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Secret Law (secret + law)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Law and Criminology100%

Selected Abstracts

Secret Law and the Value of Publicity*

RATIO JURIS, Issue 2 2009
CHRISTOPHER KUTZ
The dangers of secret law from the perspective of democratic accountability are clear, and need no elaboration. But distaste for secret law goes beyond questions of democracy. Since Plato, and continuing through such non-democratic thinkers as Bodin and Hobbes, secret law has been seen as a mark of tyranny, inconsistent with the notion of law itself. This raises both theoretical and practical questions. The theoretical questions involve the consistency of secret law with positivist legal theory. In principle, while a legal system as a whole could not be secret, publicity need not be part of the validity criteria for particular laws. The practical questions arise from the fact that secret laws, and secret governmental operations, are a common and often well-accepted aspect of governmental power. This paper argues that the flaw of secret law goes beyond accountability and beyond efficiency to the role that law plays, and can only play, in situating subjects' understanding of themselves in relation to the state. Secret law, as such, is inconsistent with this fundamental claim of the law to orient us in moral and political space, and undermines the claim to legitimacy of the state's rulers. [source]

The Behavioral Foundations of Trade Secrets: Tangibility, Authorship, and Legality

JOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2006
Yuval Feldman
This article examines whether the nature of information protected by trade secret law affects departing employees' normative judgments of obedience to trade secret law. This examination assesses two main dimensions: tangibility (whether the employee downloaded the confidential information) and authorship (whether the employee developed the confidential information by himself or herself). The data was collected from a nonrandom multi-sourced sample of 260 high-tech employees in Silicon Valley. Tangibility affected almost all the factors that were measured (such as the perceived consensus and participants' own intention to share information), while authorship affected only participants' moral perceptions. Further analysis revealed that the expected social approval of a new employer was the most important mediator of the effect of tangibility on the intention to share trade secrets. [source]

Secret Law and the Value of Publicity*

RATIO JURIS, Issue 2 2009
CHRISTOPHER KUTZ
The dangers of secret law from the perspective of democratic accountability are clear, and need no elaboration. But distaste for secret law goes beyond questions of democracy. Since Plato, and continuing through such non-democratic thinkers as Bodin and Hobbes, secret law has been seen as a mark of tyranny, inconsistent with the notion of law itself. This raises both theoretical and practical questions. The theoretical questions involve the consistency of secret law with positivist legal theory. In principle, while a legal system as a whole could not be secret, publicity need not be part of the validity criteria for particular laws. The practical questions arise from the fact that secret laws, and secret governmental operations, are a common and often well-accepted aspect of governmental power. This paper argues that the flaw of secret law goes beyond accountability and beyond efficiency to the role that law plays, and can only play, in situating subjects' understanding of themselves in relation to the state. Secret law, as such, is inconsistent with this fundamental claim of the law to orient us in moral and political space, and undermines the claim to legitimacy of the state's rulers. [source]