Suchergebnisse

Examines current legal and business practices in Shenzhen province, which has adopted some Hong Kong laws and practices, in order to analyze prospects for retention of common law after Great Britain relinquishes control of Hong Kong. Based on interviews with business and legal elites in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, 1994-96.

The continuing debate over an activist judiciary frequently overlooks the issue whether majoritarian institutions such as Congress can be the principal policy makers for a democracy as well as whether they ought to be. An explicit comparison of the institutional capacities of the Congress and federal courts on abortion funding suggests that Congress is capable of developing representative, responsible, and educative policies. However, a retreat by the "Imperial Judiciary" from an activist posture would not necessarily transfer power from the courts to the Congress but from the courts to unelected bureaucracies within the Congress and the Presidency.

Like all languages, the language of American law can liberate or confine thinking. Its confining power is illustrated by the absence of the radical "group rights" claim in the Bakke litigation despite the prominence of that argument in the popular debate over affirmative discrimination. This absence establishes the limitations of the metaphor developed to give meaning to the concept "persons" in the equal protection context. While capable of investing the corporation with many of the attributes of "personhood" as defined by the Fourteenth Amendment, the metaphor makes absurd the claim of a racial group to exercise rights or privileges distinct from those of its members. This analysis illuminates the metaphorical structure of law language and concludes that the restricted range of metaphorical thinking in law weakens the law's capacity to mediate struggles over social goals.