Faculty Bibliography

This paper empirically documents the continued importance of the legal families (common law and civil law) for the diffusion of formal legal materials from the core to the periphery, and some possible channels of diffusion, in post-colonial times. This raises the possibility that substantive differences between countries of different families around the world, such as those documented in the legal origins literature, continue to be the result of separate diffusion processes rather than of intrinsic differences between common and civil law. Using the example of corporate and securities law, this paper documents the frequent and often exclusive use of legal materials and models from the respective legal family’s core countries in treatises and law reform projects in thirty-two peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. Most authors of these treatises and projects were trained in the respective core countries. Data on the activities of national legal development and cooperation organizations, trade and investment flows, and student migration confirm the close legal family ties and provide some evidence of possible channels through which materials may continue to diffuse within their legal families after decolonization. The diffusion of formal legal materials need not imply that the substantive development of law is affected by foreign influences, at least not in ways that induce substantive differences between periphery countries of different legal families. Various theories from comparative law, sociology, political science, and economics provide reasons, however, why the content of law in the periphery might continue to be influenced by core country models of the same legal family, as the evidence of formal diffusion suggests they are. Such diffusion theories fit the available data better than other theories put forward in the literature.

The Antidirector Rights Index from La Porta et al.'s Law and Finance (1998) has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in almost 100 published studies. With articles by legal scholars questioning the accuracy of index values for several countries, I undertake a systematic study to verify these values for 46 countries with the help of local lawyers. My emphasis is on accuracy of the data; I do not change the original variable definitions. The study leads to a substantial revision: 33 of the 46 observations need to be corrected, and the correlation of corrected and original values is only .53. With accurate values, the well-known results of La Porta et al. (1997, 1998) no longer hold: accurate index values are neither distributed with significant differences between Common and Civil Law countries nor correlated with stock market size and ownership dispersion. All of the many results derived with the index will have to be revisited.

I re-code the "Antidirector Rights Index" (ADRI) of shareholder protection rules from La Porta et al. 1998 for 46 countries in 1997 and 2005 with the help of local lawyers. My emphasis is on consistent coding; I do not change the original variable definitions. Consistently coded ADRI values are neither distributed with significant differences between Common and Civil Law countries, nor predictive of stock market outcomes. The revision of the variable definitions in Djankov et al. 2005 salvages some of the original results, but reinforces severe endogeneity concerns regarding the index components that drive the remaining significant results. I review the other index components and conclude that the ADRI is unlikely to be a valid measure of shareholder protection. Results derived with the ADRI in the literature may have to be revisited. Along the way, I develop some general guidelines for consistent coding.

It is generally assumed that trade retaliation under the WTO performs some kind of ‘rebalancing’ by allowing the injured Member to suspend ‘concessions and obligations’ vis-à-vis the violating Member of a level equivalent to the level of ‘nullification and impairment’ suffered by the injured Member. This article argues that this perception is misguided. The article first questions if a sensible comparator exists with which equivalence for purposes of ‘rebalancing’ could be evaluated. It then argues that WTO arbitration decisions do not even succeed in their limited goal of providing for retaliation that will affect trade in the same amount as the WTO-inconsistent measure at issue. One reason is the use of an asymmetric and underspecified trade effects comparator. The other reason is very significant miscalculation of the trade effects of the violation, as shown by detailed legal-economic analysis of all relevant arbitration decisions. The decisions concerning countermeasures against prohibited export subsidies do not make any attempt at ‘rebalancing’ in the first place. The article considers political explanations of arbitration decisions. It concludes with some suggestions for improvement.

This paper tries to develop a general framework for choice-of-law in a federal system and an internal market. The framework consists of two elements: The first element is the criteria that should guide us in forging a choice-of-law rule, i.e., the answer to the question: How do we determine which choice-of-law rule is preferable? Recent European literature scrutinizes choice-of-law rules under the Dassonville/Cassis de Dijon test of Art. 28 EC, the parallel of the US Constitution's Dormant Commerce Clause, in the first ever intensive exploration of the influence of the concept of the internal market on choice-of-law. But this European literature overemphasizes a few "private interests", while largely ignoring the "state interests" involved, i.e., the horizontal power distribution of the federal system, an important element extensively addressed by the US literature. This paper joins these European and American ideas on a topic of common interest, to develop more sound criteria for forging choice-of-law rules in a system that is both federal and an internal market. The second element is the authority to make choice-of-law rules, i.e., the answer to the question: Who gets to determine which choice-of-law rule is right? In a federal system, this authority should be exclusively the union's. It should ideally be vested in the federal legislature, otherwise possibly in the federal courts. This paper agrees with a growing body of US literature that finds this ideal state to be embodied in the US Constitution. In Europe, authors merely advocate a federal control of state choice-of-law rules (under the EC Freedoms), but this seems to be no more than a third-best cost-inefficient substitute for the (supposedly) missing European federal law-making power in choice-of-law matters.