This book, a well-argued treatise on the benefits of neo-classical free trade, develops the principles of a liberal foreign trade theory and provides a new conceptual basis for discussing the argument between free-trade and protectionism.

In these heady days of ever increasing globalization it has become vital to question whether governments should be allowed to protect domestic enterprises from foreign competitors.This book represents a first attempt to provide a new conceptual basis for discussing the cases in which free trade should be the option of choice in trade policy and tho

This new and comprehensive volume covering the subfield of comparative political economy provides a detailed overview over its intellectual roots, clarifies its contents, and introduces the readers to key debates while identifying new and exciting avenues for future research. Ideas, interests, and institutions have traditionally been the main focus points of this field, but the volume argues that culture provides an additional and often neglected area, providing the 'glue' that keeps national models of capitalism hanging together. The volume also develops pathways beyond the varieties of capitalism paradigm. Building on a thorough and rigorous review of comparative capitalisms and a synthesis of the research strands that have built the bedrock of this subfield, Comparative Political Economy explores the individual components of national models of capitalism and argues that these elements deserve closer scrutiny. Their permutations have been considerable over the past thirty years, and their study permits valuable insights both empirically and theoretically. The empirical coverage of the book includes chapters covering industrial relations, labour markets, systems of education and training, finance, welfare state, and debt. In the conclusion, research pathways forward are identified and the impact of energy security issues and environmental factors on the study of comparative capitalisms will be assessed.

Governments, or at least the clever ones among them, are aware of the factors guiding business activities. In the course of adopting and enforcing economic legislation, they seek to attract business activities in order to increase national income (and fiscal revenues), generate employment opportunities, and, very generally, please voters. Hence economic law may be considered an economic good, as suggested by the title of this book. That function, which most rules of economic law have in the competition of systems, was strengthened by the worldwide liberalization of trade. Today, it is of greater significance than ever before. Lawyers, economists, academics, and practitioners, from inside and outside Germany, have taken a look at the facts and have discussed approaches to conceptualizing them. The resulting 30 essays, collected in this volume, contribute to the interpretation of existing, and the making of new, economic law.

This bookexamines liberty’s Constitutional meaning through the jurisprudence of Justice Stephen Field, one of the late-Nineteenth Century’s most influential Supreme Court Justices. A Lincoln appointee who served on the Court from 1863-1897, Field articulated a view of Constitutional liberty that speaks to contemporary disputes. Today, some see liberty as protection through government regulation against private oppression. Others see liberty as protection from government through limits on governmental power. Justice Field is often viewed as siding against government power to regulate, acting as a pre-cursor to the infamous “Lochner”Era of the Court. This work explains how Field instead saw both these competing conceptions of liberty as legitimate. In fact, the two cooperated toward a common end. In his opinions, Field argued that protections through and from government worked in tandem to guard fundamental individual rights. In describing this view of liberty, Field addressed key Constitutional provisions that remain a source of debate, including some of the earliest interpretations of the Due Process Clause, its relationship to state police power and civil rights, and some of the earliest assertions of a national police power through the Commerce Clause. This work furthermore addresses the underpinnings of Field’s views, namely that he grounded his reading of the Constitution in the context of the common law and the Declaration of Independence. In his principles as well as his approach, this book argues, Justice Field presents a helpful discussant in ongoing debates regarding the meaning of liberty and of the Constitution.

The state-centred 'Westphalian model' of international law has failed to protect human rights and other international public goods effectively. Most international trade, financial and environmental agreements do not even refer to human rights, consumer welfare, democratic citizen participation and transnational rule of law for the benefit of citizens. This book argues that these 'multilevel governance failures' are largely due to inadequate regulation of the 'collective action problems' in the supply of international public goods, such as inadequate legal, judicial and democratic accountability of governments vis-a-vis citizens. Rather than treating citizens as mere objects of intergovernmental economic and environmental regulation and leaving multilevel governance of international public goods to discretionary 'foreign policy', human rights and constitutional democracy call for 'civilizing' and 'constitutionalizing' international economic and environmental cooperation by stronger legal and judicial protection of citizens and their constitutional rights in international economic law. Moreover intergovernmental regulation of transnational cooperation among citizens must be justified by 'principles of justice' and 'multilevel constitutional restraints' protecting rights of citizens and their 'public reason'. The reality of 'constitutional pluralism' requires respecting legitimately diverse conceptions of human rights and democratic constitutionalism. The obvious failures in the governance of interrelated trading, financial and environmental systems must be restrained by cosmopolitan, constitutional conceptions of international law protecting the transnational rule of law and participatory democracy for the benefit of citizens.

A distinguished group of judges, scholars, political leaders, lawyers, and representatives of groups in the private sector who convened in Philadelphia in 1976 reexamine the Constitution and our system of government, exploring its implications for the present and future.

This book offers a legal understanding regarding the core elements of SGEI (Services of General Interest), and of how the post-Lisbon constitutional framework on SGEI affects the application of the EU market rules by the EU Court of Justice, including procurement rules, to public services. It is built up of three parts, namely Part I: No Exit from EU Market Law for Public Services, Part II: SGEI as a Constitutional Voice for Public Services in EU Law, and Part III: The cost of loyalty, the relationship between EU procurement and state aid legislation on social services and the Treaty rules on SGEI, ending with a case study of Swedish systems of choice. Analyses are also provided on how the EU legislator engages in the Europeanisation of social services through EU procurement and state aid rules that have an ambiguous relationship to the Treaty framework on SGEI. Some explanation to this ambiguity is proposed by studying how the application of EU state aid rules could hinder the development of Swedish systems of choice liberalizing publicly-funded elderly care and school education. Included are propositions on crucial but yet unsettled legal questions, in particular what the legal meaning and relevance of the notion of economic activity in EU market law are and which core elements characterize SGEI. This book is therefore mainly aimed at legal academics and practitioners but may also be of interest to political scientists. Caroline Wehlander studied at Umeå University and holds the title of Doctor of Laws. She lives and works in Sweden.

“Eminently readable, and anybody who cares about the future of American democracy in these perilous times can only hope that it will be widely read and carefully considered.” —James Pope, Washington Post “Fishkin and Forbath’s accessible work serves as both history lesson and political playbook, offering the Left an underutilized—and perhaps counterintuitive—tool in the present-day fight against social and economic injustice: the Constitution.” —Benjamin Morse, Jacobin “Rousing and authoritative...attempt[s] to recover the Constitution’s pivotal role in shaping claims of justice and equality...Makes even the present court’s capture by the ideological right a compelling platform for a revived social-democratic constitutional politics.” —New Republic Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. But as this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history shows, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought. Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this “democracy-of-opportunity” tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to fight for the constitutional right to form a union. But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy.

This timely book, with contributions from prominent experts including Luis Ortiz Blanco, Valentine Korah, Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker, Lorenzo F. Pace and Richard Whish, examines the novel aspects of the 2009 Guidance on Article 102. They present a critical assessment of the Guidance that could be relevant to the result of the ongoing Commission'sinvestigations, for example, the opened procedure against Google. Moreover, the contributing authors identify the differences between the Guidance and the prohibition of exclusionary abuses in some member states (including France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Spain) and reveal the ways in which the relevant national laws treat exclusionary abuses, and assess how they differ from the approach of the Guidance. They also reveal the history and development of the relevant national legislation on prohibitions of unilateral conduct.