No abstract

No abstract

For the past 15 years an enormous enterprise of global norm making and related national lawmaking has been underway in many areas of global commerce. This article shows that leading global institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations, are building an international financial architecture with law-including corporate bankruptcy law-as its foundation. Building on research on international institutions and three national cases (China, Indonesia, Korea), the authors propose a new framework for legal change in a global context-the recursivity of law. They argue that the globalization of bankruptcy law has proceeded through three cycles: (1) at the national level through recursive cycles of lawmaking, (2) at the global level through iterative cycles of norm making, and (3) at the nexus of the two. Recursive cycles are driven by driven by four mechanisms-the indeterminacy of law, contradictions, diagnostic struggles, and actor mismatch. Thus the recursivity of law both revives and expands the sociological theory of legal change and offers a basis for an integrated theory of globalization and law.Sociological studies of globalization largely neglect law. Whereas research has been extensive in such global arenas as finance, business, culture, religion, and population, it has been almost entirely absent for law. This

During the Depression, the Townsend movement enjoyed varied success in seeking pensions for the aged. Social-movement models predict that success depends on the mobilization of resources or on collective action. Other theories predict that economic or political conditions cause the emergence of movements and changes in public spending. The political mediation model used here holds that, to succeed, a movement must reinforce political action with strong organization of members under favorable political conditions. This article defines "success" and employs various analytical and empirical strategies, including qualitative comparative analysis on statelevel data, to appraise the models. Although each perspective has some support, the political mediation model offers the best explanation of the patterns of successes. The state and the political party system determine whether mobilization and action benefit a constituency and win acceptance for a movement organization.Perhaps more than any other social protest movement of the Great Depression, the insurgency of the aged led by Francis E. Townsend has been credited with transforming public social provision in the United ' For comments, criticisms, aid, and advice, we thank

Modern theories of rational decision-making distinguish between certainty, risk and uncertainty. When the consequences of action cannot be calculated,