30 January 2010

Different beats

Among this weekend's reading (ie skiving off with post-The Road distress) -

Raphael Cohen-Almagor's short, lucid article 'Holocaust Denial Is A Form of Hate Speech', 2(1) Amsterdam Law Forum (2010), 33-42.

Katherine Biber & Derek Dalton's article on 'Making Art from Evidence: Secret Sex and Police Surveillance in the Tearoom', 5(3) Crime Media Culture (2009), 243-267 - questions about artistic recycling of videos from covert surveillance of beats. For another perspective on homocriminality see Dalton's 'Policing Outlawed Desire: Homocriminality in Beat Spaces in Australia’, 19(1) Law &Critique (2007) 375–405 and 'Gay Male Resistance in Beat Spaces in Australia: A Study of "Outlaw" Desire', 28 Australian Feminist Law Journal (2008), 97–119 and Johnson's 'Ordinary Folk and Cottaging: Law, Morality and Public Sex', 34(4) Journal of Law & Society (2007), 520–543.

Common sense about clickocracy in Courtney Martin's article 'The Missing Discomfort in Mourning for Haiti (There is a hidden cost to tweeting, texting, and other "convenient" ways of taking action to help others)', American Prospect (2010). There's a similarly robust response by Fraser Speirs, in post, to some of the more arrogant criticisms of the iPad.

Marilyn Friedman's provocative Autonomy, Gender, Politics (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2003) and

Jennifer Hill's 51 page article 'Subverting Shareholder Rights: Lessons from News Corp.'s Migration to Delaware' in (2010) 63 Vanderbilt Law Review  101-150 -
The aim of this Article has been to reconsider, through a detailed case study of News Corp.'s migration from Australia to Delaware, an embedded assumption in much contemporary corporate governance scholarship that a unified common law corporate governance model exists. The News Corp. reincorporation saga highlights a number of important differences between U.S. and Australian corporate law rules relating to shareholder rights and provides a valuable counterpoint to convergence theory, which often assumes that a homogeneous shareholder protection regime exists within the common law world.

The News Corp. reincorporation case study is also relevant to the ongoing shareholder empowerment debate. It tests claims about the evolutionary nature of the current U.S. system of corporate governance that are often inherent in antishareholder empowerment arguments. It also demonstrates the importance of focusing on specific legal rules, rather than broad generalizations, in comparative corporate governance scholarship. The net result of News Corp.'s move from Australia to Delaware was an appreciable reduction in shareholder rights and an enhancement of managerial powers, including the power to implement poison pills — a power unavailable in Australia. Although News Corp. asserted that legitimate commercial goals prompted its original reincorporation proposal, the alacrity with which the company adopted a poison pill upon arrival in Delaware strongly suggests that gaining access to Delaware's pro-managerial governance regime was an important aspect of the reincorporation decision.
Margaret Gilbert's A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment and the Bonds of Society (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2006)