Details:
Our third installment of this speaker series will feature a presentation by Professor Benjamin van Rooij, titled “Towards a Compliance Action Laboratory: Ideas for Comparative Research about How Rules Shape Behavior in the US and in China.”
In both China and the US, non-compliance with regulatory rules is an important problem undermining the law’s function to mitigate economic, health, and ecological risks. Much existing research on compliance from criminology, law and economics, and socio-legal studies has helped us to understand the complexity of how rules shape behavior and has explained why violations keep recurring. This body of work has demonstrated the mixed effects of a deterrence punishment based enforcement strategy and underlined the importance but also the complexity of using collaborative, educational, and punitive approaches to get people to obey the law. Much of this body of work has been less able to evidence a feasible and effective approach to enhance compliance. In social psychology, economic psychology and behavioral economics there have over the last decades been a number of studies, mostly of an experimental nature, that offer original and also hopeful insights about new approaches to enhance compliance. This talk will discuss an initiative to replicate and expand on these studies seeking to make them directly applicable in real life business and regulatory contexts, both in China and the US.
Light refreshments will be served. This event is free and open to the public.
Date:
Wednesday, February 12th, 2014
Time:
11:30am-12:30pm
Location:
UCI Campus, Social Ecology I, room 112
Speaker Bio:
Benjamin van Rooij is the John S. and Marilyn Long Professor of U.S.-China Business and Law and academic director of the John S. and Marilyn Long U.S.-China Institute for Business and Law. By affiliation he is Professor of Chinese Law and Regulation at the Faculty of Law at Amsterdam University and director of the Netherlands China Law Centre. Also he is honorary professor at Wuhan University School of Law and long-term visiting professor at Yunnan University School of Law. In 2010, he was visiting faculty at New York University School of Law as a member of the Hauser Global Faculty.
Prof. van Rooij’s research focuses on implementation of law in comparative perspective. Since 2000 he has studied the implementability of legislation, regulatory law enforcement and compliance, and rights invocation and legal empowerment. A central theme is how implementation of law can be improved in the context of emerging markets where weak enforcement and widespread violations of law create a vicious circle undermining compliance. Using insights from sociology of law, criminology, political science and social psychology he uses anthropological methods to study compliance behavior and motivations and public and private enforcement practices. He uses innovative fieldwork data both to seek improvement to persistent implementation problems as well as to reorient existing regulatory, criminological and socio-legal theories that so far have yet to adapt to data from countries such as China.
Fields of law studies include environmental law, land law, labor law, food safety law, and taxation.
Prof. van Rooij has served as an adviser to the Dutch Prime Minister, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment.
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