Explore the vast range of titles available.

Initial random acts can be replicated and evolve into precedents, but precedents can also be built with strategic intent. Regardless of their origin, strategically applying a particular precedent or effectively refuting the relevance of a precedent can help a negotiator control decisions and achieve interdependent goals. The purposeful use of precedents has received little attention in the negotiation literature, even though using precedents can be a powerful negotiating tactic. In this study, we examine how past decisions became precedents that helped establish the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement of 2014 (KAFTA). We further consider how precedents established through KAFTA later influenced trade negotiations with Canada, China, India, and Japan. Following an extensive literature review and field research, we developed a two-dimensional matrix (precedent ownership and negotiator goals) to help guide negotiators both offensively (what I want from you) and defensively (what I don't want to give you). We conclude by proposing research to enhance our understanding of temporal issues in negotiation. No previous study within the negotiation literature has examined precedents empirically.

It is remarkable that precedents and their use have not been well explored within the negotiation literature. In this article, I examine the sparse knowledge of precedents and offer a preliminary framework for understanding the role of precedents in negotiation, including how negotiators establish and apply them. Precedents can either evolve randomly or be created with strategic intent. Understanding precedents generally involves examining how negotiators build, adopt, avoid, and reject them. In this review of the existing literature, I identify twelve concepts and paradigms that are particularly relevant to our understanding of negotiation precedents. I also establish a research agenda and identify three methods for further developing our knowledge of precedents: applying path dependence theory from the field of international relations to a negotiation context; conducting experimental research in a laboratory setting involving subjects engaged in negotiation exercises that contain opportunities to apply precedents; and conducting field research with a focus on case methodology grounded in negotiation linkage theory and theories of negotiation dynamics. Finally, in this article, I formulate a two-part framework on building and applying precedents, and offer managerial guidance for the negotiation practitioner. Precedents serve as a strategic technique and provide a source of power at that point in a negotiation when decisions are made.

Existing evidence of law constraining judicial behavior is subject to serious endogeneity concerns. Federal circuit courts offer an opportunity to gain leverage on this problem. A precedent is legally binding within its own circuit but only persuasive in other circuits. Legal constraint exists to the extent that use of binding precedents is less influenced by ideology than use of persuasive precedents. Focusing on search and seizure cases, I construct a choice set of published circuit cases from 1953 to 2010 that cite the Fourth Amendment. I model the use of precedent in cases from 1990 to 2010, using matching to ensure that binding and persuasive precedents are otherwise comparable. The less visible decision of which cases to cite shows no evidence of legal constraint, while there is consistent evidence that the more readily observable act of negatively treating a cited precedent is constrained by the legal doctrine of stare decisis.

Procedure has long shaped how Congress operates. Procedural battles have been central to legislative contestation about civil rights, the welfare state, tax policy, and presidential impeachments. In these instances and many others, procedural disputes often turn not on written rules but on parliamentary precedents. These precedents constitute a hidden system of law that has received little scholarly attention, despite being critical to shaping what goes on in Congress. This Article explores parliamentary precedent in Congress. Parliamentary precedent mostly resembles judicial precedent: both are common-law systems that rely on the arguments of adversarial parties. But the two systems differ in key respects. Parliamentary decision-making employs an especially strong form of stare decisis, is minimalist in the extreme, and relies freely on legislative purpose and legislative history as tools of interpretation. These seemingly legal dynamics play out in the shadow of congressional politics. Understanding parliamentary precedent requires understanding the institutional positions of the parliamentarians, the nonpartisan officials who resolve procedural disputes. The parliamentarians' distinctive jurisprudence reflects their tenuous positions — namely, that they can be removed, overruled, or circumvented by the majority party. Drawing on novel interviews with parliamentarians and the legislative staffers who work closely with them, this Article illuminates the intersection of law and politics in the making of parliamentary precedent. A better understanding of parliamentary precedent contributes to our understanding of how Congress operates and the fault lines that emerge in an age of polarization and hardball. These dynamics also hold lessons for public law more broadly. First, the parliamentarians' efforts to protect themselves from the political fray shed light on efforts by other governmental decision-makers (in all three branches) to do the same. Second, the development of parliamentary precedent provides insight into the relationships between positive law and common law and between law and politics. Third, understanding parliamentary precedent, like understanding other elements of Congress's internal workings, can inform statutory interpretation.

We argue why interpretability should have primacy alongside empiricism for several reasons: first, if machine learning (ML) models are beginning to render some of the high-risk healthcare decisions instead of clinicians, these models pose a novel medicolegal and ethical frontier that is incompletely addressed by current methods of appraising medical interventions like pharmacological therapies; second, a number of judicial precedents underpinning medical liability and negligence are compromised when ‘autonomous’ ML recommendations are considered to be en par with human instruction in specific contexts; third, explainable algorithms may be more amenable to the ascertainment and minimisation of biases, with repercussions for racial equity as well as scientific reproducibility and generalisability. We conclude with some reasons for the ineludible importance of interpretability, such as the establishment of trust, in overcoming perhaps the most difficult challenge ML will face in a high-stakes environment like healthcare: professional and public acceptance.

A decision maker makes a ruling on a random case in each period. She is uncertain about the correct ruling until conducting a costly investigation. A ruling establishes a precedent, which cannot be violated under binding precedent. We compare the information acquisition incentives, the evolution of standards and the social welfare under nonbinding and binding precedents. Compared to nonbinding precedent, under binding precedent, information acquisition incentives are stronger in earlier periods, but become weaker as more precedents are established. Although erroneous rulings may be perpetuated under binding precedent, welfare can be higher because of the more intensive investigation early on.

Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect.

After Mao Zedong died, Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues sought to prevent “the overconcentration of power” by introducing fixed terms of office, term limits, and a mandatory retirement age; delegating authority from the Communist Party to government agencies; and holding regular meetings of Party institutions. All these moves were designed to decentralize authority, regularize political life and check dictatorial power. The centerpiece of the institutionalization project was the practice of regular peaceful leadership succession followed by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Regular premortem leadership succession was a rare achievement in a communist system and the most important source of China’s “authoritarian resilience.” Yet today, Xi Jinping is taking China back to a personalistic dictatorship after decades of institutionalized collective leadership. He has clearly signaled his intention to remain in office after his normal two terms end in 2022. This article analyzes the reasons why the institutional rules and precedents laid down since Deng Xiaoping’s time failed to prevent the emergence of another strongman leader like Mao Zedong.

What does IPE have to contribute to pressing policy and academic debates about the urgently required transition to a low carbon global economy? Despite the obviously global, political and economic dimensions of such a transition, insights from IPE have yet to be brought to bear on the question of what form such a transition might take: the relations of power which will frustrate or enable it; the historical precedents for previous transformations in dominant structures of production, finance and technology in the global economy; and the potentially central role of the state and institutions of global governance. This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of transitions grounded in different strands of literature from neo-Gramscian and historical materialist IPE and political economy more broadly. It focuses, in turn, on the role of the state in transitions; the ways in which the globalization of the global economy structures the possibility and likely form of transitions; and the role of global governance institutions in key energy and economic domains. It calls for energy to take up its rightful place as a lens for understanding and revising orthodox comprehensions of political, economic and social processes.