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Legal Academics (legal + academic)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Law and Criminology75%

Selected Abstracts

Non-governmental Organisation Participation in the EU Law-making Process: The Example of Social Non-governmental Organisations at the Commission, Parliament and Council

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 5 2008
Israel De Jesús Butler
The Commission's current transparency initiative has focused attention on the rules (or lack of) governing access to the Commission as the initiator of legislation. This article examines more broadly, on the basis of interviews, both the formal and informal means of accessing not only the Commission, but also the European Parliament (in particular through intergroups) as well as the Council. By using specific examples of legislation it illustrates the routes by which ,social' non-governmental organisations currently interact with these institutions, offering examples of how their work may impact on the output of the Commission, Council and Parliament. The article avoids an overly legalistic analysis with an original glimpse at the ,hidden' workings of the EU law-making process which has hitherto received little attention among legal academics and practitioners. [source]

Competition and the Quality of Standard Form Contracts: The Case of Software License Agreements

JOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2008
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler
Standard form contracts are pervasive. Many legal academics believe that they are unfair. Some scholars and some courts have argued that sellers with market power or facing little competitive pressure may impose one-sided standard form terms that limit their obligation to consumers. This article uses a sample of 647 software license agreements drawn from many distinct segments of the software industry to empirically investigate the relationship between competitive conditions and the quality of standard form contracts. I find little evidence for the concern that firms with market power, as measured by market concentration or firm market share, require consumers to accept particularly one-sided terms; that is, firms in both concentrated and unconcentrated software market segments, and firms with high and low market share, offer similar terms to consumers. The results have implications for the judicial analysis of standard form contract enforceability. [source]

Beginning to Write Separately: The Origins and Development of Concurring Judicial Opinions

JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY, Issue 2 2010
CHARLES C. TURNER
Introduction While political scientists and legal academics have both evinced a "fascination with disagreement on courts,"1 this scholarly concentration on conflict rather than consensus has tended to focus on dissent and dissenting opinions. As far as we can tell, there is no authoritative history of concurring opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court. This article is a first effort to correct that oversight by examining developments and change in concurring behavior from the founding through the White Court (1921). This period covers the emergence of an institutionally independent national judicial branch and ends before the start of the modern, policy-making Court era, which we argue begins with the Taft Court and the creation of a fully discretionary docket. [source]

Casaubon's ghosts: the haunting of legal scholarship

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2001
Allan C Hutchinson
Much academic work continues to operate within the cramping and pervasive spirit of a black-letter mentality that encourages scholars and jurists to maintain legal study as an inward-looking and self-contained discipline. There is still a marked tendency to treat law as somehow a world of its own that is separate from the society within which it operates and purports to serve. This is a disheartening and disabling state of affairs. Accordingly, this article will offer both a critique of the present situation and suggest an alternative way of proceeding. The writer recommends a shift from philosophy to democracy so that legal academics will be less obsessed with abstraction and formalism and more concerned with relevance and practicality. In contrast to the hubristic and occasionally mystical aspirations of mainstream scholars, it presents a more humble depiction of the worth and efficacy of the jurisprudential and scholarly project in which ,usefulness' is given pride of place. Of course, these fundamental charges are not applicable to all legal scholars. Many scholars are engaged in work that not only challenges the prevailing paradigm of legal scholarship, but also explores exciting new directions for legal study. It will be part of the essay to acknowledge those contributions. [source]