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Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, this essay seeks to show (illegal) alienage in U.S. law in new lights. First, this essay demonstrates how the emergence of a positive law of citizenship, through which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the importance of citizenship for rights, is a relatively recent and historically contingent development in U.S. law. Second, this essay shows how the concept of “sovereignty” plays different roles in the U.S. positive law of citizenship and (illegal) alienage. This essay seeks also to evaluate the limits and possibilities of alternatives to “sovereignty” as grounds for the rights of noncitizens in the United States. And it seeks to make the point that the apolitical valences of “territoriality” and “social productivity” vis-à-vis “sovereignty” in U.S. law render illegal alienage in particular misleadingly outside the realm of the political. Ultimately, this essay seeks also to challenge understandings of “sovereignty” in political theory by integrating law and political theory, and to recast legal discourse on illegal alienage by turning attention to “sovereignty.”

X = multiple interpretations

Attempts to trace the evolution of the major ideas of the natural law and in this way shed some light on the ethical contents of economics. Asks the reader to ponder some of the perennial questions such as: What is primary, ego or social association? Is man a social animal by nature? Is man a political animal? Is the justification for human existence to be found in the individual alone or in the social whole? Is society a synthesis of individuals, or does it contain something more than the simple totality of individuals?

The modern social and political order is characterised by a range of disparate moralities which lead to a plethora of interpretations and competing perspectives as to what ought to be the appropriate ethical template for corporate social responsibility. The possibility of uniting these disparate threads into a unified whole is explored by addressing the complex philosophies of Immanuel Kant and his alleged successor, Hans Kelsen; paying particular attention to their contrasting views of the proper foundations of public consensus towards establishing an idealised moral community of corporate actors.

The research is library-based and suggests that philosophy (in this instance, Kant’s moral philosophy and Kelsen’s general theory of law and state, for example) is able to offer an alternative rational and morally grounded ethics of law and governance; pertinent to the effective governance of corporate behaviour and moral management practices.

Central concepts, characteristic of both the Kantian and Kelsenian philosophical methodologies, have the capacity to act as a positive influence on the development of effective CSR mechanisms for assuring greater accountability. In addition, it is suggested that by prescribing ethically appropriate corporate behaviour as a first consideration, such philosophical frameworks are capable of providing a powerful disincentive against corporate crime.

The paper is interdisciplinary and (in an era of mistrust, global financial impropriety and other corporate misdemeanours) explores the utility of a philosophical approach towards articulating the conditions for imposing a moral duty incumbent upon all corporate actors in addressing the practical and conceptual needs of their shareholders and wider society.

The object of this research is the reconstruction of the existing legal response by European Union states to the phenomenon of immigration. It seeks to analyse the process of conferral of protection.

One main dimension is selected and discussed: the case law of the national courts. The study focuses on the legal status of immigrants resulting from the intervention of these national courts.

The research shows that although the courts have conferred an increasing protection on immigrants, this has not challenged the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the states to decide, according to their discretionary prerogatives, which immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in their territories. Notwithstanding the differences in the general constitutional and legal structures, the research also shows that the courts of the three countries considered – France, Germany and Spain – have progressively moved towards converging solutions in protecting immigrants.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the different legal orders analysed.

This study investigates effects of corporate governance on the financial performance of family-controlled firms and how these effects differ between common law and civil law jurisdictions.

This study applies a number of corporate governance measures to the largest 243 publicly listed family-controlled businesses worldwide from 2009 to 2018. The corporate governance measures include board independence, board gender diversity, corporate governance index (CGI) and the percentage of family ownership.

The empirical evidence indicates that board independence improves financial performance; this positive effect is more pronounced in common law than civil law jurisdictions. Board gender diversity has a negative impact on financial performance under common law but a positive impact in civil law jurisdictions. Moreover, the CGI and family ownership structure are positively associated with financial performance, and no difference is found between the two jurisdiction types. In addition, family ownership negatively moderates CGI in civil law countries only.

This study provides new insight on the relevance of considering jurisdictional differences when examining the effect of corporate governance on performance. The study also addresses important concerns in family business research relating to unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity. Implications of these for research and practice are discussed in the paper.

“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter… It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil.” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West, 1975.

Norberto Bobbio's Birth Centenary was celebrated in Turin in October 2009. This article acknowledges an important 20th century legal philosopher whose work is yet to be fully appreciated in the Anglo-American context. A short introduction is followed by an overview of his works in English, and intellectual profile. Relevant excerpts aim to convey some understanding of his legal scholarship. Three exemplars of his contribution to law: jurisprudence, legal sociology and the general theory of law are discussed. It is argued that a Bobbian lens can be usefully employed to consider some of the pressing 21st century legal-political and social issues.

Much of existing research has attempted to explain Asian Growth Paradox through formal institution – role of the government or rule of law. Therefore, this paper attempts to empirically explain the paradox with informal institution including interaction between informal and formal institutions. Two interrelated research questions summarize this research. First, how can we capture the relationship between informal and formal institutions? Then, how is that relationship different for Asian Paradox states vs non-paradox states?

To capture the relationship between informal and formal institutions, we use Helmke and Levitsky (2004)'s framework to categorize the interaction as complementing, competing, substituting and accommodating. We perform cross-sectional regression analysis for more than 130 countries.

We find that the developed, developing and the Asian Paradox states display different patterns of interaction between informal and formal institutions. However, we also find that the interaction effect has a limited value explaining growth for most of these countries, suggesting that Helmke and Levitsky (2004)'s framework has limitations. Finally, we challenge the notion of Asian Paradox states, as countries outside of Asia also qualify as the Paradox states.

Not much empirical effort has examined how different relationships between informal and formal institutions can explain growth internationally across countries. We show that different institutional patterns explain growth across the Paradox states and non-Paradox states.