Civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face mounting challenges, especially in authoritarian states, where they encounter closures, persecution and smear campaigns. Consequently, their crucial work in advancing human rights, good governance and inclusive...

In this article, I have estimated the Rule of Law for 193 countries using data from the Environment Social and Governance-ESG database of World Bank. I have used different econometric techniques to estimate the value of “Rule of Law” i.e.: Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Panel Data with...

This chapter examines the relationship between formalist interpretive methodology and ideals of legality and the rule of law. In other work, I have argued that the structural formality of law and deliberatively formalistic legal reasoning are closely associated with legality and the rule of law....

Downside risk in stock prices is a significant focus in stock investment. This study investigates how the legal origin of each country affects its property rights and the rule of law, and how these property rights and the rule of law affect the downside risk of the stock market differently....

We present new evidence on how generalized trust is formed. Unlike previous studies, we look at the explanatory power of economic institutions, we use newer data, we incorporate more countries, and we use instrumental variables in an attempt to handle the causality problem. A central result is...

Is it possible to know how institutionally stable a country is, how corrupt its rulers are, what is the expectation and standard of living of its inhabitants, how dynamic and complex is its economy, all this, just by identifying and counting certain words in its constitution? We tried to...

This paper explores the role which Member State-led infringement proceedings can play in overcoming the EU’s rule of law crisis, and hypotheses that it can prove helpful in breaking the current impasse. It begins by understanding why the EU’s “traditional” rule of law enforcement...

The “rule of law” (ROL) is invoked by multinational institutions, Western governments and in China as a political expectation of what legitimate governance looks like. Chinese leaders regularly make claims that are translated into commitments to uphold the ROL, and they generalize this...

In 2017, the European Commission prohibited Google from favouring its comparison shopping service within general search results pages. It imposed a fine of US $ 2.73 billion for the committed abuse and a periodic payment penalty for any future non-compliance with the decision. On 10 November...

In their book, The Narrow Corridor, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson contend that prosperity requires a rule of law that threads the needle between anarchy and despotism. We emphasize that creating that rule of law is a process in which society—the citizens of a sovereign state—is in a race...

If rule of law discourages relationship-specific investments, then industries that use intermediates which require relationship-specific investments should have a disproportionately low share of output in countries where rule of law is weak. We find robust support for this prediction using data...

Competition is a vital component of, not only functioning market economies but also of democratic legal and political systems. In Europe, one of the key historical lessons so prominently advanced by the Ordoliberals was the concern about repercussions of concentrated market power and political...

As the nation’s principal law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice (DOJ) plays a unique role in protecting U.S. democracy. Even though the attorney general is appointed by the president and serves at the president’s pleasure, a recognition of the comparable independence of the DOJ...

The Taliban’s ouster in 2001 presented a historic opportunity to break away from Afghanistan’s despotic past and transition toward democratic governance. This article argues that the viability of Afghanistan’s democratization hinged, in key part, on institutional compliance with the rule...

This paper analyses the relationship between the rule of law (RoL) and intangible capital investment by businesses within a sample of 16 European countries, over the period from 1996 to 2017. Studies on the effects of RoL on intangible capital investment are scarce, hence, the relevance of...

Much political conflict in the world revolves around the issue of how much freedom to accord people. Liberal democracies are characterized by, e.g., the rule of law and a strong protection of civil rights, giving individuals a great deal of legally guaranteed freedom to lead their lives as they...

By discussing the experiences of two EU Member States: Hungary and Poland, the article aims to demonstrate that there are three layers of rule of law which are relevant for EU competition law. The first one is external: it relates to the legal system of EU Member States which competition law is...

This article argues that the AdTech market has undermined the fundamental right to privacy in the European Union and that current legislative and fundamental rights protections in the EU have been unsuccessful in restraining these privacy harms. The article further argues that these privacy...

The article proves a long-lasting legacy of Martin Krygier’s work on the rule of law. Taking the European Union as a case study, and specifically—the recent infringement action concerning the judicial independence in Poland, the article addresses the point (teleos) of the rule of law, the...

The paper examines changes in labor regulation between 1898 and 1940 in the context of issues related to rule of law in two areas. 1) Many see the 1905 Lochner Supreme Court decision on men’s hours laws as the beginning of 30 years in which labor regulation was stymied by the doctrine of...

With respect to the election of the U.S. President, the U.S. Constitution is vague and full of silences and gaps. Responding to the constitutional crisis of 1876, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA) attempted to offer more specific rules. The ECA was a major advance, but in important ways, it...

The paper focuses on explaining the existence of the right (freedom) to strike in legal systems. It has been argued that the attitude of the state to strikes is a measure of progress (democracy).Totalitarian states forbade striking, while socialist states – forced by the circumstances –...

We are witnessing a global trend of democratic decline and constitutional decay marked by the rise of populist authoritarian leaders and parties. India has increasingly become a central case study of this phenomenon. This article focuses on one important aspect of India’s democratic decline...

This paper makes a conceptual prescription: it argues that judges and lawyers should adopt a positivist concept of law, on normative grounds. The positivist view, I will argue, is more consistent with reasonable disagreement and majority rule than nonpositivist views, offers a better view of...

While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer-term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on political and economic crises to assess what we can learn from the...

This study examines AI algorithmic pathways capturing the relation between managers’ perception of norms of governance (rule of law, control of corruption and democracy) and earnings management from a framing perspective across 102 countries. Further, this paper illustrates how upper echelon...

Using the policy of establishing specialized intellectual property courts (IPC), this paper explores how judicial protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) affects business performance. We find that establishing IPCs has led to a 14.4% improvement in the business performance of local...

Divestment ist eine Untergruppe nachhaltigkeitsorientierter Finanzstrategien. Absicht von Divestment ist es, die zum Unternehmenssektor gehörenden Förderer und Nutzer fossiler Brennstoffe so-zial zu brandmarken, um sie zu einem Verzicht auf diese Aktivitäten zu zwingen. Im vorliegenden...

Corruption is an endemic societal problem with profound implications in the development of nations. In combating this issue, cross-national evidence supporting the effectiveness of the rule of law seems at odds with poorly realized outcomes from reforms inspired in such literature. This paper...

This paper examines whether there is a rule of law recession among OECD member countries. This formal inquiry is motivated by the recent findings of a democratic recession across several countries with a long tradition of democratic values. I conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses...

Without the rule of law, traders who incur trading costs can be held up by counter-parties who are stronger in anarchic bargaining. The favourable terms which the latter extract can overcrowd that side of the market, dissipating the benefits. We establish plausible necessary and sufficient...

What might lie behind a heterodox approach to legal disputes arising in the struggle for energy resources? Here, the State parties turn to bargained solutions, instead of reaching for remedies available in contracts and in investment treaties, as suggested by the mainstream literature on rule of...

Combining the approaches of three fields of scholarship - political science, law and Russian area studies - the author of this 2002 Oxford University Press book explores the foundations and future of the Russian Federation. Russia's political elite have struggled to build an extraordinarily...

This article focuses on the difficult relationship between the fight for the Rule of Law in the EU and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It outlines the connections between the two and then focuses on when and how the Charter could and should play a more significant role in upholding the...

This is the report of a mission of the IMF Legal Department which visited the People's Republic of China in May 1993. The purpose of this mission was to explore the questions: "What does the rule of law mean for the tax system of China? What changes would have to be made to the system to better...

The trade-off between the harms of copyright infringement and the harms to innovation from overzealous enforcement have been central to the copyright debate for decades. US courts have tried to fashion a body of law that strikes a balance between these dangers. Two related trends in copyright...

We estimate the interrelationships among economic institutions, political institutions, openness, and income levels, using identification through heteroskedasticity (IH). We split our cross-national dataset into two sub-samples: (i) colonies versus non-colonies; and (ii) continents aligned on an...