This chapter traces political party development in Kenya and India from a comparative and historical perspective. It shows that despite many shared experiences as British colonies, nationalist parties with transoceanic connections to one another, and dominant party structures that endured for several years after independence, party development in the two countries took very different routes in the medium and long terms. In Kenya, the Kenya African National Union (KANU) emerged as a narrow, divisive, and ethnically oriented party. By contrast, the Indian National Congress (INC) developed deep societal roots, penetrated rural areas, and sought to unite Indians across caste and ethnic divides. These divergent trajectories influenced the development of new party entrants and generated differing incentive structures for instrumentalizing party violence in the two countries.

This chapter takes stock of institutional configurations in the New World colonies at the time of the American Revolution. It observes that the same bundle of institutions that made individual colonies autonomous relative to the crown also made them autonomous relative to each other. In turn, this mutual autonomy presented major constraints when American state elites bargained over a national constitution. These bargaining constraints, as well as the institutional models of imperial government, resulted in some of the core institutions of the American state that structure so much policy making today: Federalism, checks and balances with a powerful legislature, judicial review, and even specific executive bureaucracies. The chapter concludes with a summary of the book’s argument.

This introductory chapter lays out the historical background of English New World colonization and sketches the argument of the book. It explains the English crown’s formal authority over colonization and introduces the principal–agent perspective as a framework to analyze the crown’s use of that authority. The chapter lays out the concept of contractual imperialism, or the early crown’s policy of early colonization embedded in letters patent to private colonizers, and of regulatory imperialism, or the later crown’s policy of regulating colonial political economies.

This chapter explores the intersection of transnational law with contemporary corporate governance laws and principles. Corporate governance, with its complex array of public and private actors, fits naturally within the modern concept of transnational law as a species of law that "can no longer be viewed through a purely national lens." Financial markets today are global and interconnected and events, such as the 2007-2009 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis, exemplify the risk of contagion across those markets. Not only can corporate governance problems transcend national boundaries, so too can their solutions, which often involve regulatory efforts that operate at a transnational level. The chapter explores, from a transnational perspective, the transmission of laws and norms that are designed to constrain directors’ conduct and enhance corporate accountability. It focuses on two key examples of such accountability mechanisms-fiduciary duties and corporate codes. The chapter examines, for example, the global transmission of corporate governance and shareholder stewardship codes. These codes, which are a relatively recent phenomenon, play an important role as “norm creators.” The chapter assesses the transmission of laws and norms against the backdrop of convergence and path dependence theories of corporate governance.

Chapter 3 analyses how evidence has become a central element of the FCTC regime (2005–present). Section 3.1 captures the most important developments since the conclusion of the FCTC in 2003. Section 3.2 provides the theoretical framework of the chapter, focusing on the concept of path dependence in international organisations. Section 3.3 proceeds by showing that the development of the guidelines by the FCTC Conference of the Parties (COP) has been in effect a continuation of the strategy on evidence. Section 3.4 in turn highlights the second facet of the FCTC as an evidence-based regime, that is how the FCTC has mobilised new evidence at the national level. Sections 3.5 and 3.6 reflect on the consequences that the evidence-based approach has had on the outlook of the FCTC regime. Section 3.5 uses in-depth qualitative analysis to demonstrate that the evidence-based approach has reinforced the importance of the expertise of civil society organisations. Finally, Section 3.6 illustrates how the evidence-based approach has started to show its shortcomings in the work of the FCTC COP – particularly in the approach to new products like e-cigarettes (or ENDS) and in the (lack of) development of strategies to foster the implementation of tobacco control measures.

Chapter 2 discusses the linkages between technology and environmental sustainability. It starts out with some brief context on key concepts in the contemporary debate: transitions, transformations, and resilience. The chapter continues with two concepts that are central for this book: the idea of the ‘techno-fix’, in the sense of technology potentially providing partial solutions for intractable social- and political problems; and the notion of lock-in, where past technological choices may be difficult to revise or reverse in the present. Further, it develops the notion of technological ‘promises’ and ‘perils’ as key elements of my theoretical framework: transformative novel technologies could produce substantial benefits but also give rise to various types of harm, providing a rationale for governance responses that capture the former and avoid the latter. At the same time, transformative novel technologies tend to be ambiguous as the precise extent to which they entail different types of promises and perils is usually unknown, uncertain or disputed.

Chapter 7 assesses the overall findings of the book and provides outlooks and perspectives. The responses of international institutions to transformative novel technologies are mostly deficient in that they do not meaningfully contribute either to the realization of associated technological promises or to the avoidance of perils. Exceptions do exist, however, particularly where transformative novel technologies have a strong normative fit with pre-existing regulatory frameworks and can thus be assimilated by them with relative ease. The chapter also offers broader reflections on how to improve institutional responses to transformative novel technologies and then goes on to elaborate on some conceptual issues that have emerged in the previous discussion: from technology and path dependence to the role of the precautionary principle to the potential problem of ‘slippery slope’ effects in research and development. The chapter then tentatively discusses how the theoretical framework of this book would apply beyond the environmental domain. I conclude with some final considerations on the notion of ‘techno-fixes’ in the global politics of environmental sustainability.

The chapter examines the corporate governance institutions that developed during the Legal Modernization Era. It analyzes the traditional corporate governance mechanisms, both internal and external to the firm, that were embraced in China and adapted to domestic political–economic circumstances. The chapter discusses how China’s superficially convergent, investor-oriented corporate governance framework actually diverged in practice. It illuminates the political functions of law, showing how the corporate governance framework was ultimately directed to support the reconsolidation of political–economic powers and the shift toward state capitalism. The chapter offers comparative insights drawn from alternative systems of corporate governance and analyzes the implications of the Chinese framework for investors in the Chinese market.

Explaining historical change is difficult because it involves analyzing a moving object. Historical explanations address this problem by dividing historical change into moments of discontinuity and periods of continuity. They explain discontinuities by retracing the generative processes that ultimately produced a change. Historical explanations explain continuities by drawing on path-dependent explanations. Such explanations involve specifying an early mover advantage during a historical discontinuity and following up by identifying so-called increasing return mechanisms that compound the causal effects of the early mover advantage over time. This compounding effect serves to epxlain why certain changes, once they are in place, reproduce themselves and hence endure.

In a tribute to the work and writings of Professor John Bell, leading scholars present essays on factors affecting the course of ‘legal development’ in common law and civilian systems. This introductory chapter draws on their essays and John Bell’s scholarship to reflect on what is distinctive about comparative legal research. It shows how a comparative enquiry expands the boundaries of the law’s domain beyond ‘black-letter’ legal knowledge to embrace the reasons and context for legal development. It reminds us that a comparative law enquiry includes looking at the law’s roots in society, that is, at the law both in action and in the books, the legal institutions, legal cultures, and the extra-legal environment. References to the authors’ case studies in tort, contract, legal history and judicial studies illustrate the discussion of the key features of comparative law research.

Chapter 3 unpacks why national judges broadly eschewed turning to European law and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) when doing so could bolster their own power. It reveals historically rooted practices and knowledge deficits embodied in the trudge of daily work within civil service judiciaries that fostered what I call an “institutional consciousness” of path dependence: An accrued social identity tied to institutional place that magnifies the reputational risks and labor costs of mobilizing European law. This consciousness reifies judges’ sense of distance to Europe, legitimating a renouncement of agency and resistance to change. The core of this chapter revolves around interviews and oral histories with 134 judges across French, Italian, and German courts, contextualized via ethnographic fieldnotes, descriptive statistics, and secondary sources. The chapter will speak to readers interested in a historical and sociological understanding of what path dependence looks, sounds, and feels like in the courthouse, why judges in civil service judiciaries can be likened to street-level bureaucrats, and how immersive fieldwork can illuminate the habitual practices calcifying the behaviors and identities of judges.

The conclusion examines the different influences on contemporary French administrative law. Some distinctive features have their origins in the historical development of French government and the distinctive development of the French administrative courts and legal scholarship. The development of a proper constitutional law in the Fifth Republic has changed the dynamics of the leadership of public law and its sources of influence, mainly by expanding the scope of public law.The existential commitment of France to Europe has created a newer path dependence. EU law and the European Convention shape French public law not only through directly applicable rules, but also as benchmarks and sources of ideas. France and French society belong to global trends which have shaped expectations of the public not only about the administration, but also about the context in which it operates. The rules on public procurement are an example of these wider influences. France is thus distinctive, but at the same time an illustration of wider forces at work in administrative law.

Institutions are essentially temporal, in the sense that, definitionally, they endure. Setting aside the conventional understanding of a historical institutionalism, we focus on the interplay of institutions and temporality. The chapter begins with a conception of time that is complex and social, and identifies four concepts amenable to deeper exploration: duration, tempo, and “temporal location,” which itself involves distinct notions of sequencing and timing. Institutions shape and are shaped by all of these aspects of temporality. The chapter surveys a range of institution-theoretic analyses, combining them in myriad ways via more complex notions such as the power of the institutional status quo, institutional intercurrence, punctuated equilibrium, critical junctures, and path dependence. While temporal approaches offer limited leverage on institutional origins, they show great strength in accounting for dynamic persistence and change, especially insofar as they supply means of understanding the layering and corresponding multiplicity of institutions of distinct temporal profiles operating at any given moment in social life.