Documents Deakin, Simon 72 results

"One of the principal tasks for legal research at the beginning of the 21st century is to reconstruct the understanding of the relationship between the legal system and the market order. After almost three decades of deregulation driven by a belief in the self-equilibrating properties of the market, the financial crisis of 2008 has reminded everyone of the fundamental truth that markets have legal and institutional foundations, without which they cannot effectively function. The chapters in the present volume are the result of work by a group of legal scholars which began in the mid-2000s, at a time when the shortcomings of deregulatory policies were becoming clear in a number of contexts. The chapters address the question of how the language of contract law describes or conceptualises the market order and the relationship of the law to it. The perspectives taken are, in turn, historical, comparative, and context-specific. The focus of the book is on a foundational idea, the concept of capacitas, which signifies a status conferred upon citizens for the purpose of enabling them to participate in the economic life of the polity. In modern legal systems, 'capacity' is the principal juridical mechanism by which individuals and entities are empowered to enter into legally binding agreements and, more generally, to arrange their affairs using the instruments of private law. Legal capacity is thereby the gateway to involvement in the operations of a market economy."

"The timing and nature of industrialization in Britain and continental Europe had significant consequences for the growth and development of labour market institutions, effects which are still felt today and which are visible in the conceptual structure of labour law and company law in different countries. However, contrary to the claims of the legal origin hypothesis, a liberal model of contract was more influential in the civilian systems of the continent than in the English common law, where the consequences of early industrialization included the lingering influence of master–servant legislation and the weak institutionalization of the juridical form of the contract of employment. Claims for a strong-form legal origin effect, which is time invariant and resistant to pressures for legal convergence, are not borne out by a growing body of historical evidence and time-series data. The idea that legal cultures can influence the long-run path of economic development is worthy of closer empirical investigation, but it is premature to use legal origin theory as a basis for policy initiatives."

"The case of the British minimum wage illustrates the interplay of ideas and interests in the making of labour legislation. In the 1980s, the pragmatic and data-driven approach of the Cambridge School, associated with the Department of Applied Economics (DAE), advanced a case for the minimum wage which combined fairness and efficiency justifications. Through collaboration with trade unions and think tanks, the argument was mobilized into an activistled campaign which changed political perceptions of the minimum wage. During the 1990s the campaign looked to have failed, as a more conventional economics informed the passage of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998. In the long run, however, the case made by the Cambridge School has endured, to inform today's global movement for a living wage."

"The concept of the ‘Capitalocene' draws attention to the origins of the climate crisis in capitalist dynamics, and specifically to the need for natural resources to be reproduced for less than their true cost if firms are to remain profitable. This insight suggests that the environmental crisis, manifested by extreme climate events, and the crisis in labour law, manifested by wage suppression and rising inequality, have the same root cause. Bringing production and reproduction back into balance will require changes of a structural kind to the global economy, and a rethinking of the law-nature nexus."

"Leximetric data coding techniques aim to measure cross-national and inter-temporal variations in the content of legal rules, thereby facilitating statistical analysis of legal systems and their social and economic impacts. In this article we explain how leximetric methods were used to create the CBR Labour Regulation Index (CBR-LRI), an index and related dataset of labour laws from around the world spanning the period from 1970 to 2013. Datasets of this kind must, we suggest, observe certain conventions of transparency and validity if they are to be usable in statistical analysis. The theoretical framework informing the construction of the dataset and the types of questions which it is are designed to answer should be made explicit. Then the choices involved in the selection of indicators, the definition of coding algorithms, and the aggregation and weighting of data to create composite measures, must be spelled out. In addition, primary legal sources should be referenced, and it should be clear how they were used to generate reported values. With these points in mind we provide an overview of the CBR-LRI dataset's main features and structure, discuss issues of weighting, and present some initial findings on what it reveals of global trends in labour regulation."