1,720,963 research outputs found
Corporate Law as Decolonization
No full textAfter centuries of colonial subordination, Black and Brown former colonies are still fighting to achieve the fruits of decolonization. The traditional theory is that former colonies will emerge from the colonial period with the legal mandate and international recognition needed to chart their own futures. But, for those Black and Brown British colonies that achieved political independence, it became clear that, without economic strength to care for their societies, legal separation could not deliver on its promise of freedom from subordination. This Article argues that investments in corporate law innovations by some jurisdictions, such as Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, and the Cayman Islands, have provided a pathway to postcolonial self-determination. These communities have generated immense wealth and autonomy for their populations in the postcolonial era by using strategies akin to those deployed by the State of Delaware. While former colonizers denigrate Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and the British Virgin Islands as tax havens and corporate law imperialists, which must be aggressively governed to protect the tax base and financial sectors of “non-tax haven” countries, there is another side to this narrative: Offshore corporate law is freedom-promoting for some communities. This Article complicates the dominant perspective of corporate law imperialism and introduces a conceptualization of corporate law as decolonization to the legal and policy discourse on offshore financial centers
Law, Growth, and the Identity Hurdle: A Theory of Legal Reform
Full text linkThis Article offers a new theoretical approach to understanding resistance to legal change in the corporate and commercial context by introducing the sociological concept of community economic identity (CEI) into legal scholarship. I argue that community leaders (typically, but not exclusively, from the political, legal, and business spheres) generate public and recognizable identities-e.g., Coal Country or Motor City -with respect to some commercial activities. These identities influence how law reform is conceived and deployed within jurisdictional boundaries (i.e., country, state, town, region, etc.). CEI complicates the prevailing public choice narrative regarding the influence of special interests in the law reform process. Efforts to promote efficient legal reforms absent CEI considerations may prove difficult because of the underappreciated social significance of some economic activities to a community. For example, an old automobile manufacturing plant may still anchor a towns economic identity decades after the jobs have gone. Hopes of return to a past era when automobile manufacturing reigned supreme may lead the local community to resist regulations that are perceived as undermining a future for the industry. The local perception may be that important aspects of social relationships in that community are tied to the identity industry and are a form of social glue that helps to bind the community. Reforms that undermine this relationship are therefore seen as socially harmful, even if they are economically beneficial. I make the case that, while political-economy explanations for laws role in business regulations are plentiful and invaluable, complementary sociological analysis helps to provide a richer and more comprehensive understanding of why communities may choose or resist specific legal reforms
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Equality Offshore
No full textGlobal governance architecture, crafted by wealthy nations, has perpetuated the subordination of developing jurisdictions. The Article offers a novel and surprising analysis of governance tools used by wealthy countries and inter-governmental organizations to constrain offshore financial centers (OFCs) by focusing on the tools’ disparate impacts on tax havens whose populations comprise predominantly Black and Brown people. With tax haven issues garnering increasing attention, this Article provides a pathbreaking conceptual framework for examining the international tax, crime, and business discourse on OFCs. It also illuminates how the actions of powerful international actors, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU), risk exacerbating the subordination of marginalized jurisdictions.
This Article makes four core contributions to the OFC literature. First, it argues that the current global governance architecture that is premised on the containment and eventual elimination of OFCs inflicts harms disproportionately on small developing countries, such as post-colonial jurisdictions and overseas territories. This approach uses a “hatchet” method that focuses on blunt instruments such as economic coercion and “lists” of non-cooperating jurisdictions to uniformly constrain a diverse set of jurisdictions. This uniform approach ignores the differences between wealthier, developed, and politically influential countries like Switzerland, on one hand, and developing, post-colonial jurisdictions like Barbados, on the other hand. A more nuanced, targeted “scalpel” approach would identify differences between jurisdictions and employ tools that cause the least harm to more vulnerable locales.
Second, this Article explains that global governance “lists” that “name and shame” jurisdictions fail to adequately consider how small countries conceptualize and use their limited administrative capabilities for economic development. Third, it highlights how offshore financial services help to build judicial capacity in some smaller developing jurisdictions. Finally, it notes that the offshore financial services sector can be a source of economic identity for the communities within some of these jurisdictions and discusses the implications of this complicating factor for the pursuit of global governance agendas
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Regulatory Competition and State Capacity
No full textThis Article explores an underlying tension in the regulatory competition literature regarding why some jurisdictions are more attractive to firms than others. It pays special attention to offshore financial centers (OFCs). OFCs court the business of nonresidents, offer business friendly regulatory environments, and provide for minimal, if any, taxation on their customers. On the one extreme, OFCs are theorized as merely products of legislative capture— thereby lacking any meaningful agency of their own. On the other hand, OFCs are conceptualized as well-governed jurisdictions that attract investment because of the high quality of their laws and legal institutions—indicating some ability to manage legislative capture. This Article argues that the prevailing explanatory frameworks for OFC development and success overlook deeper institutional structures within these jurisdictions. Drawing on the political sociology literature on state development, this Article offers a new theoretical framework. It suggests that some OFCs may have experienced more success than others because of how they developed “state capacity”—i.e., their ability to formulate and implement specific kinds of policy choices skillfully and effectively. This Article makes two important contributions to the regulatory competition and OFC literatures. First, it places the institutional quality of jurisdictions at the center of the discourse and analysis of OFC achievements in the business law arena. Second, it introduces the interdisciplinary concept of “state capacity” into the growing scholarly debate concerning the rise of OFCs
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Law, Growth, and the Identity Hurdle: A Theory of Legal Reform
No full textThis Article offers a new theoretical approach to understanding resistance to legal change in the corporate and commercial context by introducing the sociological concept of community economic identity (CEI) into legal scholarship. I argue that community leaders (typically, but not exclusively, from the political, legal, and business spheres) generate public and recognizable identities-e.g., Coal Country or Motor City -with respect to some commercial activities. These identities influence how law reform is conceived and deployed within jurisdictional boundaries (i.e., country, state, town, region, etc.). CEI complicates the prevailing public choice narrative regarding the influence of special interests in the law reform process. Efforts to promote efficient legal reforms absent CEI considerations may prove difficult because of the underappreciated social significance of some economic activities to a community. For example, an old automobile manufacturing plant may still anchor a towns economic identity decades after the jobs have gone. Hopes of return to a past era when automobile manufacturing reigned supreme may lead the local community to resist regulations that are perceived as undermining a future for the industry. The local perception may be that important aspects of social relationships in that community are tied to the identity industry and are a form of social glue that helps to bind the community. Reforms that undermine this relationship are therefore seen as socially harmful, even if they are economically beneficial. I make the case that, while political-economy explanations for laws role in business regulations are plentiful and invaluable, complementary sociological analysis helps to provide a richer and more comprehensive understanding of why communities may choose or resist specific legal reforms
Equality Offshore
Full text linkGlobal governance architecture, crafted by wealthy nations, has perpetuated the subordination of developing jurisdictions. The Article offers a novel and surprising analysis of governance tools used by wealthy countries and inter-governmental organizations to constrain offshore financial centers (OFCs) by focusing on the tools’ disparate impacts on tax havens whose populations comprise predominantly Black and Brown people. With tax haven issues garnering increasing attention, this Article provides a pathbreaking conceptual framework for examining the international tax, crime, and business discourse on OFCs. It also illuminates how the actions of powerful international actors, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU), risk exacerbating the subordination of marginalized jurisdictions.
This Article makes four core contributions to the OFC literature. First, it argues that the current global governance architecture that is premised on the containment and eventual elimination of OFCs inflicts harms disproportionately on small developing countries, such as post-colonial jurisdictions and overseas territories. This approach uses a “hatchet” method that focuses on blunt instruments such as economic coercion and “lists” of non-cooperating jurisdictions to uniformly constrain a diverse set of jurisdictions. This uniform approach ignores the differences between wealthier, developed, and politically influential countries like Switzerland, on one hand, and developing, post-colonial jurisdictions like Barbados, on the other hand. A more nuanced, targeted “scalpel” approach would identify differences between jurisdictions and employ tools that cause the least harm to more vulnerable locales.
Second, this Article explains that global governance “lists” that “name and shame” jurisdictions fail to adequately consider how small countries conceptualize and use their limited administrative capabilities for economic development. Third, it highlights how offshore financial services help to build judicial capacity in some smaller developing jurisdictions. Finally, it notes that the offshore financial services sector can be a source of economic identity for the communities within some of these jurisdictions and discusses the implications of this complicating factor for the pursuit of global governance agendas
Offshore Entanglements
No full textFor decades, scholars have struggled to determine how to deploy laws and legal institutions to spur economic prosperity. But, without knowing which legal rules and institutions to prioritize for a particular social context, the outcomes have been generally unsatisfactory. The case of offshore financial centers provides fresh and compelling new insights into this puzzle. This Article uses the sociological concept of community economic identity (“CEI”) to understand why some offshore financial centers prioritize investments in legal institutions that bolster their offshore finance enterprises while others do not. CEI refers to a community’s shared identity that is linked to a specific commercial enterprise.
Some offshore financial centers, such as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (“UKOTs”) of Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, and Cayman Islands, have developed CEIs around their offshore sectors. This identity has led them to make credible and enduring commitments to legal rules and institutions — innovative corporate laws, financial regulatory agencies, and specialized commercialized courts — that directly support offshore finance activities. Other offshore financial centers, such as the UKOTs of Anguilla, Montserrat, and Turks and Caicos Islands, have not developed a CEI around offshore financial services and lack these sorts of legal and institutional investments. These jurisdictions have also not seen the same level of offshore finance success as Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, and Caymans Islands. CEI may therefore be relevant to determining which legal rules and institutions are appropriate to a particular jurisdiction’s economic prosperity
Offshore Entanglements
Full text linkFor decades, scholars have struggled to determine how to deploy laws and legal institutions to spur economic prosperity. But, without knowing which legal rules and institutions to prioritize for a particular social context, the outcomes have been generally unsatisfactory. The case of offshore financial centers provides fresh and compelling new insights into this puzzle. This Article uses the sociological concept of community economic identity (“CEI”) to understand why some offshore financial centers prioritize investments in legal institutions that bolster their offshore finance enterprises while others do not. CEI refers to a community’s shared identity that is linked to a specific commercial enterprise.
Some offshore financial centers, such as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (“UKOTs”) of Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, and Cayman Islands, have developed CEIs around their offshore sectors. This identity has led them to make credible and enduring commitments to legal rules and institutions — innovative corporate laws, financial regulatory agencies, and specialized commercialized courts — that directly support offshore finance activities. Other offshore financial centers, such as the UKOTs of Anguilla, Montserrat, and Turks and Caicos Islands, have not developed a CEI around offshore financial services and lack these sorts of legal and institutional investments. These jurisdictions have also not seen the same level of offshore finance success as Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, and Caymans Islands. CEI may therefore be relevant to determining which legal rules and institutions are appropriate to a particular jurisdiction’s economic prosperity
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