IntLawGrrls |
- Guest Blogger: Claire Moore Dickerson
- Sub-Saharan development & business laws
- In honor of Maître Alice Roullet-Piccard & Dr. Dorothea May Moore
- On June 28
| Guest Blogger: Claire Moore Dickerson Posted: 28 Jun 2010 03:36 AM PDT  It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Claire Moore Dickerson (left) as today's guest blogger.Claire is the Senator John B. Breaux Professor of Business Law at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, Lousiana, and also a permanent visiting professor at the University of Buea in Cameroon. She has conducted considerable research in that country and elsewhere in Africa, especially the Ivory Coast and Senegal. Her scholarship -- including the co-authored Unified Business Laws for Africa (2009) -- is noted for its application of socioeconomic principles to business-related areas and for its focus on the intersection of commerce and human rights. In her guest post below, Claire discusses her article, forthcoming next January in the American Journal of Comparative Law; it examines business law and informal-sector entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Claire teaches Business Enterprises, International Business Transactions, Contracts, and a Comparative Corporate Governance Seminar. She came to Tulane from Rutgers University School of Law, Newark, New Jersey, where she was Professor of Law, Dickson Scholar, Schuchman Fellow, Co-Director of the Global Legal Studies program, and holder of the Visiting Lowenstein Chair. She also taught at the law school as St. John's University. She holds an A.B. magna cum laude from Wellesley College, a J.D. from Columbia University,  where she was a Stone Scholar, and an LL.M. in Taxation from New York University. Before entering law teaching she was a partner at the New York office of Coudert Brothers, and later at Philadelphia's Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis.She's active in several professional organizations, including the Law & Society Association and the American Society of International Law, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Section on Socio-Economics of the Association of American Law Schools. In a further guest post below, Claire dedicates her contribution to 2 foremothers, Maître Alice Roullet-Piccard and Dr. Dorothea May Moore.
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| Sub-Saharan development & business laws Posted: 28 Jun 2010 02:27 AM PDT (Thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post on research to be published as "Informal-Sector Entrepreneurs, Development and Formal Law: A Functional Understanding of Business Law," 59 American Journal of Comparative Law (January 2011), as well as my dedication below to two foremothers) While discussing the policies of the prior US administration towards his country, a respected Senior Barrister in Cameroon trotted out the old adage: 'Give people fish, and you feed them for today. Teach them to fish, and you have fed them for a lifetime.' He was, of course, asking that donor institutions and donor states provide tools that reinforce independence rather than mere handouts. This perspective does seem consistent with a trend by the World Bank, among others, to encourage business, including smaller businesses. Indeed, prodded by economists seeking to encourage development by facilitating business, this international financial institution has over the past half-dozen years paid very serious attention to the role of business laws. Consider, for example, the World Bank's "Doing Business" reports, annual compilations of studies focused on the contribution of law to the business environment in emerging economies.  It is easy for us in the global North, especially as we endure the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, to be cynical about the ability of business laws to facilitate development. Business laws have failed to protect the overall business environment, including the availability of credit.As we consider what regulations to impose on the largest financial and other companies here, politicians and economists are contemplating the long-term impact on the entire business community. Thus, small businesses should care about the regulations constraining the most powerful actors in their economy. Still, their daily ability to work in sanitary, lighted, safe environments, and to expect the machinery of government to support their commercial contracts, continues to be protected. In Sub-Saharan Africa, ► To what extent can law restrain the excesses of the most powerful agent, typically the state, while facilitating business on the ground? ► To what extent can laws help create a business environment that most closely mimics that of the global North — where, in the best of circumstances, the most powerful actors are adequately controlled? The Sub-Saharan business climate is, of course, fundamentally different. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the informal sector represents 40-60% of gross domestic product, according to a study by Friedrich Schneider. International Labor Organization figures state that this sector employs as much as 93% of non-agricultural workers. The informal sector thus is highly important. Yet formal law does not penetrate easily or predictably there. For this reason, simple transplantation of classic business law from the global North will not be sufficient to protect and support the business either of an informal-sector-market woman or street vendor, or even of the many business people who have a foot in both the formal and informal sectors. The focus has to be on functionality. The goal is to serve the informal sector with laws that accomplish there what classic business laws do for the smaller businesses of the global North. Specifically, laws should increase the predictability of transactions while limiting abuse from government and other powerful agents. The attack should be two-pronged. ► Formal law both can constrain formal-sector actors, such as some landlords transacting with informal-sector businesses, and can mandate that formal-sector actors provide pro-business realities that Northern businesses enjoy, including sanitary work environments. Precisely because these actors are in the formal sector, they are subject to government regulation — even if the landlord is in fact the government. ► The second prong still cannot directly affect the informal-sector nano-entrepreneurs, those self-employed workers who typically operating alone or with family, and with very modest sales. These workers will not be directly affected because, almost by definition, they are at best unpredictably subject to formal laws and regulations. On the other hand, nano-entrepreneurs do tend to have a legal regime, or a quasi- legal traditional regime, that affects businesses. This second prong, in turn, deploys two strategies to allow formal law to have as direct an impact as possible on the informal sector. ►► The first strategy aimed at the informal sector is to have formal laws that reinforce existing business norms. These laws are the most likely to support effectively a North-style predictability, since the informal-sector nano-entrepreneurs are primed to comply. ►► The second strategy aimed at the informal sector emphasizes the importance of encouraging coordination of consumers of law. This strategy is especially important when the applicable legal system is highly centralized — as is typically the case in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Discussion of relatively developed countries and their formal economies may be found in Law & Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World (2008), by Columbia Law Professors Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor.) Laws promoting coordination include West and Central Africa's Economic Interest Group (specifically, Sections 869-885 of the OHADA Commercial Companies and EIG Uniform Act), as well as other laws that promote cooperatives. A case in point is the  self-coordination effort in the Ghanaian chocolate industry, described here. (credit for photo of woman in Ghana holding fair-trade chocolate) (Prior IntLawGrrls post on problems in the chocolate industry.)In short, the additional strategy aimed at the informal sector workers is to facilitate the formation of cooperatives. The goal is for business-related laws to achieve in Sub-Saharan Africa the functionality that classic business laws offer, in the best of times, to businesses of the global North.  |
| In honor of Maître Alice Roullet-Piccard & Dr. Dorothea May Moore Posted: 28 Jun 2010 01:14 AM PDT (Today's IntLawGrrls guest blogger, Claire Moore Dickerson, has chosen to dedicate her contribution to 2 foremothers) .JPG) I am delighted to participate in this project, and would like to dedicate my contribution to two formidable professional women whom I knew well and continue to admire fiercely.Maître Alice Roullet-Piccard (right), born in 1890, received her degree in law from the Faculty of Law of the University of Geneva in 1912, and in 1914 was among the first woman admitted to the bar in Geneva. She opened a law office with her husband, a former classmate at university. From that perch she practiced law until her death in 1972, frequently representing wards of the state and the indigent. She also raised three children. She became an institution within the Geneva bar. Walking in her wake through the city was a slow process: as she proceeded through the streets, stately, under full sail, she would be greeted by colleagues and clients. To her granddaughter, Maître Roullet-Piccard seemed in total command and absolutely fearless. Dr. Dorothea May Moore (below right) was my pediatrician (and my first cousin). Tall and spare, her gray hair was swept up in a 1930s style, and her voice was slightly gravely but very elegant. Her gray eyes framed by steel-rimmed glasses, she offered her small patients an unfailingly bemused gaze, inviting and intimidating at once. Born in 1894, she graduated from college in 1915 and medical school in 1922. She had her own practice, engaged in research, and taught at Harvard Medical School for over 30 years, where  she was the first woman instructor in pediatrics. She continued to work under her maiden name even after her marriage in 1941, and, having started in medicine before the advent of antibiotics, persisted in her chosen her profession long after many of her age cohort had retired. She died just 15 years ago, at the age of 101.Even as a girl, I understood both that the paths chosen by Maître Roullet-Piccard and Dr. Moore had been hard, and that their example made my own path smoother.  |
| Posted: 28 Jun 2010 12:03 AM PDT  On this day in ...... 1635 (375 years ago today), the Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique established a French colony at Guadeloupe (right), a Caribbean archipelago about 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., where the explorer Christopher Columbus had landed in 1493. "By 1674, Guadeloupe was annexed to the Kingdom of France and a slave-based plantation was established." Britain and other countries wrestled for control of the territory, but French colonization was confirmed in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, and slavery was abolished in 1848. Guadeloupe remains a French colony and so is a member of the European Union. (Prior June 28 posts are here, here, and here.)  |
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