Property titling and conveyancing

This chapter analyzes titling institutions and the regulation of supporting conveyancingservices. After examining the tradeoff of enforcement benefits and consent costs posed byproperty rights, it explains how different public titling systems (privacy, recording andregistration) try to solve this tradeoff, and what the consequences are for the nature andregulation of private conveyancing services. The chapter ends with a discussion of someempirical issues and data which are useful for comparing, designing and managing titlingand conveyancing systems.

Internet, Law and Politics. A decade of transformations.

Proceedings of Internet, Law and Politics. A decade of transformations.

Common law and civil law as pro-market adaptations

We argue that in the development of the Western legal system, cognitive departures are themain determinant of the optimal degree of judicial rule-making. Judicial discretion, seen here as the main distinguishing feature between both legal systems, is introduced in civil law jurisdictions to protect, rather than to limit, freedom of contract against potential judicial backlash. Such protection was unnecessary in common law countries, where free-market relations enjoyed safer judicial ground mainly due to their relatively gradual evolution, their reliance on practitioners as judges, and the earlier development of institutional checks and balances that supported private property rights. In our framework, differences in costs and benefits associated with self-interest and lack of information require a cognitive failure to be active.

Did the cooperative start life as a Joint-Stock company? business law and cooperatives in Spain, 1869–1931

Studies of Spanish cooperatives date their spread from the Law on Agrarian Syndicates of 1906. But the first legislative appearance of cooperatives is an 1869 measure that permitted general incorporation for lending companies. The 1931 general law on cooperatives, which was the first act permitting the formation of cooperatives in any activity, reflects the gradual disappearance of the cooperative’s "business" characteristics. In this paper we trace the Spanish cooperative’s legal roots in business law and its connections to broader questions of the freedom of association, the formation of joint-stock enterprises, and the liability of investors in business and cooperative entities. Our account underscores the similarities of the organizational problems approach by cooperatives and business firms, while at the same time respecting the distinctive purposes cooperatives served.

Law and the practise of principle in diverse societies

Projecte de recerca elaborat a partir d’una estada a la London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom, entre 2007 i 2009. L’objecte principal del projecte ha estat analitzar les implicacions jurídico-polítiques i institucionals d’una teoria de la justícia i la igualtat liberals aplicada a societats multiculturals amb un marcat predomini de la diversitat cultural. L’anàlisi desenvolupa una línia d'investigació interdisciplinar - entre el dret i la teoria política - iniciada en una tesis doctoral sobre multiculturalisme i drets de les minories culturals (UPF, 2000) que va culminar en la publicació de Group Rights as Human Rights (Springer, 2006). La recerca adopta com a punt de partida les conclusions de l'esmentada obra, en especial, la rellevància del reconeixement de drets col•lectius; tanmateix, el tipus de qüestions plantejades, l’enfoc i la metodologia emprades són substancialment diferents. En concret, s'adrecen preguntes específiques sobre el model i aspiracions del constitucionalisme democràtic i el paper del dret en contextos multiculturals. També s’atorga un pes central a la dimensió institucional dels models de gestió de la diversitat que s’analitzen, prioritzant un enfocament comparatiu a partir de l’estudi de controvèrsies concretes. L’objectiu és superar algunes limitacions importants de la literatura actual, com ara la tendència a examinar en abstracte la compatibilitat de determinades demandes amb el constitucionalisme democràtic, sense abordar el funcionament d'estratègies de gestió de la diversitat cultural emprades en contextos concrets. Els treballs producte d'aquest projecte articulen les línies bàsiques d’un model pluralista, basat en principis més que en regles, que desafia els plantejaments dominants actualment. Aquest model es caracteritza pel compromís amb la legitimitat i igualtat comparatives, rebutjant el paternalisme i les visions liberals típiques sobre el paper de la regulació. La presumpció de l’“standing” moral dels grups identitaris és fonamental per tal de considerar-los interlocutors vàlids amb interessos genuïns. També s’argumenta que la integració social en contextos multiculturals no depèn tant de l’eliminació del conflicte sinó, sobre tot, d’una gestió eficient que eviti abusos de poder sistemàtics. El model defensa el rol del dret en la institucionalització del diàleg intercultural, però admet que el diàleg no necessàriament condueix a l’acord o a una estructura reguladora coherent i uniforme. Les aspiracions del ordre jurídic pluralista són més modestes: afavorir la negociació i resolució en cada conflicte, malgrat la persistència de la fragmentació i la provisionalitat dels acords. La manca d'un marc regulador comú esdevé una virtut en la mesura que permet la interacció de diferents subordres; una interacció governada per una multiplicitat de regles no necessàriament harmòniques. Els avantatges i problemes d’aquest model s'analitzen a partir de l'anàlisi de l’estructura fragmentària de l'ordre jurídic internacional i del règim Europeu de drets humans.

Corporate criminal law and organization incentives: A managerial perspective

Corporate criminal liability puts a serious challenge to the economictheory of enforcement. Are corporate crimes different from other crimes?Are these crimes best deterred by punishing individuals, punishing corporations, or both? What is optimal structure of sanctions? Shouldcorporate liability be criminal or civil? This paper has two majorcontributions to the literature. First, it provides a common analyticalframework to most results presented and largely discussed in the field.In second place, by making use of the framework, we provide new insightsinto how corporations should be punished for the offenses committed bytheir employees.

The ambiguous disruption of gender-role expectations in the law and the lady name

The main purpose of this research project is to analyse the major female figures in Wilkie Collins' work of fiction The Law and the Lady, in relation to the times in which the novel was produced and the situation of women in the Victorian era. After taking into account the major events of the life of the author, as well as the sociohistorical conditions of the Victorian period, I try to reach conclusions about whether the author challenges gender-role expectations, presenting the readers with a new form of femininity, of if, on the contrary, he preserves and maintains a conservative, traditional perspective of femininity and female conventions proper to the established parameters of the times in which he lived. Keywords:

Oncobiguanides: Paracelsus" law and nonconventional routes for administering diabetobiguanides for cancer treatment

The dose makes the poison, the common motto of toxicology first expressed by Paracelsus more than 400 years ago, may effectively serve to guide potential applications for metformin and related biguanides in oncology. While Paracelsus' law for the dose-response effect has been commonly exploited for the use of some anti-cancer drugs at lower doses in non-neoplastic diseases (e.g., methotrexate), the opposite scenario also holds true; in other words, higher doses of non-oncology drugs, such as anti-diabetic biguanides, might exert direct anti-neoplastic effects. Here, we propose that, as for any drug, there is a dose range for biguanides that is without any effect, one corresponding to"diabetobiguanides" with a pharmacological effect (e.g., insulin sensitization in type 2 diabetes, prevention of insulin-dependent carcinogenesis, indirect inhibition of insulin and growth factor-dependent cancer growth) but with minimal toxicity and another corresponding to 'oncobiguanides' with pharmacological (i.e., direct and strong anticancer activity against cancer cells) as well as toxic effects. Considering that biguanides demonstrate a better safety profile than most oncology drugs in current use, we should contemplate the possibility of administering biguanides through non-conventional routes (e.g., inhaled for carcinomas of the lung, topical for skin cancers, intravenous as an adjunctive therapy, rectal suppositories for rectal cancer) to unambiguously investigate the therapeutic value of high-dose transient biguanide exposure in cancer. Perhaps then, the oncobiguanides, as we call them here, could be viewed as a mechanistically different type of anti-cancer drugs employed at doses notably higher than those used chronically when functioning as diabetobiguanides

Repensando la relación entre la ley y la violencia hacia las mujeres. Una aproximación a los discursos de los/las agentes del ámbito judicial en relación a la ley integral de violencia de género en España = Rethinking the relationship between law and violence against women. an approach to the juridical agents' discourses in relation to the integral law of gender-based violence

Of the many dimensions of the problem of violence exercised by men toward women in the context of the relations of partner or ex partner, this article deals with the analysis of the discursive productions of the institutional actors that are part of the judicial process. Our intention is to investigate the relationship between criminal law and gender-based violence starting from the implementation of the Law of Integral Gender-based Violence in Spain (LO. 1 / 2004) from a theoretical perspective which includes contributions from social psychology, and socio-legal feminism. We have approached the legal instrument - the Law of Integral Gender-based Violence - through the discourse of legal officers with a perspective that questions the values, so often proclaimed, of universality, objectivity and neutrality of the law

Intellectual property rights and efficient firm organization

I show that intellectual property rights yield static efficiency gains, irrespective oftheir dynamic role in fostering innovation. I develop a property-rights model of firmorganization with two dimensions of non-contractible investment. In equilibrium, thefirst best is attained if and only if ownership of tangible and intangible assets is equallyprotected. If IP rights are weaker, firm structure is distorted and efficiency declines:the entrepreneur must either integrate her suppliers, which prompts a decline in theirinvestment; or else risk their defection, which entails a waste of her human capital. Mymodel predicts greater prevalence of vertical integration where IP rights are weaker,and a switch from integration to outsourcing over the product cycle. Both empiricalpredictions are consistent with evidence on multinational companies. As a normativeimplication, I find that IP rights should be strong but narrowly defined, to protect abusiness without holding up its potential spin-offs.

Challenges and Opportunities of Online Entertainment. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Internet, Law & Politics. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, 9-10 July, 2012.

El VIII Congrés Internacional Internet, Dret i Política (IDP 2012) que s'ha dut a terme a Barcelona els dies 9 i 10 de juliol de 2012 sota el títol genèric de "Reptes i oportunitats de l'entreteniment en línia", ha abordat alguns dels principals reptes als que s'enfronta la societat de la informació des de la perspectiva jurídica i politològica. Concretament, els temes centrals han estat el debat sobre l'entreteniment a la xarxa, així com altres qüestions relacionades amb Internet i els drets de propietat intel·lectual, la privacitat, la seguretat o la llibertat d'expressió.

Deciding where to belong: gender differences in educational trajectories and migration in a rural Spanish town

From an anthropological perspective, formal post-secondary schooling is not an abstractentity with an intrinsic value that everyone finds desirable, but rather one alternative among many that young people evaluate from their different positions in the social field. The problem discussed in this paper is the diverging life trajectories that young men and women in a concrete rural context, at the end of the 20th century, shape for themselves at the ages of 14-16, a moment of decision created by national legislation regarding mandatory education (LGE, 1970, General Education Law, and LOGSE, 1990, General Organic Law of the Education System). Despite a strong cultural norm of equal inheritance divided among all children, male and female, and despite the equal educational opportunities provided by the Spanish State, different meanings of possession and use-rights over land and the resulting culturally accepted gendered division of work converge to orient men and women differently towards post-secondary schooling. Observation of the age, gender, and civil status structure of the population led to the preliminary query: Why do men and women, in this town, behave differently with respect to migration and marriage? The main hypothesis was that women’s longer school trajectories and resulting migration and men’s anchoring in the town and their higher rates of celibacy were not drastic changes in values, in the positional-relational sense of Bourdieu (1988, 2002), but the current outcome of previously existing dissimilar relations to property that produce dissimilar mobility. Through their schooling and work choices, young men and women, at very early ages, locate themselves in, or decide to belong to, different contexts that later reveal very different possibilities of finding marriage partners. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a small rural town (302 inhabitants in 1950; 193 in 2000) near Leon. Although this paper deals with the situation in the final decades of the 20th century, we must also consider the first half of the century, where some elements that shape this situation have their roots. Fieldwork was carried out between 1988 and 2001, in periods of differing length and intensity. The social subjects discussed here are the domestic unit and its component members. They were studied in conjunction, analyzing the life-trajectory decisions of specific persons in the framework of the domestic unit and the relations among people and property which comprise it. The tried-and-true methods of ethnographic research –participant observation, interviews, and life-histories, etc.- were employed. Archival research was also important for producing demographic data. Demographic analysis, the analysis of the composition and transformation of domestic units, and the creation of life trajectories were among the principal techniques used. The theoretical analysis was oriented by Bourdieu’s (2002) framework of the social field, habitus, and difference.

Scaling and data collapse for the mean exit time of asset prices

We study theoretical and empirical aspects of the mean exit time (MET) of financial time series. The theoretical modeling is done within the framework of continuous time random walk. We empirically verify that the mean exit time follows a quadratic scaling law and it has associated a prefactor which is specific to the analyzed stock. We perform a series of statistical tests to determine which kind of correlation are responsible for this specificity. The main contribution is associated with the autocorrelation property of stock returns. We introduce and solve analytically both two-state and three-state Markov chain models. The analytical results obtained with the two-state Markov chain model allows us to obtain a data collapse of the 20 measured MET profiles in a single master curve.

Endogeneizing know-how flows through the nature of R&D investments

In this paper we carefully link knowledge flows to and from a firms innovation process with this firms investment decisions. Three types of investments are considered: investments in applied research, investments in basic research, and investments in intellectual property protection. Only when basic research is performed, can the firm effectively access incoming knowledge flows and these incoming spillovers serve to increase the efficiency of own applied research.. The firm can at the same time influence outgoing knowledge flows, improving appropriability of its innovations, by investing in protection. Our results indicate that firms with small budgets for innovation will not invest in basic research. This occurs in the short run, when the budget for know-how creation is restricted, or in the long-run, when market opportunities are low, when legal protection is not very important, or, when the pool of accessible and relevant external know-how is limited. The ratio! of basic to applied research is non-decreasing in the size of the pool of accessible external know-how, the size and opportunity of the market, and, the effectiveness of intellectual property rights protection. This indicates the existence of economies of scale in basic research due to external market related factors. Empirical evidence from a sample of innovative manufacturing firms in Belgium confirms the economies of scale in basic research as a consequence of the firms capacity to access external knowledge flows and to protect intellectual property, as well as the complementarity between legal and strategic investments.

One kind of lawlessness: estimating the welfare cost of Somali piracy

This paper estimates the effect of piracy attacks on shipping costs using a unique data set on shipping contracts in the dry bulk market. We look at shipping routes whose shortest path exposes them to piracy attacks and find that the increase in attacks in 2008 lead to around a ten percent increase in shipping costs. We use this estimate to get a sense of the welfare loss imposed by piracy. Our intermediate estimate suggests that the creation of $120 million of revenue for pirates in the Somalia area led to a welfare loss of over $1.5 billion.