This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter addresses general aspects regarding the piercing of the corporate veil. The rationale for this chapter is to give a brief overview of piercing the corporate veil and address basic aspects that will be covered in this thesis; for example, piercing the corporate veil in corporate groups and piercing the corporate veil in the context of privately owned companies. Additionally, reasons for not covering points such as piercing the corporate veil in the context of public companies will be mentioned. The second chapter is dedicated to studying the piercing of the corporate veil in England and the U.S .. These jurisdictions are the parents of the modern corporate personality and general aspects about piercing . the corporate veil derive from these countries. Thus, Chapter Two can be regarded as a continuation of Chapter One. My purpose is to present the Anglo-American piercing of the corporate veil for it to be contrasted in Chapter Three. Chapter Two starts by addressing the piercing of the corporate veil in England and the reasons for the current position of English courts over this matter. The second part of this chapter is dedicated to the U.S. and its approaches developed in order to deal with corporate personality in that jurisdiction. This chapter concludes by stating the reasons why these jurisdictions have different positions regarding this subject. The third chapter will cover the piercing of the corporate veil in Spain and Latin America. This chapter starts by addressing general aspects of the corporate personality in Spain and Latin America as well as civil law concepts and principles used by these jurisdictions when dealing with corporate personality issues. The second section of this chapter is dedicated to Spain and corporate personality issues in that jurisdiction. Following, is the third section which starts by making a brief comment about the reasons for choosing the jurisdictions subject of study before continuing by addressing Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Brazil individually. This chapter ends by making a comparison between the methods used by Spain and the discussed Latin American jurisdictions. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the main case study, Panama. In this chapter, basic aspects of the Panamanian corporate entity in addition to the way in which Panamanian authorities have dealt with corporate veil issues to date are addressed. Finally, the principle of san a critica will be explained in the fifth chapter. The origins and rationale for the existence of sana critica and the reason to consider it suitable for supplementing an approach to deal with corporate veil issues. In addition, each of the rules on which sana critica is founded will be explained as well as the influence these rules have had over judges thinking and judgments. This chapter ends with a suggestion for the development of an approach to deal with corporate veil issues in Panama.

National parliaments have always been involved in the affairs of the European Union. They have debated and voted on joining the Community and have ratified the European treaties negotiated by their governments. On a more regular basis, national parliaments have also, to varying degrees, scrutinised European legislation and the European-level activities of their executives. Increasingly, it has been recognised that national parliaments underpin decisions taken at the European level by legitimising the actions of their executives. As Europeanisation has progressed and the impact of European legislation has become more widely felt at the domestic level, national parliaments have found that their space to manoeuvre has shrunk. National parliaments have become part of a multi-level system of governance and can no longer, singularly, determine the parameters within which they operate. The traditional model of undertaking scrutiny, with specialised European committees operating in isolation from the rest of parliament, is therefore no longer tenable. EU specialists are unable to provide the expertise on all areas covered by European integration and increasingly require the expertise found in other committees within national parliaments to perform their scrutiny adequately. Inter-parliamentary contacts have contributed to a better understanding of common parliamentary problems. Parliamentarians have become more aware of the challenges of Europeanisation and globalisation, but have also discovered ways to, collectively and individually, face these challenges. National parliaments are likely to remain firmly anchored in the domestic level, maintaining their roles as legitimisers of national executives as well as expressions of national sovereignty. They can therefore also be expected to remain independent and autonomous institutions, determining their own activities and procedures. As a consequence, the impetus behind any move by national parliaments to further develop their influence over European (or global) decision-making and activities must come from within national parliaments themselves.

This study investigates accountability of the judiciary for its role in authoritarianism as an integral part of accountability in transitions. It argues this is an important but relatively neglected aspect of transitional justice theory and state practice. The thesis of the research is that the judicial institution, as the third branch of government ought to be held accountable for its role in past governance in transitional societies. This is particularly important to obtain comprehensive accountability. It is also relevant to the crucial task of institutional transformation which is a key objective of transitional justice. The paucity of critical perspectives on the role of the judiciary during a society’s troubled period would appear to be because of the view that it lacks a distinct role in governance. This suggests that the judicial function was inconsequential or judicial outcomes were invariably imposed. In view of the acknowledged important role of the judiciary in both liberal and democratising polities all over the world, it is argued that the purview of transitional justice mechanisms should, as a matter of policy, be extended to scrutiny of the judicial role in the past. There is the need to publicly scrutinise the course of judicial governance in post-authoritarian societies as a cardinal measure of institutional transformation. Following on the recognition that the judiciary in post-authoritarian contexts will be faced with enormous challenges of dispute resolution, restoration of the rule of law, as well as a key role in policy determination and governance, its institutional transformation following a period of siege is critical to the survival of democracy and the rule of law. The mechanism of choice identified in this research for scrutiny of the judicial function in transitional societies is the truth commission. The research proposes extending the purview of truth-telling processes as a measure of public accountability to the judiciary in post-authoritarian contexts. The research adopts a comparative perspective but to contextualise the argument, it focuses specifically on judicial governance and accountability for the past in Nigeria’s transition to democracy after three decades of authoritarian rule.

Increasing levels of poverty and social exclusion in Africa, and Malawi in particular, have heightened interest in social security with varying proposals for refonn. Feminist scholarship highlights how women experience social security differently. However, debates on refonn have not fully engaged with how social security can reflect the needs of women in a context of plural and competing legal discourses, nonns and values. This thesis investigates the interplay between nonns and values and the lived realities of women in social security from a feminist and radical legal pluralist perspective. It uses predominantly qualitative data from a case study of women in Zomba, Malawi, based on grounded theory complemented by discourse analysis and appreciative inquiry. This study found that women's specific risks and the disproportionately adverse impact of general risks on women are in the majority of cases marginalised due to struggles for resources and power. Plural social responses at family, community, market and state levels reflect this marginalisation. Dominant legal discourses in these institutions devalue non - material disruptions of life mainly related to care practices. This weakens solidarity and results in social insecurity for the majority of women. The marginalisation is further reinforced by dominant conceptions of umunthu and human rights which obscure the disparities in solidarity and care. At the same time, there is practical resistance to the dominant discourse using idioms of jenda and substantive complementarity being generated within the same or modified regulatory institutions. These practices are creating a gap which IS precipitating the changes aspired by women. The changes include increased access to both material and non-material resources and sharing of care within and between the family, community, market and the state. This reflects solidarity of care. The thesis argues that, social security systems should be underpinned by a legal discourse of solidarity of care in order to improve women's social security.

This thesis examines the corporate governance affairs within the specific framework of the Greek market. Corporate governance has become a major topic of debate and policy development in the world of business, policy makers, and academics around the globe. The increased attention to corporate governance is due to its legal, economic, and institutional significance to the effective functioning of markets and corporations operating thereof Likewise in Greece, although the corporate governance discussion is at an infant stage, yet there are some reasonable signs showing that the issue escalates on the agenda of boardrooms and policy makers. Notwithstanding that the thesis is informed by the principal agent theory, a more contextualised approach to it is adopted. This is so for confirming a key proposition of the thesis in that the diversity of corporate arrangements, specific corporate governance patterns, and approaches are mediated by their fit or alignment with situational variables arising in diverse organisational, corporate, and legal environments. By applying this contextualised approach, the Greek corporate governance attributes are identified, showing that although the Greek system has been influenced by other paradigms, yet situational variables and adaptations to domestic attributes make it a distinct, hybrid rules based system. Using statistics from two corporate governance surveys that measure the level of corporate governance of Greek corporations, a discrepancy between the objectives of the corporate governance standards, compliance, and actual governance efficiency is established. In explaining such discrepancy, this thesis goes further on providing in-depth reasoning upon the specific situational variables of the Greek corporations and the market as a whole. It is admitted that the tendency of the Greek regulator to legislate on corporate governance matters rather the issuing principles, has created an overly bureaucratic, rigid, and inflexible legal framework. In addition, problems with implementation and enforcement of corporate governance requirements have been identified and their prevalence is explained by country-specific attributes. The overarching objective of this thesis is that the identification of those situational variables - that to some certain extent restrain the fulfilment of the corporate governance objectives- becomes a useful tool for policy makers and corporations' themselves in generating realistic and effective measures that need be taken if governance efficiency is to be strengthened. The establishment of a strong, efficient, honest governance system shall be an ongoing priority for both firms and the Greek market. Moving towards governance efficiency from the deeply rooted, country specific deficiencies of Greek corporations and the market, will inevitably be a long run, perhaps never ending process, in which both the substance and the sequencing of policies will be important.

This thesis critically reviews and evaluates theories of organisational learning and IT-related organisational change with particular reference to the task of explaining users’ acceptance (or rejection) of new technology. It seeks to develop a conceptual model of organisational learning and apply it to the particular case of recent IT-related (e-government) organisational change in Korea’s Supreme Court Registry Office (SCRO). Hitherto, there has been no systematic attempt to analyse the way in which management theories contribute to the electronic government (e-government) transformation effort within the public sector. This thesis seeks to fill this gap by synthesising perspectives drawn from the study of public sector organisation, IT, organisational transformation, and organisational learning. The analysis of the case study organisation (based on a qualitative research methodology) identifies various organisational learning phenomena occurring during the change project within the SCRO. In particular, it elaborates the interplay between the process of learning and change in the level of users’ acceptance (or rejection) of the new technology (the change over time is presented graphically in the form of a ‘support curve’). The research follows the organisational-transformation project since 1994 in terms of the process innovation diffusion model (Cooper and Zmud), which identifies the following key stages: initiation, adoption, adaptation, acceptance, routinisation and infusion (Cooper and Zmud). For each of these stages, processes of organisational learning are linked to the level of users’ acceptance. This aspect of the analysis involves considering the nature and scope of collective, mutual, situated, single-loop and double- loop learning; learning by doing; team learning; and leadership. These various approaches to organisational learning, which emerge from the analysis of the existing organisational-learning literature, are applied to the case analysis to bring out major developments in the SCRO’s organisational transformation. The findings derived from this study provide a framework that can be further applied and tested in future research, and that will also allow public sector management to continuously anticipate the problems involved in cultivating and sustaining users’ acceptance of new technology and nurturing appropriate organisational learning.

The research evaluates the implementation of the Framework Agreements on Telework and Work-related Stress in Belgium, Denmark, UK, and Czech Republic and in the banking and local Government sectors within these countries. Further, it evaluates the various factors that explain divergent implementation outcomes in countries and sectors. It develops two benchmarks to assess the efficacy of the Agreements as modes of European social partner ‘soft’ law governance; a benchmark that assesses the procedural implementation of the Agreements, and a benchmark that assess the substantive implementation of the Agreements. A multi-level governance theoretical approach is also adopted. It emerged that ‘effective’ procedural implementation of the Agreements largely occurred in Belgium and Czech Republic, but did not occur to the same degree in Denmark and UK. It also emerged that the substantive effect of the Agreements was patchy and that the substantive impact of the Telework Agreement was greater than that of the Work-related Stress Agreement. Although structural factors were important in explaining divergent implementation outcomes, it also emerged that it was primarily policy and actor related factors that explained divergent national and sectoral implementation outcomes. The research ends with a rather skeptical evaluation of the Agreements as modes of European social partner ‘soft’ law governance.

This research analyses the role and action of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreements (TRIPS) and pharmaceutical patents in the public health network of Djibouti, by using an approach largely inspired by actor-network theory (ANT). In doing so, it addresses issues that run beyond the specificities of this case study and relate more broadly to the relevance of ANT to socio-legal analysis. The relation between TRIPS, pharmaceutical patents and public health in developing countries has been a widely debated issue in the past decade. However, the field remains limited by a relative uniformity in the range of approaches and case studies chosen in existing research. This project aims to address some of these limits, by looking at the role of TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents in a small country with no local pharmaceutical industry, no pre-existing official system of intellectual property, and with a largely undocumented public health system. Using ANT in this project allowed for the complexity of the mechanisms of both TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents to be highlighted. It participated in emphasising that they need to be understood as made of multiple, co-existing dimensions. By demonstrating how specific connections and associations have shaped what TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents are and do in the networks of Djibouti, this research emphasises the artificiality of the dichotomy between social and legal, and proposes an understanding of social connections as symmetrical and co-dependent. It discusses the more general relevance of this approach to socio-legal research. The example of Djibouti also allows for new questions to be raised in relation to the actual impact of TRIPS and pharmaceutical patents in “developing countries”. In particular, it emphasises the need to return to a more balanced approach to the relation between pharmaceutical patents and health in poor countries.

The emergence between 1965 and 1973 of a crisis of over-accumulation and over-capacity, rooted in international manufacturing yet affecting the overall private business economies of the advanced capitalist countries, inaugurated a developmental context whose profound contradictions were brought home by the Great Recession of 2008-9 and the continuing Long Depression. The intervening period has seen profound economic, political and social crisis in the advanced capitalist world and has simultaneously been treacherous for under-developed economies forced to navigate rocketing energy costs and international commodity price and currency exchange rate turbulence under the continual threat of debt-levered expropriation. The struggle to locate the causes – proximate and ultimate – of the present crisis is at the same time a battle to map the basic economic and political coordinates of the continuing long downturn. In this connection it is contended that efforts have been undermined by the epistemological underdevelopment conditioned by a crisis of knowledge-formation which has unfolded in parallel with the long downturn. The dominance of neoclassical economics (‘unworldly’ since the marginal revolution) on the right and the displacement of Marxism on a structurally weakened and autodidactic left in the context of the ascent of postmodernism as an intellectual and cultural dominant has opened a space between the material and discursive realities of global capitalist development. This work is an attempt to deploy the method developed by the classical Marxist tradition to approach the significance of the state and law in the historically-conditioned reproduction of capitalist social relations. It is contended in the first place that the dualism which obtains between national and global spheres in much theorisation of neoliberal ‘globalisation’ obscures the dialectical interrerelation of state and world market – the institutional and regulatory environment of international trade, money and finance being both the creation of states and the developing context which frames their – necessarily path-dependent and reflexive – projects of domestic economy making. As against popular notions of state decline, following Gowan the state-political content of the centring of private financial markets in the mediation of international monetary relations is recalled, while the embeddedness of the state in circuits of capital accumulation is emphasised (Tony Smith), the concept of ‘regime of accumulation’ being deployed to capture the nexus of monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy which articulates historically-conditioned development strategies. In this respect, we depart from the work of the Bolshevik jurist Pashukanis, who despite significantly advancing the materialist analysis of the juridical form, identified in his most significant work a largely derivative role for the state. It is argued that the methodological weakness represented by Pashukanis’ disproportionate emphasis on commodity exchange – his failure to proceed from the basis of the capitalist economy as a contradictory unity of production and circulation – prevents him from fully apprehending the role of the state in the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. As the discussion unfolds, there is developed in conversation principally with Gramsci an understanding of the state as the specific material condensation of a relationship of forces among classes and class fractions. Upholding the notion of the ‘integral state’ as a differentiated unity of civil society and political society upon which terrains the capitalist class forms alliances with proximate classes as the prerequisite for and correlate of its domination of labour, the developmental context represented by neoliberalism is conceived in terms of the transition of interest-bearing capital from leading to dominant fraction of the capitalist class in parallel with its tendential contradictory disaggregation from productive capital. Such a process has necessitated a transformation in the character of bourgeois political supremacy involving a dismantling of the civil rights and social protections accumulated during the period bookended by Americanism and the welfare state and increasing dependence upon an expanded machinery of coercion. Proceeding from this basis, it is considered how in specific developmental contexts the state by way of the legal form maps the social totality, achieving distinctive couplings (and de-couplings) of wealth production and social reproduction. There is asserted the second-order integration of public and private spheres in terms of the fundamental unity of capitalist reproduction, the first-order public/private metabolism being evaluated in view of the facilitation and rationalisation of social reproduction in the context of a productive economy structured around dissociated private producers. The legal form is further interrogated in view of its role in structuring the productive antagonism between capital and labour, a relation which on the basis of its form comes to expresses various contents – from consensual integration to casuistic assimilation – as domestic social relations are (in-)validated by the operation of the law of value at the level of the world market. In this connection, the unproductive theoretical polarisation obtaining between approaches which consider law to be epiphenomenal and those which pursue its relative autonomy is enriched by a historicised conception in terms of which law, concretising specific relationships of forces within particular regimes of accumulation, appears as ‘sword’, as ‘shield’ and as ‘fetter’. This framework is particularly useful for evaluating the opportunities for the deployment of legal strategies by labour and groups oppressed under capitalism – a question in relation to which Pashukanis, following Lenin, demonstrated a remarkable political astuteness.

The ultimate aim of this thesis is to examine the legitimacy and procedural fairness of the asset-freezing legal systems1 as a counter-terrorism measure, in order to offer recommendations on how to reform the law in Jordan. To that end, it is argued that counter-terrorism measures generally undermine procedural fairness and relevant human rights. This thesis explores how sophisticated legal orders deal with the adverse effects of lack of legitimacy and procedural fairness in the asset-freezing counter-terrorism, in order to form a model that can resolve the defects in the application of the asset-freezing systems. To achieve this end, the thesis is divided into seven chapters. It starts with a brief introduction. Chapter 1, seeks to explore the development of the asset-freezing in the United Nations (hereinafter ‘UN’), the changes in its nature, and determines if the United Nations Security Council (hereinafter ‘UNSC’) is empowered to impose such asset-freezing obligations. Chapter 2, inspects the decision-making procedures involved in the asset-freezing against designated persons such as UNSCR.1267, and its descendants, and the observation of procedural fairness in the UN legal order. Chapter 3, examines the application of the UNSC asset-freezing systems by the European Union (hereinafter ‘EU’) and its procedures, and the observation of procedural fairness in order to explore its inconsistencies and flaws. Chapter 4, looks at the legal challenge to the UN and EU legal orders, the lack of judicial protection in the UN, and the possibility of compensating for this lack by the EU Judiciary based on the autonomy of the EU legal order to see if the EU courts have the capability to provide effective judicial protection and the extent of such judicial protection . Chapter 5 deals with the approaches followed in applying the UN, EU and national asset-freezing systems and their procedure in the UK legal order, also the observance of procedural fairness in these contexts. Chapter 6 examines the right to effective judicial protection and the approach followed to accommodate the security considerations in proceedings before the UK court. Chapter 7 explores the application of the asset-freezing systems in Jordan, the lack of procedural fairness and the limited judicial protection offered. Finally, the thesis presents concluding remarks and recommendations for law reform in Jordan.