Academic

Democracy Part XX: Democracy Without Elections in Honduras

Posted on December 04, 2009
On June 28, 2009, the sitting President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was removed from office and sent forcibly into exile at the instigation of the Honduran Supreme Court and Legislature., and through the offices of the Honduran military The actions were branded by many as a?constitutional coup? and condemned by many states...

Participate in Online Forum: Business and Human Rights

Posted on December 01, 2009
Christine Bader, Adviser to the U.S. Secretary General's Special Representative on Business and Human Rights (John Ruggie) has just announced the commencement of an important participatory vehicle for individuals and organizations interested in contributing to the developing transnational framework for regulating the human rights impacting conduct of economic enterprises...

Democracy Part XIX: Electoral Legitimacy in Honduras and Afghanistan

Posted on November 29, 2009
In this age of mass democracy, elections are the essence of democratic constitutionalism. Elections, like some purifying elixir, cleanses all (political) sin of states that indulge the practice. An act of sovereign will by which the people of a state convey their political power to agents who act on their behalf, elections conform the appropriate relationship between state apparatus and the sovereign masses...

Honduras Between Restoration and Legitimacy

Posted on November 27, 2009
The Honduran constitutional crisis continues to lurch toward its messy end. At the insistence of the international community, both sets of protagonists in the conflict agered to s set of extra constitutional actions that were meant to restore Mr. Zelaya to his office and ensure that the legitimacy of upcoming elections would be recognized...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Pluralism and Power: South Africa Confronts Hierarchy in Diversity

Posted on November 24, 2009
Pluralism, or its cousin, multiculturalism, might suggest a more horizontal relationship among different communities sharing the same territorial space. It suggests mutual respect and toleration. It also might suggest a willingness, among a political community, to abandon notions of assimilation to a dominant discourse and a dominant framework for inclusion...

Escape Velocity From the Orbit of the State: Is Governance Without Government/Government Without the State Possible?

Posted on November 10, 2009
Set out below are some preliminary thought on the question posed by the title of this essay--is it possible to reach escape velocity from the orbit of the state, and state-law systems? In other words, is it possible to conceive of governance without government, or better put, government without the state? While there appear to be no clear answers to me (for those with different or more elaborate views I welcome comments), I explore the possibility of such a state of "statelessness" in the materials that follow...

Disciplining Education

Posted on November 08, 2009
It has long been true that the control of educational institutions have been a principal site for the control of social, cultural and political norms within a society. Everyone, from John Dewey to Fidel Castro and John Paul II, has understood that education is less about the production and dissemination of knowledge than it is about the production of citizens fully (to the extent possible) assimilated to whatever objective is required of its "pupils...

Who Owns the Name of God? The Malaysian Government Knows!

Posted on November 05, 2009
Who Owns the Name of God? One would at first suspect that the answer is that the Divine Presence owns its own name, or at least all of the variations through which humans attempt to provide a means of communicating about the Divine Presence (or speaking of it with reference to the religious traditions of others)...

Part II: The OECD, Vedanta, & the Indian Supreme Court?Polycentricity, Transnational Corporate Governance and John Ruggie?s Protect/Respect Framework

Posted on November 03, 2009
In Part I of this essay, Larry Catá Backer, Part I: The OECD, Vedanta, and the Supreme Court of India?Polycentricity in Transnational Governance--The Issue of Standing, Law at the End of the Day, Nov. 1, 2009, I posited that the state system remains stubbornly grounded in a monocentric view of law and regulation, even as it implements polycentric governance systems through intergovernmental and other international organizations...

Part I: The OECD, Vedanta, and the Supreme Court of India?Polycentricity in Transnational Governance--The Issue of Standing

Posted on November 01, 2009
The state system remains stubbornly grounded in a monocentric view of law and regulation, even as it works to construct increasingly relevant multi-level systems of soft governance. ?Here the great difficulty is defining the scope of the obligations to be imposed, formally and socially, on enterprises...

Transnational Constitutionalism Triumphant: The End of the Honduran Constitutional Crisis

Posted on October 31, 2009
?A constitution without legitimacy is no constitution at all. It is outside the law in the sense that it ought to be respected by the community against which it is applied. . . . Legitimacy is a function of values, which in turn serve as the foundation of constitutionalism...

Curriculum Reform and Emerging Class Structures in Legal Education

Posted on October 28, 2009
Curriculum reform continues to occupy much thinking within the American legal academy. For a review of some contemporary issues and distinct approaches to resolving them, see, e.g., Larry Catá Backer, Georgia State University Hosts International Conference on the Future of Legal Education, Law at the End of the Day, Feb...

Remodeling Kenya's Political System on a Chinese Foundation

Posted on October 24, 2009
I have suggested the importance of the Chinese model of state organization for both constitutionalist theory and the organization of states on the basis of a rule of law order quite distinct from that natural in the West. See, Larry Catá Backer, The Rule of Law, the Chinese Communist Party, and Ideological Campaigns: Sange Daibiao (the 'Three Represents'), Socialist Rule of Law, and Modern Chinese Constitutionalism...

Podcast of Presentation at Penn State: "The Party as Polity"

Posted on October 21, 2009
I recently presented my paper, ?The Party as Polity, the Communist Party, and the Chinese Constitutional State: A Theory of State-Party Constitutionalism,? as part of Pennsylvania State University Law School's Scholarly Dialogue's program. In this work I sought to apply emerging principles of constitutional theory to the party-state model of governance in China, and to articulate a way that state-party governance and the traditional western understanding of a constitutional guarantee of the rule of law can co-exist...

On Challenges to Operationalizing a Transnational Framework for Business and Human Rights--the View From Geneva

Posted on October 13, 2009
"On 5-6 October 2009, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) held a consultation: "Operationalizing the framework for business and human rights presented by the Special Representative" -- the "Protect, Respect, Remedy" framework [PDF] proposed by Special Representative Ruggie in his 2008 report to the UN Human Rights Council...

On the Malleability of Genocide--Turkey Between Armenia, Israel and China

Posted on October 12, 2009
Genocide has proven to be an elastic concept since the Second World War. It has become a powerful accusation that can serve to de-legitimate regimes who are successfully accused of the practice. Its meaning, once thought to be fairly clear has assumed something of a political overlay as communities of states fight with each other to keep members of their respective camps from being accused of acts of genocide...

Rewarding the American State Apparatus for Good Behavior: Understanding and the Awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mr. Obama

Posted on October 09, 2009
This blog site joins the great chorus of people and institutions in raising a loud hosanna to the genius of the global community now manifested in the form of the recent decision of the Nobel organization to award its prize for peace to the American President, Barack Obama...

Al-Qaida in China

Posted on October 08, 2009
The Jerusalem Post recently reported that al Qaeda appears to have assessed itself strong enough to take on the Chinese in Xinjiang.Al Qaida spokesmen announced on Thursday that the organization's militants would soon begin to work towards "freeing their Muslim country," referring to China...

When Collectivist Economies Meet Sovereign Investing: Dubai Ports in Cuba

Posted on October 04, 2009
Over the last decade, Cuba has sought to revivify the concept of state to state economic activity. As one of the last bastions of organization on the model of the old Stalinist collectivist state apparatus, Cuba has long sought to convince others that this form of economic organization, substantially discredited after the fall of the Soviet Union and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, can be efficient enough...

On Autonomy and Complexity in the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund

Posted on October 02, 2009
A few weeks ago I noted the announcement of a restructuring of the capital of the Chinese sovereign investment vehicle, the China Investment Corporation, and changes to dividend policies of potential effect to its operation. See Larry Catá Backer, On SWF Autonomy: Restructuring the China Investment Corporation, Law at the End of the Day, September 20, 2009...

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: The Rise and Fall of Shoe Throwing as a Media Sanctioned Political Event

Posted on October 01, 2009
The use of the media for the projection of potent political speech is a dangerous business. News cycles are short; and the power to ridicule is as great as the power to elevate symbolic speech. So it is with shoe throwing. For a brief moment, when the media campaigns favored decisive action against the then sitting President of the United States and the reformulation of American policy in Iraq, shoe throwing became a grand political gesture that earned the appearance of weighty thought, and perhaps even thinly disguised approval...

"Diana: A Celebration": Celebrity as a Status Power Marker in an Age of Mass Democracy

Posted on September 29, 2009
The Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau recently announced:Even more than a decade after her untimely death, Princess Diana remains an adored and admired figure. In the fall of 2009, the National Constitution Center hosts Diana: A Celebration, a tribute to the Princess of Wales, remembering her inspirational and magical life that captivated people from every walk of life, everywhere in the world...

The Financial Stability Board and Global Financial Governance After the September 2009 G20 Conclave

Posted on September 26, 2009
The Financial Stability Board, a little known inter governmental amalgamation of economic regulatory authorities from G20 states has come into it own with the release of three significant reports at the end of the September meeting of the G-20 recently concluded in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...

The Other Shoe Drops--Brazilian Interventionism in Honduras

Posted on September 23, 2009
I had suggested yesterday that the miraculous entry of Mr. Zelaya into Honduras and his equally fortuitous admission into a Brazilian Embassy in the Honduran capital just when coincidentally enough the bulk of the Brazilian staff was elsewhere suggested that these events were being orchestrated by Brazil to topple the Honduran state and replace it with a person more to Mr...

Democracy Part XVIII-- Constitutional Caudillismo: End Games in Honduras

Posted on September 22, 2009
There is something refreshing about international relations when old patterns are embraced by actors new to their roles. The freshness intensifies where those patterns also hearken back to more traditional days yet point forward to new notions of constitutional hierarchy...

Transnational Corporate Constitutionalism?

Posted on September 21, 2009
I was fortunate to have recently participated in the excellent program, The Constitutionalization of the Global Corporate Sphere?, hosted by the International Center for Business and Politics, and its director, Lars Bo Kaspersen, of the Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 17-18, 2009...

A Chinese Perspective on Cuban Economic Reform

Posted on September 20, 2009
It it commonly understood that China may not be a good model for Cuban economic reform. See Larry Catá Backer, Cuban Corporate Governance at the Crossroads: Cuban Marxism, Private Economic Collectives and Free Market Globalism. Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, Vol...

On SWF Autonomy: Restructuring the China Investment Corporation

Posted on September 20, 2009
The China Investment Corporation, the Chinese sovereign Wealth Fund, is the principle organ of Chinese sovereign investing. I have suggested the nature of that investing in recent work. See, Larry Catá Backer, Sovereign Investing in Times of Crisis: Global Regulation of Sovereign Wealth Funds, State Owned Enterprises and the Chinese Experience, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, Vol...

From Narrative to Narrator: Remarks at "Business Law and Narrative Symposium" at MSU

Posted on September 16, 2009
It was my great privilege to have participated in the recently concluded conference, "Business Law and Narrative" sponsored by the Michigan State University College of Law, September 11, 2009., organized by MSU's Mae Kykendall Larry Ribstein has written of portions of that conference, centered on his most interesting engagement with the cultural management of the financial crisis and its implications for regulations as well as for conceptions of the normal in American business...

On the Horizen--Brazil-China Trade Competititon in a Complex BRIC Relationship

Posted on September 12, 2009
In traditional developed states elites, and their media outlets, tend to think about the so-called BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) as some sort of monolith. Each serves as a separate strand that together is bound to do any number of things with or to developed states...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.