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Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health explains how Donald Trump destabilized the decades-long bipartisan consensus that federal agencies must base their decisions on evidence, expertise, and analysis. Administrative agencies are charged by law with protecting values like stable financial markets and clean air. Their decisions often have profound consequences, affecting everything from the safety of workplaces to access to the dream of home ownership. Under the Trump administration, agencies have been hampered in their ability to advance these missions by the conflicting ideological whims of a changing cast of political appointees and overwhelming pressure from well-connected interest groups. Inconvenient evidence has been ignored, experts have been sidelined, and analysis has been used to obscure facts rather than inform the public. The results are grim: incoherent policy, social division, defeats in court, a demoralized federal workforce, and a loss of faith in government’s ability to respond to pressing problems. This experiment in abandoning the norms of good governance has been a disaster. Reviving Rationality explains how and why our government has abandoned rationality in recent years, and why it is so important for future administrations to restore rigorous and even-handed cost-benefit analysis if we are to return to a policymaking approach that effectively tackles the most pressing problems of our era.

This book presents a theoretical, historical, and empirical account of the relationship between intellectual property (IP) rights, organizational type, and market structure. Patents expand transactional choice by enabling smaller research-and-development (R&D)-intensive firms to compete against larger firms that wield difficult-to-replicate financing, production, and distribution capacities. In particular, patents enable upstream firms that specialize in innovation to exchange informational assets with downstream firms that specialize in commercialization, lowering capital and technical requirements that might otherwise impede entry. These theoretical expectations track a novel organizational history of the U.S. patent system during 1890–2006. Periods of strong patent protection tend to support innovation ecosystems in which smaller innovators can monetize R&D through financing, licensing, and other relationships with funding and commercialization partners. Periods of weak patent protection tend to support innovation ecosystems in which innovation and commercialization mostly take place within the end-to-end structures of large integrated firms. The proposed link between IP rights and organizational type tracks evidence on historical and contemporary patterns in IP lobbying and advocacy activities. In general, larger and more integrated firms (outside pharmaceuticals) tend to advocate for weaker patents, while smaller and less integrated firms (and venture capitalists who back those firms) tend to advocate for stronger patents. Contrary to conventional assumptions, the economics, history, and politics of the U.S. patent system suggest that weak IP rights often shelter large incumbents from the entry threat posed by smaller R&D-specialist entities.

Studies in the Contract Laws of Asia provides an authoritative account of the contract law regimes of selected Asian jurisdictions, including the major centres of commerce where limited critical commentaries have been published in the English language. Each volume in the series aims to offer an insider’s perspective into specific areas of contract law—remedies, formation, parties, contents, vitiating factors, change of circumstances, illegality, and public policy—and explores how these diverse jurisdictions address common problems encountered in contractual disputes. A concluding chapter draws out the convergences and divergences, and other themes. All the Asian jurisdictions examined have inherited or adopted the common law or civil law models of European legal systems. Scholars of legal transplant will find a mine of information on how received law has developed after the initial adaptation and transplant process, including the influences affecting and mechanisms of these developments. The many points of convergence and divergence (in both form and in substance) emerge. These provide good starting points for regional harmonization projects. Volume III of this series deals with the contents of contracts and unfair terms in the laws of China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Typically, each jurisdiction is covered in two chapters; the first deals with the contents of contracts, while the second deals with unfair terms.

Climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies, economies, and the planet. Yet despite clear signals, we are slow to act in a meaningful way, despite the fact that we have the legal, political, and technological tools to transition our economies to net zero carbon. While some businesses are reluctant to take significant steps to reduce their carbon footprint, many companies are well-intentioned but feel somewhat paralysed in the face of overwhelming data that portend a financially and environmentally devastating future. Yet we can still reverse the trajectory of climate change, but it requires bold and informed action to reduce our carbon footprint in a manner that embeds fairness in the transition. This book offers a guide for companies, pension funds, asset managers, and other institutional investors to commence the legal, governance, and financial strategies needed for effective climate mitigation and adaptation, and to help distribute the economic benefits of these actions to their stakeholders. It takes the reader from ideas to action, from first steps to a more meaningful contribution to the move towards a ‘climate positive’ circular economy. It can also serve as a helpful guide to everyone implicated in a corporation’s activities—employees, pensioners, consumers, banks and other lenders, policy-makers, and community members. It offers insights into what we should be expecting, and asking, of these individuals who have taken responsibility for effectively managing our savings, our retirement funds, our investments, and our tax dollars.

This book situates the war in Syria within the actual and imagined system of international criminal justice. It explores the legal impediments and diplomatic challenges that have led to the fatal trinity that is Syria: the massive commission of international crimes that are subject to detailed investigations and documentation but whose perpetrators have enjoyed virtually complete impunity. The book tracks a number of accountability solutions to this tragic state of affairs that are being explored within multilateral gatherings, by states, and by civil society actors, including innovations of institutional design; the reactivation of a range of domestic jurisdictional principles (including universal jurisdiction in Europe); the emergence of creative investigative and documentation techniques, technologies, and organizations; and the rejection of state consent as a precondition for the exercise of jurisdiction. Engaging both law and policy around international justice, the text offers a set of justice blueprints, within and without the International Criminal Court. It also considers the utility, propriety, and practicality of establishing an ad hoc tribunal and pursuing a transitional justice program without a genuine political transition. All told, the book attempts to capture the creative energy radiating from members of the international community intent on advancing the accountability norm in Syria even in the face of geopolitical blockages within the U.N. Security Council. In so doing, it presents the range of juridical measures—both criminal and civil—that are available to the international community to respond to the crisis, if only the political will existed.

The colonization policies of Ancient Rome followed a range of legal arrangements concerning property distribution and state formation, documented in fragmented textual and epigraphic sources. Once antiquarian scholars rediscovered and scrutinized these sources in the Renaissance, their analysis of the Roman colonial model formed the intellectual background for modern visions of empire. What does it mean to exercise power at and over distance? This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.

At a time when Europe is in the grip of a new crisis, it is especially useful to look back at the experiences of the European welfare states’ constitutions during the most recent financial crisis. This book provides unique insights by analysing social protection reforms undertaken in nine European countries, from both a social law and a constitutional law perspective. It highlights the mixture of short-term cuts in benefits and of structural changes in social protection schemes. The crisis might have helped to further the partial and temporary implementation of reforms, but it certainly cannot spare us from the debates and political compromises that are unavoidable in order to reform social protection thoughtfully and thoroughly. Moreover, the book records the outcome of relevant constitutional review proceedings and thereby demonstrates that, even if corrections remained restricted to relatively few cases, social rights matter. The financial crisis advanced their protection one step further, but left many questions open. One lesson is of paramount importance, also for helping us overcome the current pandemic crisis: we need a substantial and commonly accepted agreement in the Europe Union on how to balance the economy and social protection in the future.

Necessity and proportionality hold a place in the international law governing the use of force by states and in the law of armed conflict (LOAC). However, the precise contours of these two requirements are uncertain and controversial. This book explores in 5 parts how necessity and proportionality manifest under the law governing the use of force and the LOAC. First, the book introduces the reader to how necessity and proportionality factor in the debate about the interaction between morality and law in the use of military force. Second, the book addresses the issue of how proportionality in the law governing the use of force relates to proportionality in the LOAC. Third, the book addresses a number of pressing legal issues including: how proportionality and necessity are linked under international law, the controversial “unwilling and unable” test, drones and targeted killing, their application during civil war, and the need for further transparency in states’ justification for the use of force in self-defense. Fourth, the book analyzes the role of military necessity within the LOAC on the battlefield. This includes discussions about the history and nature of the principle of military necessity, the proper application of the principle of proportionality, how commanders should account for mental harm in calculating proportionality, and the role artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems may play in a proportionality analysis. Finally, the book concludes with a discussion on the potential role of proportionality in the law governing post-conflict contexts.

The constitutional system in the United States evolves through the interplay between three cycles: the rise and fall of dominant political parties, the waxing and waning of political polarization, and alternating episodes of constitutional rot and constitutional renewal. American politics seem especially fraught today because we are nearing the end of the Republican Party’s long political dominance, at the height of a long cycle of political polarization, and suffering from an advanced case of constitutional rot. Constitutional rot is the historical process through which republics become increasingly less representative and less devoted to the common good. Caused by increasing economic inequality and loss of trust, constitutional rot seriously threatens the constitutional system. But the United States has been through these cycles before, and will get through them again. The country is in a Second Gilded Age, slowly moving toward a Second Progressive Era, during which polarization will eventually recede. The same cycles shape the work of the federal courts and theories about constitutional interpretation. They explain why political parties have switched sides on judicial review not once but twice in the twentieth century. Polarization and constitutional rot alter the political supports for judicial review, make fights over judicial appointments especially bitter, and encourage constitutional hardball. The Constitution ordinarily relies on the judiciary to protect democracy and to prevent political corruption and self-entrenching behavior. But when constitutional rot is advanced, the Supreme Court is likely to be ineffective and may even make matters worse. Courts cannot save the country from constitutional rot; only political mobilization can.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the withdrawal agreement concluded between the United Kingdom and the European Union to create the legal framework for Brexit. Building on a prior volume, it overviews the process of Brexit negotiations that took place between the UK and the EU from 2017 to 2019. It also examines the key provisions of the Brexit deal, including the protection of citizens’ rights, the Irish border, and the financial settlement. Moreover, the book assesses the governance provisions on transition, decision-making and adjudication, and the prospects for future EU–UK trade relations. Finally, it reflects on the longer-term challenges that the implementation of the 2016 Brexit referendum poses for the UK territorial system, for British–Irish relations, as well as for the future of the EU beyond Brexit.