Scholars have long regarded certain attributes of corporate governance, particularly legal institutions that protect investors, as engines for financial development, capital market expansion, and growth. Yet, the development of China’s market challenges many of the underlying assumptions in those theories and leaves its observers puzzled. Consequently, many have dismissed the role of law in China’s economic development. But they have neglected to consider the political functions of law and how they have bolstered the development of the Chinese market. Part I delineates the conceptual and analytical frameworks underpinning the book. Chapter 1 unpacks the traditional framework that shapes how scholars and policymakers think of corporate governance and its role in financial development and market growth. Chapter 2 offers law and political economy as an alternative analytical framework through which to address the puzzle and the role of law within it.

Political religion is a popular concept for studying totalitarian regimes including the Soviet political regime. In this paper, I contribute to the field by utilizing it for studying Soviet law. I start with brief description of the Soviet political religion and its ideological premisesMarxism-Leninism teachings on state and society. Then I elaborate on what I call “the symbol of faith of Soviet law” a set of ideas or dogmas that exhibit the influence of Soviet political religion on Soviet law. These ideas concern the nature of Soviet law, its role in society and in the movement toward communism, how law interacts with politics and the State, and its relationship with bourgeois law. Then I show how Soviet jurisprudence developed these ideas in what I call “theology of Soviet law”. Finally, by exploring four concepts in Soviet law uniqueness, publicness, politicization, and socialist legality, I try to clarify how and to what extent Soviet political religion influenced the real legal system of the Soviet Union.

This chapter examines the interplay between law and politics in the UK Constitution, highlighting that, in many ways, the study of the UK Constitution is a study of politics as much as a study of law. Two alternative readings of the UK Constitution will be introduced. First, we consider the ‘political’ constitution as outlined by J. A. G. Griffith, before moving on to look at the contrasting ideas associated with legal, or common law, constitutionalism. The political constitution emphasises the primacy of the political process as the constitutional means through which government operates and is regulated. The ideas of legal constitutionalism, by contrast, prioritise the need for law to control governmental activity. In turn, each model envisages a particular role for the courts within the constitution. Courts in the ‘political’ constitution play a limited role, secondary to that of elected politicians. By contrast, legal constitutionalism envisages a more active role for the judges in holding elected politicians to account, envisaging the law as articulating the fundamental guiding principles of the constitution.

An initial glimpse into the ICC courtroom introduces the lead participants on the first day of the Court’s first trial. This chapter contrasts the modern courtroom in The Hague with culturally distant conflicts arising in the Congo, which tested the Court’s stamina for implementing international legal norms. The Court’s legal mission was formulated in the Rome Statute, a treaty accepted after 1998 by some 120 member states, building on earlier court models from Nuremberg, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. Its moral scope contained broad ideals: promoting long-term peace and justice by prosecuting those deemed most responsible for atrocities that “shock the conscience of humanity.” Among the ICC’s innovations was a commitment to elevate victims of mass atrocities, enabling their active participation in trial proceedings. The Court’s overall design included a series of tensions and conflicts that would emerge during the years covered by the Congo trials. In addition to the cultural contrast between The Hague and the Congo, there were tensions between the strictly legal courtroom proceedings and the inevitable political entanglements facing an international court.

This chapter identifies the book’s two basic aims: (1) explaining what policy makers and scholars interested in building tax capacity in developing countries may learn from the Chinese experience; and (2) articulating a framework for understanding the politics of taxation in China. It then explains how the unique approach of the book, which focuses on ground-level tax administration, serves these two aims. In relation to the first aim, the book will argue that contrary to assumptions in the current literature, there are fundamentally different types of state capacity in taxation, which follow potentially irreconcilable choices in the face of difficult trade-offs. In relation to the second aim, the book uses the structure of tax administration to illustrate the heterogeneity of political incentives within the Chinese state, critical information bottlenecks, and the political motives behind invocations of law. Unifying the pursuit of these two aims is a reflective conception of law as a special form of securing social order, which sees legal ordering as fundamentally different from social ordering based on state coercion. A summary of the ensuing chapters follows.

Statute and Judgment offers Schmitt’s theory of adjudication. Schmitt responds to the attack on legal determinacy that is associated with the free law movement (a German precursor to pragmatist and critical approaches to adjudication). While Schmitt adopts the view, as put forward by proponents of the free law movement, that statutory law is inherently indeterminate and must fail to guide judicial decision-taking in particular cases, Statute and Judgment aims to reconstruct legal determinacy on the basis of an analysis of the customs and conventions of legal practice. Schmitt’s attempt to show how legal determinacy is possible prefigures later arguments to the effect that a situation of normality is a condition of the legitimate applicability of legal norms.

This chapter considers the evolutions in the practice of judicial review in Kenya, and the continued relevance of English law, in the broader context of the role of judicial review in facilitating the attainment of democratic governance. It argues that English law bequeathed to Kenya an ambivalent legacy that continues to shape the exercise of the judicial review power. In theory, law has promised to provide a bulwark against the abuse of governmental power. In practice, however, it has largely served to facilitate authoritarianism. The chapter begins by locating judicial review in the context of governance in colonial and post-colonial Kenya. It then examines the nature and role of judicial review in the Kenya colony, Independent Kenya, and more recently after the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya 2010.

An initial glimpse into the ICC courtroom introduces the lead participants on the first day of the Court’s first trial. This chapter contrasts the modern courtroom in The Hague with culturally distant conflicts arising in the Congo, which tested the Court’s stamina for implementing international legal norms. The Court’s legal mission was formulated in the Rome Statute, a treaty accepted after 1998 by some 120 member states, building on earlier court models from Nuremberg, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. Its moral scope contained broad ideals: promoting long-term peace and justice by prosecuting those deemed most responsible for atrocities that “shock the conscience of humanity.” Among the ICC’s innovations was a commitment to elevate victims of mass atrocities, enabling their active participation in trial proceedings. The Court’s overall design included a series of tensions and conflicts that would emerge during the years covered by the Congo trials. In addition to the cultural contrast between The Hague and the Congo, there were tensions between the strictly legal courtroom proceedings and the inevitable political entanglements facing an international court.

The “APMC Act” remains among the most widely commented upon and most deeply misunderstood laws governing Indian economic life. APMCs - Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees, more commonly known as mandis - are notified, physical primary markets designated as the main and, in some cases, the only state-sanctioned sites for the regulation of the critical “first transaction” between the primary producer and the buyer of his or her agricultural produce. The APMC is not the regulated market itself, but the local body constituted to oversee its regulation, and this is only one of many conceptual and practical confusions generated under the diverse state-specific agricultural marketing acts, which have been implemented with even greater diversity across varied agro-ecological, political-economic, and administrative contexts. Drawing on long-term archival and ethnographic research in a mandi and market town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, this chapter sketches out the regulatory biography of an agricultural market, the diverse narratives and experiences of legislative amendment and yard-level market “reform,” and illustrates the empirical and analytical purchase of embedded exchange and contested jurisdiction of markets on the ground.

By the 1990s, India’s appellate courts had become closely involved in the regulation of street vending in several metropolitan cities. However, despite the frequent use of legal mechanisms by street vendor collectives, there has been little progress towards “formalization” of the street vending economy. To understand the limited impacts of legal intervention, it is necessary to examine the timing and the circumstances under which street vendor collectives first turned to judicial forums for protecting their livelihoods. Based on a historical examination of street vendor politics in Bombay and Madras, I show that legal mobilization in both instances was a response to serious threats faced by the political regimes that had previously shielded street vendors from dispossession and exploitation, rather than being a direct result of new legal opportunities (such as the emergence of public interest litigation). Since organized street vendors had a strong preference for maintaining the status quo, litigation was used as an effective method for buying time in the face of a hostile or uncertain political environment, even when the ultimate verdict was not likely to favor street vendors.

This chapter analyzes the impact of the Indian Supreme Court's watershed case on quotas for "backward classes," the Indra Sawhneycase. It explores the role of the decision in the mobilization of Dalit Muslims, who have been excluded from the constitutionally mandated affirmative action regime for the erstwhile Untouchable or Dalit castes ("Scheduled Castes"). It shows how the incipient mobilization came to creatively interpret the decision, in particular its interpretation of Hindu caste and a partial recognition of Muslim social stratification, as an endorsement of their claims. The appropriation and activation of the judgment allowed the mobilization to generate further political support, convince state commissions and eventually mount a constitutional challenge in the Court. This account aims to highlight the symbolic potential of the Court's decisions, often through unintended mechanisms, to reshape and extend social movement politics. It also highlights the role of political constraints, organizational infrastructure and the Indian institutional context as relevant factors in assessing judicial impact.