The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law

This second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law provides a wide-ranging and highly diverse survey as well as a critical assessment of comparative law at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the current era of globalization, this discipline is more relevant than ever, both on an academic and practical level. The book contains forty-eight essays, each of which provides an accessible, original, and critical account of comparative law in its respective area. Each essay also includes a short bibliography referencing the definitive works in the field. The book is divided into three main sections. Section I shows how comparative law has developed and where it stands today in various parts of the world. This includes not only traditional model jurisdictions, such as France, Germany, and the United States, but also other regions like Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and the Islamic countries. Section II discusses the major approaches to comparative law—its methods, goals, and its relationship with other fields, such as legal history, economics, and linguistics. Finally, Section III deals with the status of comparative studies over a range of subject matter areas, including the major categories of private, economic, public, and criminal law.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law provides a wide-ranging and highly diverse survey as well as a critical assessment of comparative law at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It summarizes and evaluates a discipline that is time-honoured but not easily understood in all its dimensions. The book contains forty-three articles. The aim of each article is to provide an accessible, original, and critical account of comparative law in its respective area. Each article also includes a short bibliography referencing the definitive works in the field. The book is divided into three main sections. Section I surveys how comparative law has developed and where it stands today in various parts of the world. This includes not only traditional model jurisdictions, such as France, Germany, and the United States, but also other regions like Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Section II discusses the major approaches to comparative law — its methods, goals, and its relationship with other fields, such as legal history, economics, and linguistics. Finally, Section III deals with the status of comparative studies in over a dozen subject matter areas, including the major categories of private, economic, public, and criminal law.


2019 ◽  
pp. 269-282
Author(s):  
Tobias Boes

This concluding chapter considers the continuing importance of Thomas Mann in the world republic of letters. It explains how the parameters that conditioned Mann's rise to the status of literary celebrity and antifascist icon in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s foreshadowed developments in the world republic of letters. These developments, moreover, did not fully come to fruition until after the Second World War. Furthermore, they continue to affect global literary production in the twenty-first century. In many respects, Thomas Mann was a forerunner for experiences that have become commonplace for writers in our own day, especially those that hail from the periphery of the global literary community.


Author(s):  
Xiaoyu Pu

China plays a variety of status games, sometimes emphasizing its status as an emerging great power and other times highlighting its status as a fragile developing country. The reasons for this are unclear. Drawing on original Chinese sources, social psychological theories, and international relations theories, this book provides a theoretically informed analysis of China’s global rebranding and repositioning in the twenty-first century. Contrary to offensive realism and power transition theory, the book argues that China is not always a status maximizer eager to replace the United States as the new global leader. Differing from most constructivist and psychological studies that focus on the status seeking of rising powers, this study develops a theory of status signaling that combines both rationalist and constructivist insights. The book argues that Chinese leaders face competing pressure from domestic and international audiences to project different images. The book suggests that China’s continual struggle for international status is primarily driven by domestic political calculations. Meanwhile, at the international level, China is concerned about over-recognition of its status for instrumental reasons. The theoretical argument is illustrated through detailed analysis of Chinese foreign policy. Examining major cases such as China’s military transformation, China’s regional diplomacy, and China’s global diplomacy during the 1997 Asian and 2008 global financial crises, this book makes important contributions to international relations theory and Asian studies.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Michal Bula

The American Century began in 1941 and ended on January 20, 2017. While the United States remains a military giant and is still an economic powerhouse, it no longer dominates the world economy or geopolitics as it once did. The current turn toward nationalism and “America first” unilateralism in foreign policy will not make America great. Instead, it represents the abdication of our responsibilities in the face of severe environmental threats, political upheaval, mass migration, and other global challenges.In this incisive and forceful book, Jeffrey D. Sachs provides the blueprint for a new foreign policy that embraces global cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity―not nationalism and gauzy dreams of past glory. He argues that America’s approach to the world must shift from military might and wars of choice to a commitment to shared objectives of sustainable development. Our pursuit of primacy has embroiled us in unwise and unwinnable wars, and it is time to shift from making war to making peace and time to embrace the opportunities that international cooperation offers. A New Foreign Policy explores both the danger of the “America first” mindset and the possibilities for a new way forward, proposing timely and achievable plans to foster global economic growth, reconfigure the United Nations for the twenty-first century, and build a multipolar world that is prosperous, peaceful, fair, and resilient.


Super Bomb ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 71-86
Author(s):  
Ken Young ◽  
Warner R. Schilling

This chapter examines the controversy's real or assumed moral and political aspects. Moral repugnance inflected the scientific judgments of Oppenheimer's General Advisory Committee, triggering discussion of the relative moral significance of thermonuclear bombing, the use of the atomic bomb, and the mass urban bombing campaigns of 1942–1945. More immediate concerns centered on the impact a decision to develop thermonuclear weapons might have on the pattern of international relations. Given a paucity of intelligence, the effects on the Soviet Union's own weapons program, and thereby on the United States' vulnerability, could only be guessed at. The chapter thus considers if the development of the Super would restore the status quo ante-1949 or lead to a thermonuclear arms race and ultimate stalemate—or even the end of the world.


2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Fidler

In March 2003, the world discovered, again, that I humanity's battle with infectious diseases continues. The twenty-first century began with infectious diseases, especially HIV/AIDS, being discussed as threats to human rights, economic development, and national security. Bioterrorism in the United States in October 2001 increased concerns about pathogenic microbes. The global outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the spring of 2003 kept the global infectious disease challenge at the forefront of world news for weeks. At its May 2003 annual meeting, the World Health organization (WHO) asserted that SARS is “the first severe infectious disease to emerge in the twenty-first century” and “poses a serious threat to global health security, the livelihood of populations, the functioning of health systems, and the stability and growth of economies.”


1998 ◽  
Vol 162 ◽  
pp. 273-276
Author(s):  
D.B. Hoff

In 1981, in response to growing concerns that the United States was falling behind the rest of the world educationally, the federal Secretary of Education created a national commission on excellence in education. This commission was charged with gathering data about the status of U.S. education compared to the rest of the developed world and to define the problems which would have to be faced to successfully pursue the course of excellence in education.


1969 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S Klein ◽  
Mrunal S Chapekar

9 August 2007, the US Congress established the Technology Innovation Program (TIP) through the America COMPETES Act, a comprehensive strategy to keep the United States, the most innovative nation in the world, competitive by strengthening scientific education and research, improving technological enterprise, attracting the world's best and brightest workers, and providing twenty-first century job training. The new program, TIP, is located at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD (www.nist.gov\tip).


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
John Bellamy Foster

In the twenty-first century, all signs are pointing to another period of hegemonic struggle over the world economy, this time between the United States and China, although complicated in this case by the unique, indeterminate aspects of the post-revolutionary Chinese social formation, which is neither entirely capitalist nor entirely socialist.


Author(s):  
Deepak Nayyar

This chapter analyses the striking changes in the geographical distribution of manufacturing production amongst countries and across continents since 1750, a period that spans more than two-and-a-half centuries, which could be described as the movement of industrial hubs in the world economy over time. Until around 1820, world manufacturing production was concentrated in China and India. The Industrial Revolution, followed by the advent of colonialism, led to deindustrialization in Asia and, by 1880, Britain became the world industrial hub that extended to northwestern Europe. The United States surpassed Britain in 1900, and was the dominant industrial hub in the world until 2000. During 1950 to 2000, the relative, though not absolute, importance of Western Europe diminished, and Japan emerged as a significant industrial hub, while the other new industrial hub, the USSR and Eastern Europe, was short lived. The early twenty-first century, 2000–2017, witnessed a rapid decline of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan as industrial hubs, to be replaced largely by Asia, particularly China. This process of shifting hubs, associated with industrialization in some countries and deindustrialization in other countries in the past, might be associated with premature deindustrialization in yet other countries in the future.


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