A busy week in ‘Lurbridge’

I don’t usually do these ‘what I’ve done’ blogposts anymore, but this week that’s the only thing I can offer. So what does the title refer to? Well, marking exams (grr), but also:

• Wednesday in London: I attended the launch of Marc Moore’s excellent new book on Corporate Governance in the Shadow of the State.
• Thursday in Durham: the official opening of our wonderful new law school building, with a talk by Baroness Helena Kennedy.
• Weekend in Cambridge: conference on comparative and international law, with many interesting papers (abstracts only online).

UK Law Journal Ranking (RAE 2008 data) - updated

I posted such a ranking a few months ago (here), but now I realised that I can improve it a bit. The previous ranking was based on the general RAE scores, but its better just to use the RAE ‘research outputs’ scores (here). Actually, the changes are fairly small – but the “number 1” has changed and some journals have gone up or done one place. So, here it is:

1. Modern Law Review: 0.4500

2. Common Market Law Review: 0.4252

3. European Journal of International Law: 0.4054

4. Law Quarterly Review: 0.3479

5. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies: 0.3462

6. International and Comparative Law Quarterly: 0.3221

7. European Law Journal: 0.3151

8. Legal Studies: 0.3058

9. Cambridge Law Journal:  0.3049

10. Social and Legal Studies: 0.2941

11. Journal of Law and Society: 0.2878

12. Feminist Legal Studies: 0.2511

13. Child and Family Law Quarterly: 0.2454

14. Journal of Environmental Law: 0.2264

15. British Journal of Criminology: 0.2133

16. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly: 0.1828

17. Intellectual Property Quarterly: 0.1776

18. Public Law: 0.1352

19. Medical Law Review: 0.1011

20. Law and Critique: 0.0785

21. European Human Rights Law Review: 0.0627

22. Criminal Law Review: 0.0571

23. Industrial Law Journal: 0.0435

24. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law:  0.0074

25. Journal of Business Law: -0.0027

26. Juridical Review: -0.0266

27. European Law Review:  -0.0680

28. Conveyancer and Property Lawyer: -0.0704

29. Edinburgh Law Review: -0.1048

30. Journal of Criminal Law: -0.2795

Method and limitations: I only considered the 30 journals which were submitted most often to the RAE 2008 (the final one was Law and Critique with 26 submissions; the next one, Civil Justice Quarterly, just had 22 submssions; so this seemed to me a good cutoff point). Then, I correlated the number of submissions per university per journal with the RAE 2008 research output score (note: that’s a bit different from what they did at Stirling for the RAE 2001 here). To clarify: any journal that’s not on this list may or may not be better than those journals (there just isn't enough data for those). Also, of course, the RAE 2008 law panel may have under-/overrated certain papers – I’m just reporting it in a completely unbiased way (actually, some of the journals I published in don’t score too well). And, as always, note that correlation does not imply causation.

What explains the RAE 2008 law output results?

A few months ago I posted some correlations using the RAE 2008 law data (cited below). Now, I thought why not run some basic OLS regressions? – with any suggestions welcome! The dependent variable is the average score for each law unit in the ‘Sub-profile research-outputs’ of the RAE 2008 (available here). Then, I considered a number of variables, all at the level of each law unit (e.g., something like: how many books, in % of all outputs, did a particular law school submit to the RAE?). A   couple of these variables were somehow significant, here in bold (with a decent R2 of 0.783; n = 67):

Explanatory variables		coefficient	sig.
	(Constant)		.001
	books (in %)	.068	.413
	‘proper’ articles (in %)	.291	.010
	‘proper’ chapters (in %)	.341	.000
	median of journal pages	.216	.097
	co-authorship (in %)	-.070	.299
	comparative journals (in %)	.007	.930
	European journals (in %)	.140	.055
	international journals (in %)	.073	.355
	‘soci’ journal (in %)	.130	.075
	Top UK general journals (in %)	.303	.000

I looked at the following possible explanatory variables:

• As in a previous post (here), I examined different types of research outputs, also considering whether articles or book chapters are “proper” ones, or just shorter notes – with the threshold being 22 pages. It can be seen that having proper journal articles and proper book chapters is highly significant and positive (while we can’t say anything about books; short articles/book chapters were the reference category)
• As previously discussed (here), I also considered median article length and co-authorship. The former is weakly significant (and positive), even in a regression which also has the variable on ‘proper’ articles, but not the latter.
• Next, as previously (here, here), I examined whether comparative, European, international and interdisciplinary legal research are treated unfavourable by the RAE. Yet, in none of these cases there is a negative effect. And for articles that have a European or a socio-legal dimension there is even a weakly significant positive one.
• Finally, publishing in the five established general UK law journals (CLJ, LS, LQR, MLR, OJLS) has a strongly significant positive effect. However, as previously shown, the ‘top 2’ law journals of the RAE 2008 are actually two other journals (here)

I did not consider two further factors which may be seen as important: grant income and types of universities (see the predictions by Chris Hanretty here). Naturally, these matter for the RAE data on research environment and research grants. Yet, the present calculations are specifically and only based on the results for the research outputs: here, these factors may be indirectly relevant - eg, having grants, and having time for research & hiring top researchers (ie differences between research and teaching-focussed universities) may lead to ‘better’ outputs (eg, longer articles etc). So the causality may be something like “grants & good university” à “good outputs” à high RAE output score – while the purpose of my regressions was only to consider the second, not the first, causal relationship.

The new employee-shareholder status in the U.K. - a model for the commodification and securitisation of legal protections?

Under the new UK law, just adopted a few days ago (see here) an employee can surrender certain employment rights (eg, related to unfair dismissal, flexible working) and in exchange get shares of its company that have a market value of not less than GBP 2000. This has been highly controversial: e.g., critics saying that this “encourages employees to trade their rights as if they were commodities, frustrating their purpose as essential protections for employees”.

  Of course, this is not really a commodification of rights since employees “just” get shares. But one could also imagine a real commodification similar to carbon emission certificates: here, say, all employees of companies with publicly listed shares would get certificates incorporating their employment rights which can also be traded on the exchanges where those companies are listed (ie these rights become securitised). Then, employees could sell these certificates, or if they want to, buy them back later on; also, being securitised, the price of the certificates would change depending on the current value of the employment rights (eg, depending on the risk of being made redundant). And to go one step further, why stop with employment rights: eg, one could extend it to consumer protection rights - most people may want to keep them, but if you need some cash, securitise them and sell them on an exchange until you may have the resources to buy them back.

  Finally, of course, I don't think that any of this is necessarily "good" from a normative perspective - while it does seem to me an interesting model to compensate for opting-out of default rules (of course, just for the sake of the argument, assuming that these rules should really not be mandatory ones).

Google fun! I am ….

As my previous post got a good deal of attention, this week’s Tuesday evening procrastination on what kind of person Google Instant Search thinks I am.

So, first of all, I’m a lawyer and a professor – so….

Well, not so good, but at least we may be ‘doctors too’ (?) and ‘people too’ (!); also I didn't know about the mars/snickers book… Then, of course, I’m also a blogger – so …

That’s even worse! Next, with some hesitation, what does the English-speaking web thing about the fact that I am …

Ok, to give it a positive spin, this may show that I’m hard working, that the degree of Europeans being Neanderthal is a matter of debate, but at least we're better than Americans!

But perhaps I also have to consider how I look – so … 

That doesn’t look too bad, though not perfect of course. So, by contrast, now let’s try something very general – just the first two hits … 

Oh, yes, indeed!

That should be the final word for today – next week I’m going to post something incredibly dry on a random topic of company law…

Google tells you that your university may be …. !

Ok, ignoring the obvious mistakes and insults, a couple of points seem interesting (assuming that potential students are the main persons determining the instant search results):   

- not unexpectedly, they care about the status and quality of the institution – actually I’m even a bit surprised that words like ‘rank’ or ‘ranking’ do not appear.  

- location also seems to matter; plus things such as whether a particular university is ‘fun’ or ‘posh’ (of course, a rather misled view about the nature of universities).   

- apparently there is a good deal of confusion about what public/private universities, the “Russell group”, the “University of London”, and “polytechnics” are.   

-some subject-matters seem to be popular search terms for some of the universities, indicating potential within-university differences.

A Latvian solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict?

I just return from a week in Riga, Latvia, and it made me wonder about the topic of this post – also triggered by reading a book on the history of the Baltic states and a conversation with a history professor from the University of Latvia.

  To start with, it seems strange to see Latvia as a model. A couple of years ago I attended a talk by Thomas Friedman (NYT), actually in Riga as well, and he was saying that when Americans say something is “history”, they mean that it is no longer relevant, whereas in places such as the Baltic states “history” is often the underlying reason for current conflicts. In Latvia in particular it is mainly the Russian and Soviet legacy, i.e. that a significant part of the population is of Russian origins, and that this creates discussions for example about citizenship and language (some of the Russian Latvians not having citizenship; the only official language being Latvian).

  This already sets the scene for the parallel with the Middle East – two groups of people who happen to be in the same place but would rather like to be on their own. But it is clear that the Latvian situation is the preferable one. Despite disagreements, living together somehow works – and, for example, the book cited above mentions more and more marriages between people of Russian and Latvian descents. How come? I’m not expert on Latvia but it seems to me that the implicit compromise is that the former understand that the majority culture and language is Latvian while the latter accept that the Russian speakers can stay and play an important role in the economy (due to historical reasons; but also language ones) – all of this possibly leading to a gradual process of cultural convergence.

  Now, Israel/Palestine: in some of the coastal towns there may be some convergence in terms of the secular population of different origins, but in general the problem seems to me that both sides are uncompromising about any question of cultural identity. To be sure, I’d not suggest that cultural differences (including language ones, religions etc), need to fade away – that’s not happing in Latvia either. But, considering human history more general, it is clear that processes of cultural and social diffusion often make initial divisions less relevant over time. In this respect, actually, the book on Baltic history, cited above, too explains that the Latvian culture is also very much a composite of groups (and, previously, tribes) that have settled in this region over time. So, overall the Latvian model is that there may be no ‘big solution’ but gradual changes triggered by living together (of course something which also needs to enabled, stimulated etc).

What interested me in February and March

Company, commercial law and related topics:

• New employee shareholder status in UK (CL&G)
• Shareblocking and voting by foreign shareholders in Germany (Defining Tension)
• American Sokaiya (Bainbridge)
• Towards a financial transaction tax (KCL EU blog)
• Rules v. discretion in financial regulation (Becker & Posner)

Universities, law, economics, research and rankings:

• What would a more relevant law school ranking look like (Above the law)
• In support of liberal arts law school (brazen & tenured)
• Should we see more university mergers (Economic logic)
• How economics became the hijacked science (Storbeck)
• Book: Mackaay on law and economics for civil law systems (Juris Diversitas)
• Are all research participants outliers? (Freakonomics)
• Do lawyer rankings matter (Hanretty)

The future of the EU:

• Not everyone in the UK is anti-EU (Europpblog)
• Cyprus banking crisis (Europpblog)
• Smits on Cameron’s speech (Mepli)

The best of both worlds - Empirical Legal Studies in the US and the UK

A few days ago I attended an excellent inaugural lecture on Empirical Legal Studies (in the following: “ELS”), but it made me wonder a bit on what exactly ELS is and what it should be (of course, I’m not the first one to do so; eg, here, here, here).
  To start with, it seems useful to distinguish between a US and a UK variant. In the US the respective journal and conference (JELS, CELS) have shaped ELS: predominately, it is seen as applying quantitative methods to any legal question. By contrast, in the UK, it refers to both quantitative and qualitative methods, but a quick search with Westlaw or Google-UK leads to another, more implicit, limitation, namely that ELS research is predominantly about questions related to courts, lawyers, and related institutions of justice.
  I’d suggest that the best way forward is to combine these two approaches (thus, the title of this blog post):

• On the one hand, the UK gets it right in including qualitative methods. Terminologically, there is no reason to focus on quantitative methods. Moreover, at least some research requires both: to illustrate, when I attended the CELS in the US last year a speaker merely presented data on some legal topic in China – and, unusual for CELS, the first but rather obvious comment from the discussant was that it would be really useful to add a qualitative case study in order to clarify what the real problem is and what the subsequent data may tell us. 
• On the other hand, the US gets it right in treating ELS as a method, not a particular substantive area. Of course, courts and lawyers are important, but thinking about how law works (ie applying an empirical perspective) is clearly something that also concerns its impact on other persons (citizens, businessmen etc), other institutions (companies, NGO etc), as well as the society as a whole (eg, impact on growth, well-being, etc) – and all of this, of course, may be relevant to any area of law, as the variety of topics covered in JELS/CELS show.

This “best of both worlds” approach also shows why it is useful to have a field like ELS at all, namely, to encourage us to learn about and discuss a particular method. Whereas in other disciplines methods training is seen as absolutely essential (e.g., for a doctorate degree), legal academics are often quite unfamiliar with core concepts of methodology, epistemology, philosophy of science etc. Thus, there is a clear need for fora (be it journals, conferences, centres etc) that deal with particular methods. But, this should not lead to narrow-mindedness: thus, in the present context, having a field that combines both quantitative and qualitative empirical methods as they can apply to any area of law seems most plausible to me.

A ‘Wordle’ comparison of the old and new Companies Acts of the UK and India

I’m doing serious research on comparative company law - but not today! Instead, playing with Wordle: I took the UK CA 1985, the UK CA 2006, the Indian CA 1956 (as amended) and the Indian Companies Bill 2012 (as approved by the lower house), and used Wordle to find the 20 most common words in these Acts (omitting common English words; but also uninteresting frequent terms like ‘company’, ‘section’, ‘act’).

First the two UK ones: 

So, ‘shares’ and ‘person’ most frequently used; then, ‘case’ and ‘court’ in the old one, but ‘members’ and ‘resolution’ in the new one (together with ‘accounts’ in both); also interesting that ‘information’ and ‘offence’ are now in top 20, all of this potentially showing a shift away from a judicial-focussed company law.

Now India, the old and the new acts – how will they be different from each other, and will they show convergence or divergence from the UK? 

Ok, the terms 'shares' and 'person' (and ‘case’ in the old one) are similar to the UK. But the clouds are also quite different: with ‘Government’, ‘Tribunal’ and ‘board’ (note: the ‘Amendment’ is perhaps misleading as I copied the ‘as amended’ version), but for instance not ‘accounts’ and ‘resolutions’. Some of these differences may be stylistic (‘board’?) but they may also indicate a different substantive focus (‘Government’?), or that certain topics (‘accounts’?) are addressed elsewhere in the law.

Overall, the difference between, even, the (very) black-letter law between UK and Indian company law seems to me more pronounced then I’d have expected. Of course, if one wanted to do a more proper content analysis, more sophisticated techniques could be used – or silly ones, of course (eg, I’m thinking of checking the Indian Acts, against the UK ones, with plagiarism software – but not today…)

The Problem with the THE University Reputation Ranking

Yesterday the Times Higher published its new reputation ranking. I’m not sure this ranking tells us anything meaningful. Six universities are far ahead of any other universities: ok, so people asked to name the best universities, mention the few global brands such as Harvard. Not a big surprise but certainly not a robust quality comparison (rather, more like a world survey of the best actors and of course the most well known Hollywood celebrities would top such a ranking).
The reputation ranking also unduly favours big universities. To show this, I use the Leiden ranking which scales for university size (as do some other global rankings, btw: good overview here). I took the 36 UK universities that made it in the ranking and compared the UK rank with numbers on total academic staff members (data here), as ranked for these universities.

The scatterplot shows that there is hardly any relationship (correlation 0.11): e.g., some of the largest universities (e.g., Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Imperial), but also some of the smaller ones (e.g., St Andrews, Durham, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) make it into the top ten.
But in the scatterplot I have also added circles – ie the ‘o’ – of the eight UK universities that also made it into the THE Reputation Ranking top 100 (note: in total there are nine, as the LSE is in the THE but not the Leiden ranking). Here it can clearly be seen that the THE Reputation Ranking mainly rewards size: with one exception it only includes the biggest UK universities, whether these are really the best ones or not.
Implications: well, one could think about merging universities in order to improve the brand value and reputation ranking (apparently discussed in Ireland: see here). But my real suggestion would be just to ignore the THE Reputation Ranking (though I felt urged to write this post anyway…).

UK cultural exceptionalism, Brexit and network analysis - continued

The previous post presented a basic network picture displaying cultural similarities between 21 EU countries plus four Anglo-Saxon non-EU countries [click picture for full view]. Comments:

• The most similar country pairs have shaped the network. These were Ireland-UK, New Zealand-UK, Spain-Germany, Austria-Germany, Denmark-Austria, Ireland-Canada, Poland-Bulgaria, Spain-Austria, Spain-Finland, Austria-Sweden, Canada-Netherlands, New Zealand-Netherlands. Most of these pair are somehow plausible (eg Ireland-UK, Austria-Germany) but not all of them (eg Spain-Finland?)
• More specifically, I was interested in whether the UK is more similar to fellow Anglo-Saxon or fellow EU countries. The top 7 countries most similar to the UK are: (1) New Zealand, (2) Ireland, (3) US, (4) Canada, (5) Netherlands, (6) Australia, (7) Greece. This speaks for the first view – and actually the mean UK difference from the other Anglo-Saxon vs. the other EU countries is also significant.
• I also calculated which countries are closest to the four Anglo-Saxon countries: (1) Ireland, (2) UK, (3) Netherlands – so far so predictable. BUT also which EU countries are most different from the other EU countries: (1) Bulgaria, (2) France, (3) Cyprus … (7) UK – so as a result the UK seems to be a fairly mainstream EU country; the only specific thing is that, in addition, it is also fairly similar to the Anglo-Saxon countries!
• Finally, just to say: I used the Schwartz culture data (see previous post), but there would be other, more recent and comprehensive, datasets if one wanted to do more than a blog post. Also, what I really would like to do would be to use various indicators and codings (including law-related ones, see my paper here) in order to come to a firmer conclusion on “UK exceptionalism” - but I may also leave this to others.

UK cultural exceptionalism, 'Brexit' and network analysis

In the discussion about a possible British exit from the EU it is sometimes said that the UK is just culturally very different from the rest of Europe. I don’t tend to believe in this argument – based on my anecdotal experience from having lived in a couple of European countries. But as a social scientist, that doesn’t count: we need proper empirical evidence. I took data on cultural values as developed by Shalom Schwartz for 21 EU countries plus four Anglo-Saxon non-EU countries (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) [data from here, Appendix Table A.3] and calculated the difference for each of the 7 ‘Schwartz categories’ for each of the country pairs, and then added these differences together. This gives us information on how different each country is from each of the other 24 countries. A nice thing to do with it is to present it as a network picture:

To explain, the strongest connections (ie most similar countries) are connected; if countries are very similar, this has been done with a bold link. Moreover, I applied ‘Multi-Dimensional Scaling’, ie countries that are close according to the Schwartz data have been shifted close together by the network analysis program.

What does it show? Well, the UK is in a corner of the Anglo-Saxon countries, different from most of the rest of Europe. Also, it’s interesting to see that the Eastern European countries are a bit separate from Western European ones.

More data and analysis will follow in the subsequent posts …

Conference on Networked Governance & Paper on OECD Principles of Corporate Governance

I just return from a great conference at Kyushu University, Japan, on Networked Governance, Transnational Business and the Law. The abstracts of the papers are available on the website; the final and full papers will be published in a book in the next year or so. My paper was on ‘The OECD Principles of Corporate Governance in Emerging Markets: A Successful Example of Networked Governance?’ (co-authored with Oscar Alvarez-Macotela), the working paper is available on SSRN.

Comparative Company Law – our new book!

Now published: see Amazon and Hart Publishing (with toc)   

Edited by David Cabrelli and myself (UK and Germany) – and many thanks to our co-authors: Marco Ventoruzzo and Corrado Malberti (Italy), Lena Nordman (Finland), Pablo Igesias Rodriguez (Spain), Hiroyuki Watanabe and Hisaei Chuck Ito (Japan), Kamil Szmid and Michal Zurek (Poland), Gordon Smith (US), Pierre-Henri Conac (France), Theis Klauberg (Latvia).

What interested me in January

• Cameron’s speech pro-European? (Europpblog) 
• The eclipse of British reason (Project Syndicate)
• A Nobel Prize in law at last: on the creation of the Tang Prize (Mepli)
• Brussels aims to reward investor loyalty (Defining Tension) 
• Book: Miller and German constitutional law (Juris Diversitas) 
• Airport mess shows limits of German expertise (Storbeck)
• Should there be a debt ceiling? (Becker & Posner)
• Life in a G-Zero World (Fukuyama) 
• Japan developments: an era ends, and a new one around the corner? (Iconnectblog) 
• The undercover economist’s new radio series (Freakonomics) 
• The best years of your life (PhD comics)