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Legal Changes (legal + change)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Law and Criminology	46%
Humanities and Social Sciences	38%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	15%

Selected Abstracts

Legal Change and Gender Inequality: Changes in Muslim Family Law in India

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2008
Narendra Subramanian
Group-specific family laws are said to provide women fewer rights and impede policy change. India's family law systems specific to religious groups underwent important gender-equalizing changes over the last generation. The changes in the laws of the religious minorities were unexpected, as conservative elites had considerable indirect influence over these laws. Policy elites changed minority law only if they found credible justification for change in group laws, group norms, and group initiatives, not only in constitutional rights and transnational human rights law. Muslim alimony and divorce laws were changed on this basis, giving women more rights without abandoning cultural accommodation. Legal mobilization and the outlook of policy makers,specifically their approach to regulating family life, their understanding of group norms, and their normative vision of family life,shaped the major changes in Indian Muslim law. More gender-equalizing legal changes are possible based on the same sources. [source]

Definitions of the Family as an Impetus for Legal Change in Custody Decision Making: Suggestions from an Empirical Case Study

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 1 2006
Mellisa Holtzman
Legal scholars and social scientists are increasingly calling on legislators, lawyers, and judges to recognize and embrace expanding definitions of the family. Implicit in such calls is the expectation that legal recognition of expanding definitions of the family will protect children's attachment relationships with adults, irrespective of their biological ties to those adults. Through a detailed, historical examination of custody decisions in disputes between biological and nonbiological parents in the state of Iowa, this research suggests that judicial recognition of more expansive definitions may not result in decisions that protect children's attachment relationships. This is true because the legal impact of family definitions appears to be contingent upon cultural and political factors that may undermine the expected effects of changing definitions. This research also suggests that judicial recognition of children's rights may be the most apt way to promote legal changes that will protect children's attachment relationships. [source]

Preemptive Self-defense: Hegemony, Equality and Strategies of Legal Change,

THE JOURNAL OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, Issue 2 2003
Michael Byers
First page of article [source]

Assessing the long-run economic impact of labour law systems: a theoretical reappraisal and analysis of new time series data

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL, Issue 6 2008
Simon Deakin
ABSTRACT Standard economic theory sees labour law as an exogenous interference with market relations and predicts mostly negative impacts on employment and productivity. We argue for a more nuanced theoretical position: labour law is, at least in part, endogenous, with both the production and the application of labour law norms influenced by national and sectoral contexts, and by complementarities between the institutions of the labour market and those of corporate governance and financial markets. Legal origin may also operate as a force shaping the content of the law and its economic impact. Time-series analysis using a new data set on legal change from the 1970s to the mid-2000s shows evidence of positive correlations between regulation and growth in employment and productivity, at least for France and Germany. No relationship, either positive or negative, is found for the UK and, although the United States shows a weak negative relationship between regulation and employment growth, this is offset by productivity gains. [source]

Law and Finance in Transition Economies

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 2 2000
Katharina Pistor
This paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of legal change in the protection of shareholder and creditor rights in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. Following La Porta et al. (1998), the paper constructs an expanded set of legal indices to capture a range of potential conflicts between different stakeholders of the firm. It supplements the analysis of the law on the books with an analysis of the effectiveness of legal institutions. Our main finding is that the effectiveness of legal institutions has a much stronger impact on external finance than does the law on the books, despite legal change that has substantially improved shareholder and creditor rights. This finding supports the proposition that legal transplants and extensive legal reforms are not sufficient for the evolution of effective legal and market institutions. [source]

Environmental supply chain management, ISO 14001 and RoHS.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 6 2008
How are small companies in the electronics sector managing?
Abstract This study explores the use of environmental management systems for initiating and controlling environmental improvements in the context of supply chain cooperation. It examines how environmental requirements are reaching smaller companies in the electronics supply chain, especially in the light of recent legal changes such as enforcement of the RoHS Directive. It is based on qualitative interviews with environmental and purchasing managers of 21 small and medium-sized companies. The results point out a lack of significant drivers for these companies to implement proactive measures when dealing with environmental issues, owing to limited customer pressure. RoHS and legal compliance are the only environmental customer criteria to be met, while ISO 14001 works as an optional supplier selection criterion. In consequence, companies are not focusing on environmental work within their supply chains, and the potential of influencing the environmental profile of suppliers by shaping their ISO 14001 is not used. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]

Legal Change and Gender Inequality: Changes in Muslim Family Law in India

Definitions of the Family as an Impetus for Legal Change in Custody Decision Making: Suggestions from an Empirical Case Study

Citizenship and family life in Ireland: asking the question,Who belongs'?

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2005
Siobhán Mullally
Citizenship laws provide us with models of membership. They define the terms on which strangers and natives belong to political communities, allocating both the benefits of membership and the brutalities of exclusion. Recent legal changes in Ireland, restricting the right to citizenship by birth and limiting the rights of migrant families, highlight the vulnerability of children in migrant families and the limits of citizenship status. Many other states have grappled in recent times with the right to citizenship by birth and the entitlements to family life that come with such a claim. In both the UK and Australia the jus soli principle has been significantly restricted. In the US, Canada and elsewhere, while the jus soli principle continues to apply, citizen children born to undocumented migrant parents are subject to de facto deportations, their right to membership of the nation-stute,postponed'because of the legal status of their parents. In challenges to deportation proceedings involving such children, the perspective of the child as a bearer of rights is marginalised, with disputes turning largely on the balancing of states'interests in immigration control against the residence claims made by migrunt parents. [source]

The Social Life of Rights: ,Gender Antagonism', Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2008
John P. Taylor
In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ,Violence Against Men'. Members of this ,backlash' movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western-style ,women's rights' is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long-delayed) ,Family Protection Bill'. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ,natural'kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio-economic productivity of the nation-state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ,rights' should consider the specific historical, political and socio-cultural circumstances in which they are put to use. [source]

Tackling Offending on Bail

THE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 2 2000
Anthea Hucklesby
During the early 1990s the problem of offending on bail attracted a great deal of attention from politicians, the police, the media and the general public resulting in new legislation aimed at tackling the problem. The bail provisions in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (CJ&PO Act 1994) were one of these initiatives. This Act, inter alia, removed the presumption of bail for defendants who have allegedly committed certain types of offences on bail and enabled the police to attach conditions to police bail. This article discusses the main findings of a research project commissioned by the Home Office to investigate the impact of some of these legal changes. The research found that the provisions had had little practical effect on the number of defendants who had allegedly committed offences on bail who were remanded in custody. It did, however, identify an increase in the number of such defendants who were granted bail with conditions. Changes were found in remand decisions for two groups of defendants: those charged with serious offences who already had a bail history and defendants charged with vehicle crime and burglary. It will be argued that these changes reflected broader political and media debate about offending on bail rather than the legal changes incorporated into the CJ&PO Act 1994. [source]

The ,Feminisation of Poverty' in Costa Rica: To What Extent a Conundrum?

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 1 2009
SYLVIA CHANT
Quantitative data from Costa Rica suggest that poverty is ,feminising', especially in respect of female-headed households, who, since the early 1990s, have constituted a progressively greater share of the population classified as poor. This presents something of a conundrum given significant attempts on the part of the state to promote gender equality and to direct public expenditure to low-income women. Some light on this apparent paradox is shed by qualitative fieldwork undertaken in Guanacaste province where female headship seems to have become a more viable, and sometimes, preferred, option among women on account of its role in enhancing well-being. This is largely on account of social and legal changes that have contributed to making women less inclined to tolerate gender inequalities at the domestic level. The findings underline the importance of embracing gendered subjectivities in analyses of the ,feminisation of poverty' and invite caution about the latter being a unilaterally negative phenomenon. [source]