The purpose of this thesis is to study the role and effectiveness of law and regulation in relation to the problem of financial exclusion. The research was conducted through a comparative study of the United Kingdom (hereinafter ‘UK’) and China, and focuses on whether law and regulation could fulfil a role in facilitating vulnerable consumer’s access to basic banking services. The thesis begins with an overview of the theory of financial exclusion and provides definitions of consumer vulnerability. It reviews the exclusion conditions in both countries in respect of basic payment services and consumer credit, and analyses the reasons for, and negative consequences of, being excluded from such services. The thesis then demonstrates the theory of equal opportunity, and the role of law and regulation in the context of facilitating financial inclusion, followed by an overview of credit regulation from a historical perspective. The main content of this thesis is divided into three major parts. The experiences of the UK, China and the European Union (hereinafter ‘EU’) are analysed, and it is found that the process of financial inclusion could be facilitated by way of regulation. First, commercial banks are at the centre of the mainstream market. However, their role in financial inclusion largely focuses on payment services. Whether vulnerable customers’ access to payment services could be facilitated by regulations is the main content of chapter two. This thesis suggests that without enough incentive, banks can be less motivated in this progress. To accelerate financial inclusion in respect of consumer credit, alternative credit facilities on the consumer market should be supported by law and regulation, available funding should be made available and regulatory barriers be removed. After a comprehensive review of their legal and regulatory environment, the present research suggests that the UK has generally made good progress in this regard, while China is still in the nascent stage of development. The weakness in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model is clarified through the analysis. Subprime lenders are also essential in the market because they fill a gap. Standards that regulate subprime lenders should be equal for all lenders in the market, but also give consumers in the high-risk subprime lending sector. In the case of detriment, the regulatory regime would be able to provide recovery or simple and easy dispute resolution. This thesis argues for both ex ante and ex post consumer protection.

This thesis investigates in depth the implementation of family planning regulations in China at the grassroots level with a focus on the period from the 1990s to the end of the 2000s, and the social environment in which such implementation takes place. The main evidence sources were collected during 5 months of fieldwork, and include close observation, in-depth interviews, questionnaires, archival records (secondary and official data), statistical data, and internal reports. Since the 1990s, China has experienced rapid economic development and has also introduced a new democratic system into the village: the village committee election. Thus in addition to the resistance caused by the traditional reproductive culture, these new factors also present themselves as obstacles to the smooth implementation of the family planning regulations. By adopting political science institutionalism theory and a socio-legal research method, this research aims to analyse the factors influencing the grassroots level officials’ implementation in a broad social environment. Following an explanation of the formal and informal organizational settings of the town family planning agency, this thesis also explores the town family planning officials’ degree of autonomy in implementation and the criteria they apply to their own decisionmaking. This thesis argues that family planning implementation in the grassroots rural China has been influenced by the following factors: the formal and informal organizational structures, new democratic system influences, the economic development level, employment conditions, culture and convention, the relationships among various interest groups, and family planning officials’ understandings of their work, as well as the imperfect legal environment. All these factors interact with each other to bring about the complexities and discrepancies in implementation.

The thesis examines the nature of the legal interests in emissions allowances (emissions entitlements), the tradable instruments created by the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). The potential categorisation of emissions entitlements as private property impacts significantly on the environmental success of the EU ETS and, more widely, on the conceptualisation and functionality of property rights. The current silence of the EU ETS on the nature of the entitlements has caused problems in the emissions market, as illustrated by a case study and an analysis of the commercial contracts constituting this market. In turn, the public policy goals of the EU ETS depend on the success of the private market. The thesis puts forward an analytical framework designed to articulate a construction of emissions entitlements that reconciles the multiple and potentially conflicting goals of the regime. The framework consists of two parts. The first part examines legal theories of property and establishes that the elements required to constitute a property right are exclusion, transfer and use. The second part examines three legislatively created rights regimes, namely intellectual property rights, milk quotas and spectrum rights, which are compared to emissions entitlements from the viewpoint of the identified requisite elements. This exercise further reveals instructive insights into the evolutionary nature of property rights in a regulatory environment. For private property to act as an effective tool of regulation, it needs to be specifically conceptualised as instrumental property, a new category which is put forward by the thesis. The notion of instrumental property is defined by the public policy goals of the regulatory regime and also by the particular context in which the rights operate. Instrumental property must necessarily be balanced against extraneous public or private interests which the law regards as deserving of protection.

This thesis articulates a normative theory of international law based on new natural law theory. New natural law theory is a theory of ethics, politics, and law that is based on the classical natural law doctrine of Thomas Aquinas. The primary reference point of the thesis in relation to new natural law theory is the work of John Finnis, who in Natural Law and Natural Rights and subsequent writings elaborates the theory in the consideration of fundamental concepts in political philosophy and legal theory. The thesis examines the tenets of new natural law theory regarding the common good, authority, law, justice, human rights, and legal obligation, and uses these to formulate normative claims regarding the moral purpose of international law and the moral standards that international law should satisfy in light of its purpose. The thesis posits the existence of an ‘international common good’, encompassing a set of supranational conditions that are instrumental to human welfare and that require international cooperation for their realisation. The thesis claims that the primary moral purpose of international authority and international law is to further the international common good through resolving the coordination problems of the international community of states. Identifying ‘principles of justice’ for international law, the thesis asserts that positive international law should promote and demonstrate respect for human rights, and should also promote and protect the international common good. The thesis further argues that states have a general moral obligation to obey international law, based primarily on the necessity of state compliance with international laws in order to facilitate the effectiveness of such laws in promoting the international common good. These claims are elaborated with reference to existing features of international law, and through comparison with existing normative and non-normative perspectives in international legal theory on the concepts considered.

This thesis is aimed at solving this puzzle: If the rules are the same, how do regulatory authorities compete for business firms to come to their jurisdictions? I suggest that it is better to think of regulatory competition in terms of regulating and regulated sides finding a partner to form a marriage. I argue that an important dimension to regulatory competition is competition between different types of microlevel enforcement regimes for different types of firms. Assuming the rules stay the same, depending on the match or mismatch of regimes’ and firms’ preferences, enforcement regimes have differential results in business attraction, enforcement effect and regulatory advantage. This argument is elucidated by a so-called ER (enforcement regime) Framework that uses the cultural institutionalist approach – a fusion of historical institutionalism and Mary Douglas’ grid-group typology. The framework is used to interpret the empirical findings about regulatory competition for foreign investment in China. The thesis adds to our knowledge about the dynamics both of regulatory competition and of enforcement regimes, and helps to fill the gap that exists between the literatures in these two areas.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the relationship between legal protections of minority shareholders – ‘on the books’ and ‘in action’ – and the development of equity markets. In this regard, there is a general consensus that Russian legal measures adopted to protect minority shareholders are strong. The failure of the judiciary to enforce these measures is the principal focus of the academic criticism and has been frequently cited to explain the underdevelopment of the Russian equity market. Notably, the criticism of the judiciary persists despite the market’s marked improvements over the last decade. And yet there has been little empirical analysis of enforcement of the minority shareholder protections by Russian judiciary. This thesis examines private enforcement of corporate law in Russia focusing on the lawsuits to impugn transactions with corporate insiders and the outcomes of those suits. Drawing on a dataset of 170 cases decided by the Federal Arbitrazh Court for the Moscow region in 1999 – 2006, the thesis finds that a large proportion of claimants are unsuccessful. Relying primarily on the law and economics literature and theoretical accounts of the relationship between the law and market development, the thesis develops an analytical framework (for convenience termed judicial bias hypothesis) against which it evaluates case outcomes. The evaluation suggests that in a substantial fraction of the cases the outcomes were justified by legislation or by efficiency, casting doubt over the criticisms of Russian judiciary. While cautious in drawing causal links between the enforcement and markets, the thesis suggests that marginalising legal institutions’ role in Russia might be premature. Their role in fostering the market might be greater than anticipated particularly in incentivising disclosure if not in deterring overreaching.

This thesis is about the origins and development of freedom of information laws. The number of countries with these laws has risen dramatically in recent decades, and now stands at around ninety. This is widely taken as evidence that governments across the world are converging in their institutional arrangements because they face similar challenges and demands. Access to information is increasingly claimed to be a human right, essential to the effective functioning of democracy and fundamental to legitimate public administration in the information age. This thesis seeks to challenge this assumed causal homogeneity by explaining why countries in which these principles were well-entrenched legislated at different times. The explanation offered here emphasises institutions: the manner in which important political actors are organised, and the structure of authority and accountability relations between them. It shows that differences in these institutional arrangements meant access laws were introduced at different times in different countries because they were introduced for different reasons and in response to different pressures. It supports these claims by conducting a comparative historical study of freedom of information in Sweden, the USA, France, the UK and Germany. This thesis contributes to empirically-oriented scholarship on a prominent aspect of contemporary government. It provides a framework for further rigorous comparative scholarship. It also provides detailed accounts of how access developed in two countries which have not received much attention in English-language scholarship, France and Germany, and original insights into three others about which more has been written. Whether one is interested in improving actually-existing laws or understanding democratic government in the information age, this study is valuable because it complements visions of why transparency laws are desirable with historically-informed comparative knowledge about why they are introduced at all.

In 2011, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) produced and released a documentary film entitled “Sexual Violence and the Triumph of Justice.” The documentary available on the Tribunal website is the first film produced by the Tribunal in a series of documentaries arranged thematically and geographically. In declaring a triumph of justice and by highlighting the work of feminist lawyers and judges, the official narrative seeks to reassure the international community that progress is being made in holding individuals responsible for gender crimes. The availability of the online streaming of proceedings, documentary production and visual archives allow for greater visibility of the Tribunal, including its work on sexual violence. However, these visual resources also mask what occurs off screen. My thesis problematises this official progressive narrative by turning to fictional filmic narratives about sexual violence perpetrated during the Bosnian conflict. By bringing together the literature on gender crimes and the embryonic research on film and war crimes trials, I argue through a case study of the ICTY that fictional films can show us what the law is refusing or unable to make visible.

This thesis seeks to explain the meaning and function of conscience in commercial law doctrine. It argues that the idea of conscience in law bears its ordinary meaning. When the courts use the language of conscience, they are simply expressing a moral judgement about whether, e.g. the defendant’s behaviour or a particular state of affairs conforms to the commonly held standards of right and wrong to which we all have access and of which we are all expected to be aware. The thesis argues further that the language of conscience has a discernible but very limited function in commercial law doctrine. It helps us to understand that in recognising and enforcing obligations, equity is giving effect to moral obligations, and that it will not do so unless the individual on whom the obligation is to be imposed has knowledge of the relevant facts. However, beyond this, the language of conscience has little, if any, explanatory force. For example, it tells us nothing about the moral principles underpinning particular doctrines, nor does it tell us what or how much an individual must know before it will be reasonable to treat her as subject to an obligation. In fact, the courts’ tendency to invoke the language of conscience and unconscionability without regard to the limits of its explanatory power means that a number of important doctrinal questions remain perpetually unanswered and sometimes obscured. Therefore, the thesis concludes that the courts should not continue to use the language of conscience without paying much greater attention to what it can and cannot explain.

This dissertation is concerned with how societies in transition respond to past violation by focusing on how Ethiopia has dealt with gross violations committed during the repressive regime of a military junta called the Dergue – meaning Committee. It is widely believed that transitional justice processes play a significant transformative role in societies in transition. Based on a case study of the process and impact of prosecution of Dergue officials and their affiliates, this dissertation demonstrates that transitional criminal justice processes may not necessarily transform a society to a new social and political identity that essentially departs from a repressive past. The study discusses and analyzes the theory of transitional justice emphasizing the discourses on the meaning and significance of the main components of transitional justice – justice, truth, reparation and reconciliation – and relates these discourses to the Ethiopian experience. The study is qualitative, employing both primary data (primarily in-depth interview), and secondary data including literature (on Ethiopian history, law and politics), laws both national and international, court cases, and various reports including those of courts and the prosecution office. In the Ethiopian context, the arguments in support of prosecution resonate with the general theoretical arguments that it is necessary to render justice, establish rule of law, ensure accountability, serve as deterrence, and generally serve as a foundation for a new political and social identity. However, whether prosecution or prosecution alone was an appropriate response in the Ethiopian context is a contested issue. Secondly, the legal framework for prosecution and its implementation are also problematic. Thus, this study shows the problematic nature of transitional justice processes as carried out in Ethiopian social and political context in terms of both bringing closure to the past and playing a transformative role, and thereby showing the complex and contested nature of transitional justice itself.