From Christie Ford in the Corporate Law Section, we have an admiring review of Camden Hutchison's recent Columbia Business Law Review article, "Progressive Era Conceptions of the Corporation and the Failure of the Federal Charter Movement." Ford writes:
Good history, including good legal history, sheds light on our own times. Well-written history, peopled with recognizable figures and marked by a strong narrative arc, also makes for good reading. In a new article, Camden Hutchison brings a precise historical eye and an engaging storytelling style to the understudied area of corporate legal history. His topic is Progressive Era corporate law reform, and particularly the question of why the United States failed to develop a federal corporate law regime in that period (and, of course, since).Read on here.
From the Courts Law Section, Marin Levy spotlights an article with a significant historical component: Tara Leigh Grove's "The Origins (and Fragility) of Judicial Independence," forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review. From Levy:
Drawing in part from her own (excellent) past work, Grove undertakes a significant examination of the independence of the federal judiciary. She traces the historical arcs of several key contestations between the judicial branch and one of its sibling branches, including the failure to comply with a court order, the potential removal of a judicial officer outside the impeachment process, and court packing. Though these contestations have received scholarly attention before, Grove brings them together in a new way. In so doing, she provides a persuasive account of how these various attempts to curb the courts were not only not verboten, but were embraced in the early days of the judiciary—and how political actors ultimately reversed their course.Read on here.
And from the Property Law Section comes a review of Shitong Qiao's "The Evolution of Chinese Property Law: Stick by Stick?," a contribution to the edited collection Private Law in China and Taiwan: Legal and Economic Analyses (Yun-chien Chang et al. eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2017). Writes Gregory M. Stein:
Professor Qiao’s chapter contributes to property scholarship in several important and meaningful ways. He reminds his readers that scholarship focusing on Western attitudes toward property can easily overlook non-Western cultures and legal systems. He emphasizes how cultural context influences social and legal attitudes toward property rights. He reminds the reader that China is still in an experimental phase in which private parties test out new approaches and the government endorses the ones that seem to work best.Read on here.
