Private Power Public Law

Analysis of the power of multinational corporations in moulding international law on intellectual property rights.

Cioffi argues that highly politicized reform of corporate governance law has reshaped power relations within the public corporation in favor of financial interests, contributed to the profound crises of capitalism, and eroded its political foundations.

No detailed description available for "Public Property and Private Power".

Transnational merchant law, which is mistakenly regarded in purely technical and apolitical terms, is a central mediator of domestic and global political/legal orders. By engaging with literature in international law, international relations and international political economy, the author develops the conceptual and theoretical foundations for analyzing the political significance of international economic law. In doing so, she illustrates the private nature of the interests that this evolving legal order has served over time. The book makes a sustained and comprehensive analysis of transnational merchant law and offers a radical critique of global capitalism.

During the past decade, administrative law has experienced remarkable development. It has consistently been one of the most dynamic and potent areas of legal innovation and of judicial activism. It has expanded its reach into an ever broadening sphere of public and private activities. Largely through the mechanism of judicial review, the judges in several jurisdictions have extended the ambit of the traditional remedies, partly in response to a perceived need to fill an accountability vacuum created by the privatisation of public enterprises, the contracting-out of public services, and the deregulation of industry and commerce. The essays in this volume focus upon these and other shifts in administrative law, and in doing so they draw upon the experiences of several jurisdictions: the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The result is a wide-ranging and forceful analysis of the scope, development and future direction of administrative law.

Demonstrating the crucial role that private international law and legality has played and continues to play in shaping globalization, this book argues that the rules, institutions, and actors that make up the practice of private international law have been critical in translating political and economic power into legal regimes that have facilitated the processes of globalization. These processes depend on two fundamental types of socio-political action – the legal structuring of emerging transnational spaces and flows of goods, capital, and finance, and the legal-political reconfiguration of state power and priorities to facilitate the growth of these spaces and their penetration into national political-economic-and social spaces. While a variety of processes were involved in these forms of action, the material practices of private international law played a central role in this project of political economic reconstruction. Offering a theory of private international legality as a practice that intersects with and provides a vehicle for the mobilization of political and economic power, this book examines the construction and enrolment of private law expertise and the structural condition of pluralism in the global political economy to argue that private international law has helped construct a global political economy responsive to the priorities of powerful actors and resistant to the demands and interests of the rest of the world’s populations. It will be of interest to academics and students exploring the relationship between law, international political economy and the nature of state power.

In Public Law and Private Power, John W. Cioffi argues that the highly politicized reform of corporate governance law has reshaped power relations within the public corporation in favor of financial interests, contributed to the profound crises of contemporary capitalism, and eroded its political foundations. Analyzing the origins of pro-shareholder and pro-financial market reforms in the United States and Germany during the past two decades, Cioffi unravels a double paradox: the expansion of law and the regulatory state at the core of the financially driven neoliberal economic model and the surprising role of Center Left parties in championing the interests of shareholders and the financial sector. Since the early 1990s, changes in law to alter the structure of the corporation and financial markets—two institutional pillars of modern capitalism—highlight the contentious regulatory politics that reshaped the legal architecture of national corporate governance regimes and thus the distribution of power and wealth among managers, investors, and labor. Center Left parties embraced reforms that strengthened shareholder rights as part of a strategy to cultivate the support of the financial sector, promote market-driven firm-level economic adjustment, and appeal to popular outrage over recurrent corporate financial scandals. The reforms played a role in fostering an increasingly unstable financially driven economic order; their implication in the global financial crisis in turn poses a threat to center-left parties and the legitimacy of contemporary finance capitalism.