Adrian Zuckerman’s New Evidence Scholarship

Civil procedure has been the primary focus of Adrian Zuckerman’s evidentiary scholarship in recent decades. In contributing to a celebration of his profound and lasting influence on the procedural law and scholarship of England and Wales, this essay concentrates on Zuckerman’s earlier work primarily addressing criminal evidence and procedure. It identifies and elaborates on three particularly significant conceptual innovations in Zuckerman’s evidentiary writings concerning the (1) disciplinary domain; (2) institutional context(s); and (3) normative sources of evidence law. These conceptual advances are expounded in terms of three correlative dynamic disciplinary and institutional transitions: (1) from ‘Law of Evidence’ to ‘Evidence and Proof’; (2) from transubstantivity to procedural differentiation; and (3) from evidentiary rules to principled discretion. In his ground-breaking work on the principles of criminal evidence, I argue, Zuckerman challenged us to rethink the disciplinary contours, normative foundations and jurisprudential methodologies of common law evidence. Against the prevailing common law orthodoxy of a Thayerite model of generic exclusionary rules, Zuckerman insisted that criminal evidence should be reconceptualized as the practical wisdom of principled discretion rooted in the normative values and objectives of penal justice.

Institution-driven innovation in Guangdong firms: Moderating effects of in-house formal R&D and industrial environment turbulence

This article explores the moderating effects of in-house formal R&D and industrial environment turbulence on the relationship between institutional drivers, in terms of incentives and pressures, and firm innovation. Hypotheses were tested on a sample of manufacturing firms in Guangdong Province of China, where institutional changes and governmental policies play prominent roles in shaping innovation. Results show a positive main effect of institutional incentives, but an insignificant main effect of institutional pressures. In-house formal R&D and industrial turbulence negatively moderate the institutional incentives–innovations relationship, yet positively moderate the institutional pressures–innovations relationship. This study links the innovation systems literature with the institution-based view and deepens the understanding of the joint forces of institutional transitions, industrial changes, and resource heterogeneity in shaping innovation. The findings also inform managers and policymakers in institutional transition environments to better manage institutional drivers of innovation by considering firm- and industry-specific characteristics.

When Revolutionary Coalitions Break Down: Polarization, Protest, and the Tunisian Political Crisis of August 2013

Revolutionary coalitions often break down in the aftermath of revolution, leading to the collapse of transitional governments. Fragmentation among revolutionary elites has been extensively theorized, but few works consider the origins and consequences of polarization among non-elite protesters in the revolutionary coalition. This paper examines the case of Tunisia to unpack how polarization among former revolutionaries may drive secondary waves of mobilization that imperil governing coalitions, even when elites are cooperating. Unique protest surveys of pro- and anti-government demonstrations during the Tunisian political crisis of 2013 – which catalyzed the resignation of the country’s first elected assembly – show that polarization within this coalition occurred along ideological lines concerning the role of Islam in governance but not along class lines, as some theories of transition would predict. Revolutionaries are re-mobilized in part through divergent narratives concerning which social groups participated most in the revolutionary struggle, and which groups suffered and profited most under the old regime. This paper counters the elite-centrism of predominant “transitology” approaches by highlighting how protest politics may shape institutional transitions.

Top Indian wealth shares and inheritances 1966-1985

Between 1953 and 1985 India implemented various progressive taxes on personal wealth. I use estate tax returns to compute top wealth shares (top 1%, top 0.1% and top 0.01%) over 1966-1985; a period marked explicitly by a dirigiste policy environment. These new series suggest that wealth concentration in India reduced substantially during the 1970s. Although the decline affected the entire top 1%, the losses faced by the top 0.01% were especially large. Combined with identical trends in top income shares, it appears that the 1950-80 expropriations of India’s rich had similarities to institutional transitions and shocks faced by European elites in the early to mid twentieth century.

Leadership, Law and Development

This article critically examines the role of political leadership in shaping and sustaining institutional reforms. While leadership has recently attracted a great deal of attention from other social scientists, law and development scholars have only begun to seriously consider the influence of leaders on institutions and development outcomes. The article explores the new mantra that “leadership matters” as cause for both careful optimism and renewed attention to some deeper anxieties about the future directions of law and development. On one side, emerging models of leadership provide important insights about how to change dysfunctional institutions and how to sustain those changes over the long run. A number of major studies published in the last few years have made some version of the claim that successful reforms inevitably require the dedicated leadership of one or more prominent individuals, positing good leaders as a necessary condition for institutional transitions. But the argument that good leadership itself determines good institutions also risks reproducing one of the most obstinate dilemmas in modern social theory: the contest between “structure” and “agency” as causal explanations of social change. If the new mantra that “leadership matters” represents a shift in focus away from the structure of law and politics and towards the influence of individual agents’ choices, actions, talents and beliefs, there is good reason to be sceptical about whether simply privileging agency over structure—or the inverse—has any greater chance of success than the many failed attempts to do just that in other fields of knowledge over the past several decades. Instead, the present moment could be a valuable opportunity to assess whether alternative and more integrative approaches to the longstanding structure-agency impasse in development law and policy are possible.

The Value of Business–Government Ties for Manufacturing Firms’ Product Innovation during Institutional Transition in China

This study investigates how firms invest in building and maintaining business–government (B–G) ties when they aim to innovate in regions where, due to institutional transitions, institutional contexts differ remarkably. Using data from the China Enterprise Survey of the World Bank, empirical findings suggest that the influence of B–G ties on Chinese firms’ product innovation is different in distinctive institutional contexts in China. More specifically, during institutional transition, B–G ties become less efficient for facilitating product innovation when regional legal institutions and infrastructural supporting systems in a region are more stable, fair, and efficient. By contrast, during institutional transition, a positive effect of B–G ties on firm product innovation in a region becomes more significant when financial systems are relatively advanced. In addition to this, the value of B–G ties for firm product innovation appears to be more stable when business regulation develops within subnational regions.