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In 2023, the federal antitrust agencies rewrote the nation's flagship merger policy document, as part of a broader “Neo-Brandeisian” effort to bring about a deep reform of the antitrust system. The result—the 2023 Merger Guidelines—has been highly controversial: celebrated by some as a revolutionary advance, and criticized by others as a step back toward a benighted past. This article evaluates the 2023 guidance against the arc of antitrust's modern history. It argues that the new guidance breaks a long trend of migration from structure toward welfare as the primary orientation of merger enforcement, but that it does so cautiously, by achieving a fraught ambiguity between welfarist and nonwelfarist policies. In inviting both revolutionary and evolutionary readings, the agencies have sacrificed clarity and discouraged beneficial deals, but they have also deferred—at least for now—a sharp conflict between those who would preserve antitrust's governing paradigm and those who would remake it.

This article reviews the history of race laws in the United States as distinct from the rule of law, an idea found in the writing and speeches of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American PhD in economics (1921). We review the race laws of slavery, lynching, Negro Jobs, and the making of the Black ghetto. We highlight the life and writings of Alexander and other early African American economists as an example of the cost of racial exclusion in the economics profession and how it has impeded the production of useful knowledge about the workings of the US economy.

From the legal point of view, ‘person’ is not co-extensive with ‘human being’. Nor is it synonymous with ‘rational being’ or ‘responsible subject’. Much of the confusion surrounding the issue of the firm's legal personality is due to the tendency to address the matter with only these, all too often conflated, definitions of personhood in mind. On the contrary, when the term ‘person’ is defined in line with its original meaning as ‘mask’ worn in the legal drama, it is easy to see that it is only the capacity to attract legal relations that defines the legal person. This definition, that avoids the undesirable emotional associations and equivocations that often plague the debate, is important for a legally grounded view of the firm.

The distribution of the common law was conditioned by a colonial strategy sensitive to the colonies’ level of endowments, exhibiting a more effective implantation of the legal system in initially sparsely populated territories with a temperate climate. This translates into a negative relationship of precolonial population density and settler mortality with legal outcomes for common-law countries. By contrast, the implantation of the French civil law was not systematically influenced by initial conditions, which is reflected in the lack of such a relationship for this legal family. The common law does not generally lead to legal outcomes superior to those provided by the French civil law when precolonial population density and/or settler mortality are high. The form of colonial rule in British colonies is found to mediate between precolonial endowments and postcolonial legal outcomes.

The kinds of punishment used in a society have long been considered an important criterion in judging whether a society is civilized or barbaric, advanced or backward, modern or premodern. Focusing on Japan, and the dramatic revolution in punishments that occurred after the Meiji Restoration, Daniel Botsman asks how such distinctions have affected our understanding of the past and contributed, in turn, to the proliferation of new kinds of barbarity in the modern world. While there is no denying the ferocity of many of the penal practices in use during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), this book begins by showing that these formed part of a sophisticated system of order that did have its limits. Botsman then demonstrates that although significant innovations occurred later in the period, they did not fit smoothly into the \"modernization\" process. Instead, he argues, the Western powers forced a break with the past by using the specter of Oriental barbarism to justify their own aggressive expansion into East Asia. The ensuing changes were not simply imposed from outside, however. The Meiji regime soon realized that the modern prison could serve not only as a symbol of Japan's international progress but also as a powerful domestic tool. The first English-language study of the history of punishment in Japan, the book concludes by examining how modern ideas about progress and civilization shaped penal practices in Japan's own colonial empire.

Dismissal protection is of particular significance in the canon of all labour laws being an issue of justice. All this would lead one to assume that heavy struggles had been fought about it. But according to prevalent tradition the dismissal protection act was amicably agreed upon by all social partners in the so-called »Hattenheim talks«, and designed in a way that legislator was able to adopt it with only a few changes. However, a recent historic investigation shows that this act based on very conflict-ridden negotiations between the BDA (Federal Employers’ Association) and the DGB (German Trade Union Association) of which the general public was not aware. In the beginning, there was a draft of the DGB dating back to the year 1948 prepared by Hans Carl Nipperdey which was motivated by a suggestion of Wilhelm Herschel.

This paper provides evidence that the Glorious Revolution removed political barriers to changing property rights in seventeenth century England. I study parliament’s passage of estate bills, a legislation that broke restrictions on land use and made up most of parliament’s legislative output from 1660 to 1702. Using a new dataset on estate bills, I first document that the sudden closure (prorogation) of parliament by the monarch caused bills to fail. Probit and OLS estimates show estate bills were 19 percentage points more likely to fail in these sessions. Second, I show conflict delaying revenue bills and conflict with the monarch’s interests made sudden prorogations more likely before the Glorious Revolution. Political and constitutional changes with the Glorious Revolution were thus important for England’s economic development. They improved parliament’s provision of legislation that made property rights more flexible to changing economic opportunities throughout the preindustrial era.

The article is devoted to the historical analysis of teleological argumentation evolution in the legal interpretation. The ideas of ancient Greek and Roman orators, philosophers and lawyers, which served as the basis for development of the idea of teleological interpretation in the European legal tradition, are examined. The history of teleological interpretation method development in European legal theory from Medieval jurists to sociological legal approach of the late 19th and 20th centuries is observed, as well the existence of two main approaches in understanding the teleological method of interpretation, namely subjective-teleological and objective-teleological, is ascertained. The author states that there is a direct correlation between the concept of law and the approach to understanding of the teleological interpretation method. In conclusion, the author insists on the more progressive nature of the objective-teleological method of legal interpretation.

Stefan Thönissen geht den philosophisch-theologischen Wurzeln der westlichen Rechtstradition nach und legt dar, wie Theologie und Philosophie Grundlagen der rechtlichen Moderne gelegt haben.In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten ist die philosophisch-theologische Beschäftigung mit dem Recht im Mittelalter und der Frühen Neuzeit immer mehr in den Fokus der Wissenschaft gelangt. Stefan Thönissen stellt diese Zusammenhänge in einem Überblick dar und fragt, wie das Zusammenwirken von Theologie, Philosophie und Rechtswissenschaft das Recht transformieren konnte. Hierfür werden zentrale philosophisch-theologische Debatten rekonstruiert und aufgezeigt, wie diese für rechtliche Diskussionen relevant wurden. Während zunächst die Theologie verrechtlicht wird, greift später eine Rezeption der theologischen Rechtslehre in den Bereich des Rechts Platz. Diese Entwicklungen machen begreiflich, wie sich der moderne, auf Person, Wille und Freiheit basierende Rechtsbegriff Bahn brechen konnte.