Search results

The purpose of this paper is to outline what the author believes will be the top five legal issues relating to globalization and business for the first 50 years of the twenty‐first century.

This is a wrap‐up paper articulating the author's opinion about what she considers to be the top five legal issues that will be face in the first half of the twenty‐first century.

The paper reveals cooperative censorship; intellectual property treaty harmonization domination by developing country interpretations; international tribunal dispute resolution clauses; return of the law merchant; and eminent domain or public utility – the future for dominant search engines/content aggregators as the possible top five legal issues pertaining to businesses and globalization.

The paper presents an interesting prediction of the top five legal issues relating to globalization and business for the first 50 years of the twenty‐first century.

I. Introduction to the Study of the Economic Role of Government: Alternative Approaches to Law and Economics

The authors use laboratory experiments to test two self-assessment tax mechanisms for facilitating land assembly. One mechanism is incentive compatible with a complex tax function, while the other uses a flat tax rate to mitigate implementation concerns. Sellers publicly declare a price for their land. Overstating its true value is penalized by using the declared price to assess a property tax; understating its value is penalized by allowing developers to buy the property at the declared price. The authors find that both mechanisms increase the rate of land assembly and gains from trade relative to a control in which sellers’ price declarations have no effect on their taxes. However, these effects are statistically insignificant or transitory. The assembly rates in our self-assessment treatments are markedly higher than those of prior experimental studies in which the buyer faces bargaining frictions, such as costly delay or capital constraints.

X = multiple interpretations

The act of consolidating multiple parcels of land to form a single larger parcel is known as land assembly. Laboratory experiments have enabled researchers to explore how various factors, environments, and institutions hinder or assist the aggregation process. This chapter surveys the experimental literature and highlights the experimental design used in those studies, as well as their main findings.

This paper aims to compare the law with regard to private property rights and restrictions and public controls in England and the USA, and the theoretical debates that surround them, to understand whether the private land use controls of nuisance and restrictive covenants could have a greater role to play or the public law system of planning is the best way to manage land.

This paper starts by summarising and comparing, firstly, the private laws of nuisance and restrictive covenants and then laws relating public planning, zoning and takings in England and the USA. It then reviews theoretical approaches taken in both jurisdictions to land use restrictions.

The paper concludes that private land use restrictions can only play a limited role in land management in England. Scarcity and cost of available housing necessitate a mechanism by which the state can intervene to remove or modify restrictions to enable alteration and development. The structure of freehold ownership in England and the low take-up of Commonhold as an alternative tenure mean that expansion in the use of private land use restrictions to control the use of land is unfeasible.

The value of this paper is that it seeks to provide insight into the contested relationship between private and public law and the relationship between property law and planning.

Property rights are often seen to be the cause and the solution of a wide range of social problems especially those affecting the natural environment. But, the property rights box is indeed pandoran, spawning as many questions as it answers as a function of diverse theoretical perspectives. The literature on property rights is not homogeneous so that interpretations of problems and suggestions for solutions are highly diverse. Consequently, the value of property rights theory in understanding or solving social problems can be problematic. The recent interest in property rights theory has been spawned by the focus on the “takings” issue where a particular perspective of private property rights, as a form of natural rights, has “re”‐emerged. This “new” private property rights perspective portends radical consequences for environmental management. But the theme of this paper is that this methodology adds little insight to the understanding of property rights and environmental problems.

The purpose of this paper is too analyze what causes judicial decisions about access impairment in American eminent domain and police power cases to be based on subjective interpretations instead of objective factual evidence about the spatio‐material conditions of access.

Following a review of commentary on decision making and language in legal contexts, contemporary rhetorical analysis combined with discourse analysis are employed to illuminate inconsistencies of legal terminologies with respect to access.

The analysis finds that legal terminology of access takings sustains cognitive indeterminacies and prevents the use of standard quantitative approaches to measurement.

The implications of this research are that access conditions need to be considered in the context of transaction costs based on an underlying ontology of access phenomena.

This paper calls for changing legal policy so that objective measures of access can be used to evaluate impairment.

This is the first paper to analyze underlying problems in access takings and sets the stage for a more objective and scientific approach to a long unresolved problem involving property takings.

This chapter examines the history and evolution of land use regulation in the United States. The economic effect and influence on neighborhood composition is considered. The work of political theorists Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault is utilized to analyze the practice of zoning in the United States. An overview of the Standard Zoning Enabling Act, which sets the foundation for zoning within the United States, is presented. Michel Foucault’s notion of “disciplinary power” and Gramsci’s theory of “environmental hegemony” are highlighted to elucidate how land use regulations have operated to enhance the social and economic status of some populations, while limiting the opportunities of others. The potential for changing land use polices is also discussed.