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The motivation for prison leave in the Danish penal system is based on two rationales: humanity, because the maintenance of positive contacts outside prison is expected to further a future life without crime; and discipline, because the risk of being discredited and missing out on prison leave is expected to have an effect on prisoners’ compliance with the rules in prison. The Corrections Act contains certain framework provisions. The detailed regulation of prison leave is found within separate rules and guidelines. The power to make day-to-day decisions concerning the permission or revocation of prison leave lies in the hands of the prison administration. The regulation of prison leave and release on parole are interrelated, as the latter more or less directly depends on a successful period of regular prison leave. The total amount of prison leave is declining. Over the last few decades, more prison leaves have been granted for occasional reasons, such as being seen by a doctor, rather than oriented in preparation for release, such as to attend to job or education. It is argued that the decline in the total amount of prison leave and the increase in the total number of rejections of parole are directly and indirectly interrelated. It is further argued that political intervention in the well-established division of power between legislation and discretionary power jeopardizes transparency in decision-making and puts access to justice for prisoners at risk.

Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. v. PDV Holding, Inc., stems from a larger dispute relating to a United States District Court for the District of Delaware's order that the stock of PDV Holding, Inc. (\"PDVH\"), a Delaware corporation, be sold to satisfy a judgment.1 Petróleos De Venezuela, S.A. (\"PDVSA\"), Venezuela's state-owned oil company, is the registered owner of all 1,000 shares of PDVH's stock as of December 1, 2000. [...]the plaintiff must prove it was the lawful owner of the stock and the stock certificate has been lost, stolen, or destroyed. [...]if both these requirements arc met and the corporation docs not show good cause not to issue the new stock certificate, then the court can require the issuance and delivery of a new certificate to the plaintiff. [...]any prior pledges made by PDVSA did not involve the PDVH stock. [...]any unknown pledge of the PDVH stock was very unlikely.

The sovereign nature of the forms of operation of cultural heritage protection authorities, the polarization between the individual interest and the public interest, discretion margin in the activities of the authorities – all these elements create a kind of “explosive mixture”, which is the source of the legal disputes between the owners of historical monuments and historical monuments protection bodies. The key element of the guarantee of individual freedom is the judicial review of public administration. Therefore, it is a matter of dispute to which extent the public administration is subject to judicial review when performing the tasks entrusted. The aim of this article is to show how Polish administrative courts approach the problem. What methodology of the review of discretion margin do they use? How do they solve the dilemma: who makes the final decision – the body or the court? Do they retain judicial self-restraint or are they ready and willing to interfere in the merits of the decision?

Litigation as the popular mode of dispute resolution in Islamic finance has proven inadequate in its application and interpretation of Shariah. Trails of Islamic finance cases have shown that civil court judges have no problems deciding on the civil law issues pertaining to Islamic finance, however, they are unsuited for adjudicating the Shariah issues. Section 55–58 of the Central Bank Act 2009 accords formal recognition to the Shariah Advisory Council (SAC) as their rulings is binding to the Islamic financial institutions and the courts. Post 2009 have seen that cases of law challenged the said sections as unconstitutional. The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of SAC either as expert ascertain or expert determination of the rulings on Islamic finance. In the course of discussion, s. 55–58 of Central Bank of Malaysia Act 2009 and Article 121(1) of the Constitution are analysed. Findings of the study showed that the role of SAC is merely expert ascertain of the rulings since they have no judicial power. Islamic financial law is divine in nature and different from the man made laws.

In theory, granting politicians tools to oversee bureaucrats can reduce administrative malfeasance. In contrast, I argue that the political control of bureaucrats can increase corruption when politicians need money to fund election campaigns and face limited institutional constraints. In such contexts, politicians can leverage their discretionary powers to incentivize bureaucrats to extract rents from the state on politicians' behalf. Using data from an original survey of bureaucrats (N = 864) across 80 randomly sampled local governments in Ghana, I show that bureaucrats are more likely to facilitate politicians' corrupt behavior when politicians are perceived to be empowered with higher levels of discretionary control. Using qualitative data and a list experiment to demonstrate the mechanism, I show that politicians enact corruption by threatening to transfer noncompliant officers. My findings provide new evidence on the sources of public administrative deficiencies in developing countries and qualify the presumption that greater political oversight improves governance.

This article considers some of the risks and challenges raised by the use of algorithm-assisted decision-making and predictive tools by the public sector. Alongside, it reviews a number of long-standing English administrative law rules designed to regulate the discretionary power of the state. The principles of administrative law are concerned with human decisions involved in the exercise of state power and discretion, thus offering a promising avenue for the regulation of the growing number of algorithm-assisted decisions within the public sector. This article attempts to re-frame key rules for the new algorithmic environment and argues that 'old' law-interpreted for a new context-can help guide lawyers, scientists and public sector practitioners alike when considering the development and deployment of new algorithmic tools. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.

The protection of contemporary architecture in Italy suffers from a regulatory gap. Before considering how to restore a building, one must determine whether it can even be classified as cultural heritage. In Italy, this recognition is primarily legal, not qualitative. If a building lacks the required age (Art. 10 co. 5 of Legislative Decree 42/2004), it loses its public value. This age requirement—tied to the author’s death—arbitrarily determines eligibility for protection, which remains a discretionary power of public authorities. Attempts to establish hybrid forms of protection have often resulted in administrative loopholes rather than systematic solutions. This paper discusses selected cases addressed by the Ministry of Culture, highlighting critical issues in current legislation and proposing a redefinition of heritage recognition criteria to better reflect the cultural and critical value of contemporary architecture.

Recent years have witnessed growing controversy over the “wisdom of the multitude.” As epistemic critics drawing on vast empirical evidence have cast doubt on the political competence of ordinary citizens, epistemic democrats have offered a defense of democracy grounded largely in analogies and formal results. So far, I argue, the critics have been more convincing. Nevertheless, democracy can be defended on instrumental grounds, and this article demonstrates an alternative approach. Instead of implausibly upholding the epistemic reliability of average voters, I observe that competitive elections, universal suffrage, and discretionary state power disable certain potent mechanisms of elite entrenchment. By reserving particular forms of power for the multitude of ordinary citizens, they make democratic states more resistant to dangerous forms of capture than non-democratic alternatives. My approach thus offers a robust defense of electoral democracy, yet cautions against expecting too much from it—motivating a thicker conception of democracy, writ large.

Data-driven decision-making (DDD) is rapidly transforming modern operations. The availability of big data, advances in data analytics tools, and rapid gains in processing power enable firms to make decisions based on data rather than intuition. Yet, most firms still allow managers to override decisions from DDD tools, as managers might possess private information not present in the DDD tool. We report on a field-experiment conducted by an automobile replacement parts retailer that examines the profit implications of providing discretionary power to merchants. We find that merchants’ overrides of the DDD tool reduce profitability by 5.77%. However, our analysis over product life cycle (PLC) reveals that merchants increase (decrease) profitability for growth- (mature- & decline-) stage products. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.

While the role of laws and regulations in structuring markets is well established, it is less understood how rule evasion affects the evolution of markets or how the interaction between regulators and the regulated about the meaning of compliance influences this effect. The authors study this issue by looking at the development of the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market in France, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1999 to 2009. In all three countries, this market involved financial innovations designed to evade regulations. The authors identify diverging trends in the ABCP market that are a result of whether and how regulators were embedded in the different interpretive communities that defined regulatory compliance, such embeddedness being dependent on their discretionary and sanctioning power as well as their expertise. Focusing on these regulatory networks that embed institutions in markets, they propose a synthesis of relational and institutional accounts of the embeddedness of markets.