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Regulators can adjust penalties to compensate for incomplete monitoring of regulated parties that are subject to legal rules, but compensating penalty adjustments often are unavailable when regulated parties are subject to legal standards. Incomplete monitoring consequently invites greater noncompliance under standards than under rules. This chapter develops a model that quantifies some of the specific tradeoffs that regulators face in designing standards regimes under incomplete monitoring. The model also considers the extent to which suboptimal compliance due to incomplete monitoring is likely to result in deadweight loss in different settings.

This chapter examines the survival of private property during the early transition to communism in Romania at the intersection of state policies, ideologies, and legal practices. It focuses on petitions contesting urban housing nationalization in the city of Timişoara between 1950 and 1965. I argue that petitions are partially successful acts of microresistance through law that contested the communist regime's concept of private property, played a role in halting further urban housing nationalization, undermined the regime's attempts at building legitimacy through legality, and challenged ideas about legal instrumentalism in a communist system.

This chapter analyses the relationship between individuals’ poverty situation and conjugal status (divorced, separated, in a free union, or legally married) from 1996 to 2014. It describes different marriage property regimes that exist in state laws in Mexico. Couples living in free union are found to be poorer than those legally married, indicating that marriage may help to protect families more than cohabitation laws. When comparing divorced men and women, women show higher signs of being poorer than men; this could be because the law establishes that the assets in case of divorce accrue to whoever works and pays for them, and given that many women work in the unpaid sectors, men are the owners of the assets. Having no consideration of these facts in the law may create poverty with gender bias in the case of divorce. Additionally, there is lack of data in administrative records of marriage and divorce about couples’ assets, children, and employment status before and after the marriage, so we discuss the importance that in a near future this could be register to facilitate law and policy-makers identifying what contributes to create poverty with gender bias as a results of family laws, and correct them.

In In Re Widening of Beekman Street, a nineteenth century legal case in New York State which involved questions of who owned the bodies of the dead – whether it was the state, the church who owned the land where they were buried or the relatives of the deceased – we see an interesting legal aporia. Claims of ownership were complicated by the idea that the dead perhaps owned themselves, having once been full legal subjects. In this and other legal cases in US law (with similar results in the UK as well) a kind of compromise is reached where, as the body decays, the question of its self-ownership becomes increasingly settled in favour of other parties. Yet, even in such cases, the body and its sense of personhood lingers to haunt, as it were, the certainties of law about who precisely owns whom The uncertainties that are made manifest among the dead have their equivalents among the living as well; the presence of slavery at the time meant that in some cases even living persons did not own themselves. In this mix of overlapping forms of self and other ownership then, we see an anxiety in the law, one that it must settle definitively even as the very terms of legal personhood resist the very closure that the law seeks.

This chapter examines the lives of Central American immigrant workers, with a focus on the paramount position of legal status in immigrants’ lives.

The legal context into which Central American immigrant workers arrive creates the various legal statuses they hold, which in turn dictate the kind of jobs they can obtain, where they live and, in general, shape their prospects in the United States. Although many Central Americans have held various forms of temporary protection from deportation, such relief is temporary and therefore subject to multiple extensions, applications, forms, and renewals, which serve to accentuate these immigrants’ legal uncertainty. Given their legal predicament and the consequent truncated paths to mobility, many Central American immigrant workers live in poverty; indeed, they are more likely to live in poverty than other foreign born. At the same time, they have high labor force participation rates. Their high rates of poverty coupled with high labor force participation rates indicate that their jobs do not pay much. In spite of these circumstances, they remit a significant portion of their earnings to their non-migrating family members in the origin countries.

The largely unchanged occupational and sectorial concentrations of Central Americans in the U.S. economy over the last two decades underscores the critical implications of legal status for immigrant incorporation and socioeconomic mobility.

This chapter exposes the vulnerabilities imposed by a precarious legal status and highlights the importance of more secure legal statuses for immigrant workers’ potential integration and paths to mobility.

While the trade sector has long been the backbone of growth followed by real estate development in Dubai, the impact of reduced oil revenues in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has affected Dubai. GCC countries have identified innovation and transitioning to a knowledge-based economy as critical components of sustainable growth in the post-oil world. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: (1) to examine UAE’s competitiveness relative to four economies for which we can draw meaningful conclusions (Qatar, Singapore, Norway, and Switzerland) and (2) to integrate macro- and micro-level findings in an actionable framework. Using the composite Knowledge Economy Index (KEI) developed by the World Bank (2008, 2012), we conclude that UAE should prioritize three key areas to ­transition to a knowledge-based economy: the regulatory regime, innovation, and human capital. These findings are consistent with a recent study by the UAE Department of Economic Development/INSEAD, which highlights two areas that need addressing: “Creation” (knowledge creation) and “Anchoring” (institutional environment for innovation). We integrate these macro-level findings with research at the innovation ecosystem level (and particularly survey-based research completed by Wamda Research Lab) to propose a comprehensive action framework across all ecosystem stakeholders (i.e., government, entrepreneurs, academia, support ecosystem, and corporates). The action matrix allows individual stakeholders to drive corresponding actions and prioritize across short- and long-term initiatives.

Under Anglo-American law, the consent of the masochist furnishes no defense to a charge of assault arising from sadomasochistic sexual practices. Our unwillingness to recognize consent in this context suggests disquiet with the ways in which S/M reflects the operations of law. Although the case law casts the masochist as a victim, other accounts represent masochism as a forceful enactment of submission. Masochism also challenges certain ideals of masculinity central to legal reason. Misgivings about the legitimacy of consent to S/M find a useful analogy in critiques of psychoanalytic treatment that understand consent in that context as irreducibly fraught.

This chapter develops the theoretical framework used to inform the study, which is based largely on neoinstitutional theory. This monograph recognizes that a holistic perspective and richer insights are needed when examining complex issues associated with the adoption of internationally acceptable practices. The proposed theoretical framework incorporates international influences, domestic influences, and intraorganizational dynamics. In the context of globalization, China’s convergence with internationally acceptable principles and standards is largely shaped by international forces, including supranational organizations, foreign investors, and international accounting firms. Furthermore, in order to examine the operation of those imported ideas, it is essential to consider China’s contextual setting, which comprises the political system, economic system, legal system, social and cultural system, and accounting infrastructure. In addition, the convergence process is also influenced by interaction among organizational players who may actively mobilize their power to preserve the status quo and protect their power and interests. The outcome and the process of loose coupling deeply intertwine with and reflect upon international influences, domestic influences, and intraorganizational dynamics.

This chapter explores the ethics of a critical vulnerability suffered by migrant health professionals (MHPs): the problem of ‘pathways to nowhere’. This problem arises from dynamic change in the processes, practices and policies governing how migrant professionals achieve accreditation, training and employment in destination countries, whereby established pathways to professional practice are unexpectedly altered or removed. The authors detail the significance of this phenomenon in Australian and Canadian contexts. Drawing on the literature on legitimate expectations and the rule of law, the authors outline the ethical stakes and responsibilities that attach to states creating and then disappointing people’s legitimate expectations, and discuss how these considerations apply to destination countries’ treatment of MHPs.

Many of the emerging and transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been building their economies largely on the infrastructure inherited from Communist times. It is widely recognized that much of the infrastructure in both the private and public sectors must be replaced if those economies are to achieve acceptable rates of economic growth and participate successfully within the broader European Union (EU) economic zone (The Economist, 2003). Upgrading infrastructure includes the likely importation of technology and management expertise, as well as substantial financial commitments. In this regard, inward foreign direct investment (FDI) is a particularly important potential source of capital for the emerging and transition European economies (ETEEs). FDI usually entails the importation of financial and human capital by the host economy with measurable and positive spillover impacts on host countries’ productivity levels (Holland & Pain, 1998a). The ability of ETEEs to attract and benefit from inward FDI should therefore be seen as an important issue within the broader policy context of how these countries can improve and expand their capital infrastructure, given relatively undeveloped domestic capital markets and scarce human capital.