Judicial Noncompliance and Legal Change

Abstract The article analyses the many actors and initiatives that, in the last decades, have pursued the goal of worldwide harmonization of secured transaction laws, scrutinizing the achievements and the limits of these experiments. In light of such results, the article also outlines the methodological contribution that comparative law can offer to legal change in the sector of secured transactions law, by way of confronting positive law models with meta-legal elements such as culture, society, economy, law-making processes, and geopolitics.

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The Curious Case of School Prayer: Political Entrepreneurship and the Resilience of Legal Institutions

Politics and Religion ◽

10.1017/s1755048312000089 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 394-418 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Bradley D. Hays

Keyword(s):

Religious Practice ◽

Entrepreneurial Activity ◽

Legal Institutions ◽

Legal Change ◽

Conservative Movement ◽

School Prayer ◽

Equal Access Act ◽

The Public Sphere ◽

Entrepreneurial Activities ◽

Reagan Era

AbstractSchool prayer represents a curiosity of Reagan era politics. Reagan and the social conservative movement secured numerous successes in accommodating religious practice and faith in the public sphere. Yet, when it came to restoring voluntary school prayer, conservatives never succeeded in securing the judicial victory that they sought despite conditions that seemingly favored change. Herein, we attempt to reconcile Reagan era successes with Reagan era failures by exploring Reagan's entrepreneurial activity to affect both the demand (i.e., judges) and supply (i.e., litigants) side of legal change. Identifying Reagan's entrepreneurial activities in his attempt to alter national social policy reveals the resilience of legal institutions to presidential and partisan regimes. Reagan's efforts to change national school prayer policy gained some measure of legislative success by securing the Equal Access Act but it failed to garner a change in school prayer jurisprudence. We conclude by noting that the difficulty of influencing both the demand and supply side of legal change in a timely manner and its implication for reconstructing policy through the courts.

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Legal Change and Stigma in Surrogacy and Abortion

The Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics ◽

10.1111/jlme.12232 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 43 (2) ◽

pp. 192-195

Author(s):

John A. Robertson

Keyword(s):

Gender Roles ◽

Reproductive Rights ◽

Social Expectations ◽

Legal Change ◽

Procreative Liberty ◽

Traditional Gender Roles ◽

Cultural Paradigm ◽

Good Mother

The role of stigma in limiting reproductive rights has long hovered in the air. Paula Abrams has sorted through the concept and shown how it operates in two major areas of procreative liberty — having a child through surrogacy and avoiding childbirth by abortion. Her paper is especially useful for showing how legal change initially dilutes stigma but may reinstall it with post-legalization regulation.Abrams argues that both abortion and surrogacy are stigmatized because they deviate from traditional gender roles and social expectations about pregnancy and maternity. Past restrictions have rested on a common legal and cultural paradigm of the good mother: a woman who conceives, carries her child to term, and then rears the child. Indeed, as she later argues, evidence of stigma surrounding a practice is “relevant to determining whether laws regulating abortion or surrogacy are based on impermissible stereotyping.”

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