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Legal Approach (legal + approach)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences40%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting40%

Selected Abstracts

Investor Protections and Concentrated Ownership: Assessing Corporate Control Mechanisms in the Netherlands

GERMAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2004
Robert Chirinko
Corporate governance; legal approach; the Netherlands Abstract. The Berle,Means problem , information and incentive asymmetries disrupting relations between knowledgeable managers and remote investors , has remained a durable issue engaging researchers since the 1930s. However, the Berle,Means paradigm , widely dispersed, helpless investors facing strong, entrenched managers , is under stress in the wake of the cross-country evidence presented by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny, and their legal approach to corporate control. This paper continues to investigate the roles of investor protections and concentrated ownership by examining firm behaviour in the Netherlands. Our within-country analysis generates two key results. First, the role of investor protections emphasized in the legal approach is not sustained. Rather, firm performance is enhanced when the firm is freed of equity market constraints. Second, ownership concentration does not have a discernible impact on firm performance, which may reflect large shareholders' dual role in lowering the costs of managerial agency problems but raising the agency costs of expropriation. [source]

From massacre to the genocidal process

INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 174 2002
Jacques Sémelin
Since the time of Raphael Lemkin's work, genocide studies have been conducted primarily at the intersection of law and social science. As a result, the term ,genocide' has frequently been employed in a normative sense, leading to considerable conceptual difficulties and debate. How can such problems be overcome? This article comes down firmly in favour of moving away from a legal approach to genocide studies. It recommends the use of non-normative vocabulary based on the concept of ,massacre', this term being suggested as a reference lexical unit. It also puts forward the more general expression ,destruction process', whose most dramatic form is massacre. Massacre is not an act of actual ,madness' but the response to what the author calls ,delusional rationality'. In that respect, he distinguishes between two destruction strategies: one aimed at a group's subjugation and the other at its eradication. It is in the latter case that one can refer to a genocidal process. This article thus considers that genocide should not be defined as a static concept but viewed rather as a particular dynamic of civilian destruction, being the product of both its perpetrators' will and of favourable circumstances. [source]

Treatment Decisions for Critically Ill Infants: The Abrogation of the Best Interests Standard

JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL, Issue 3 2004
FRANK I. CLARK
ABSTRACT The issue of withholding or withdrawing medical treatment from seriously ill newborns first gained the attention of the American public in 1982 when Baby Doe was allowed to die without surgery. Since that time, the predominant ethical, medical, and legal approach has been one that allows informed parents to make a reasonable medical treatment decision in the best interests of their infant with the concurrence of the health care providers. There has always been a minority that believes every infant should receive full medical treatment without regard to pain and suffering, until that infant dies a natural death. This viewpoint is reflected in recent judicial and legislative proceedings that have either already drastically changed the prevailing standard of care or threaten do so. This article reviews the significance of these changes. [source]

The Effect of Formal Policies and Informal Social Learning On Perceptions of Corporate Ethics: Actions Speak Louder than Codes

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2002
Shirit Kronzon
ABSTRACT This research investigates how two cues in an organizational setting, codes of conduct and company responses to ethical transgressions, affect the kinds of inferences individuals make about the ethical climate of the company. The business community has adopted the legal approach, emphasizing that the ethical climate of a corporation can be effectively mandated in a code. However, social psychological analysis intuits that management can define the ethical climate more powerfully through their overt actions. Study 1 and Study 2 find that it is not so much the presence/absence or strength of a code but how a company responds to violations of the code that influences how ethical a company will be judged. Study 3 examined motives for establishing a code, and showed that a company was judged as more unethical when its code was motivated by situational constraints. Employees' ethical judgments are critical to their acceptance of ethical conduct. [source]

Foucault, Rape, and the Construction of the Feminine Body

HYPATIA, Issue 1 2000
ANN J. CAHILL
In 1977, Michel Foucault suggested that legal approaches to rape define it as merely an act of violence, not of sexuality, and therefore not distinct from other types of assaults. I argue that rape can not be considered merely an act of violence because it is instrumental in the construction of the distinctly feminine body. Insofar as the threat of rape is ineluctably, although not determinately, associated with the development of feminine bodily comportment, rape itself holds a host of bodily and sexually specific meanings. [source]