.

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical assessment and outline issues in criminal regulation relating to international anti‐money laundering (AML) programs.

In the first part, this paper outlines the serious threats posed by transnational laundering operations in the context of economic globalization, and calls for highly co‐ordinated international responses to such a crime. The second part of the paper centres on elements of international criminal regulation of ML.

The focus is on the phenomenological aspect of ML and highlights that to a large extent it is an economic issue. Economic analysis calls for an accurate legal response, with typical trade‐offs: it should deter criminals from laundering by increasing the costs for such illicit operations, calling for enhanced regulatory and enforcement activities; however, stronger enforcement yields increased costs and reduces privacy. These features have lately inspired the recent paradigm shift from a rule‐based regulatory framework to a risk‐based approach which still represents an extremely delicate regulatory. Both at the international level and within the single domestic legal system, AML law is typically characterised by a multidisciplinary approach combining the repressive profile with preventive mechanisms: an empirical evaluation of the International Monetary Fund‐World Bank AML program is presented, where these two aspects are assessed. The non‐criminal measures recently implemented under the auspices of the main inter‐governmental public organisations with competence in these fields seem to be consistent with the insights of economic analysis. However, some key criminal issues need to be better addressed.

The paper offers insights into international AML programs, focusing on criminal regulation.

This paper aims to deepen understanding of the interrelated questions: how Japanese antidumping policies have been formulated and transformed; what the reasons are for such caution in adopting antidumping measures; and what patterns can be observed of recent changes in antidumping policy and legal systems.

To explain the changes in antidumping policy and rules in Japan, this paper examines not only political competition among bureaucratic organizations but also policy learning by bureaucratic organizations and their effects on change in policy preferences and advancements in the legal system.

The effects of bureaucratic politics and policy learning not only complexly interact but also are highly complicated to initiate policy changes in accordance with the maturity of antidumping legal system. In this case study, the policy learning has led the rival bureaucrats to a consensus to change antidumping policy and legal system, but the agreement could be a temporal truce that may easily collapse by political contingencies.

Along with the influences of large‐scale economic and political dynamisms, this paper focuses on two aspects of the policy subsystem to explain those changes: one is political competition among bureaucratic organizations claiming jurisdiction of antidumping policy; the other is the effect of policy learning among bureaucratic organizations on changes in policy preferences and on advancements in antidumping rules.

This research uses theoretical perspectives from public choice and public policy to establish and test theory of the combined effects of institutional environments and bureaucratic corruption on international delivery performance.

A panel archival dataset is assembled from multiple public databases to test hypotheses based on public policy, public choice and supply chain theory using a fixed effects model.

The authors' theory demonstrates that institutional environments as constituted by the level of regulatory trade barriers and legal system effectiveness combined with bureaucratic corruption can influence the timeliness of international deliveries.

This research extends public choice and public policy with the insight that regulatory institutions' bark is not bad without the bite of effective legal institutions. The research uses archival data collected in mass surveys with data aggregated at the country level that can be unduly affected by selection effects, perceptual data, and unobserved underlying mechanisms.

The results of this research can be used to inform supply chain managers working in trade compliance to be aware of the costs and effects on logistics performance that result from encountering different institutional environments and the concomitant corruption.

This is the first investigation of the complex and significant interaction effects of institutional environments and corruption on international delivery performance.

In this paper, we explore an extensive panel data set covering more than 4,000 listed firms in 16 European countries to study the effects of shareholder protection on ownership structure and firm performance. We document a negative firm-level correlation between shareholder protection and ownership concentration. Differentiating between shareholder types, we find that this pattern is mainly driven by strategic investors. In contrast, we find a positive correlation between shareholder protection and block ownership of institutional investors, in particular when we restrict the analysis to independent institutional investors. Finally, we find that independent institutional investors are positively associated with firm valuation as measured by Tobin’s Q. The opposite applies for strategic investors. Overall, our results are consistent with the view that (i) high shareholder protection and (ii) limited ownership by strategic investors make small investors and investors interested in security returns more confident in their investments.

This purpose of this study is to examine the association between earnings management (accruals earnings management (AEM) and/or real activities manipulation (RAM)) and firm underperformance following seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) using cross-country data.

The study applies ordinary least squares regression analyses to a sample of 11,764 observations on firms from 22 countries over the period from 2005 to 2017. The methods include weighted least squares regression, sub-sampling approach and alternative measures of firm performance, earnings management and legal regime for robustness tests as well as a two-stage least squares instrumental variable (IV) approach to address endogeneity concerns.

The results suggest that RAM has a greater negative impact on post-SEO performance than AEM. The result is economically significant for RAM only. The results also reveal that the negative impact of earnings management, in particular RAM, on post-SEO performance is greater in countries with a strong legal regime than in other countries.

Earnings management around SEOs has important implications for investors, regulators and policymakers. The study suggests that policymakers should improve the current legal conditions to promote fairness in the equity market.

The results from the cross-country data support earlier results from single-country studies on the impact of earnings management on post-SEO performance. The study also provides new evidence on the variation in the impact of earnings management according to the strength of the legal regime operating in a country.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between moral disengagement, individual differences (i.e. need for cognition (NFC), faith in intuition, legal authoritarianism) and responses to vigilantism.

US university students were surveyed.

NFC reduced support for vigilante justice while legal authoritarianism increased support for vigilante justice. Both relationships are mediated by moral disengagement, which also increases support for vigilante justice.

The present study provides a starting point for further research on individual differences and responses to vigilantism.

Results expand on the understanding of the function of individual differences in a morally charged decision-making task. Content has implications for academics and legal practitioners.

Vigilante justice is embedded within American culture. However, vigilantism is currently illegal, and recent instances of what might be considered vigilante justice (e.g. George Zimmerman, David Barajas) have highlighted the controversy surrounding such extralegal violence. Little research has focussed on the moral quandary posed by vigilantism.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the close relationship between the disciplines of law and health-care studies. This interrelation has become particularly evident during the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, when restrictive human rights provisions have been initiated by many states for the sake of public health. Research focuses on the notional proximity of the principle of proportionality and its health-care correlative: effectiveness. It also goes through the influence of acceptance rates for the application of restrictive measures.

Research focuses on interdisciplinary literature review, taking into consideration judicial decisions and data on acceptance rates of restrictive human rights measures in particular. Analysis goes in depth when two categories of restrictive human rights measures against the spread of the pandemic are examined in depth: restrictive measures to achieve social distancing and mandatory vaccination of professional groups.

Restrictive human rights measures for reasons of public health are strongly affected by the need for effective health-care systems. This argument is verified by judicial decision-making which relies to the necessity of health-care effectiveness to a great extent. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a laminate example of the two disciplines’ interrelation and how they infiltrate each other.

Further implications for research point at the need to institutionalize a cooperative scheme between legal and health-care decision-making, given that this interrelation is strong.

The originality of this paper lies on the interdisciplinary approach between law and health-care studies. It explains how state policies during the pandemic were shaped based on the concepts of effectiveness and proportionality.