Article
Достоинство личности как личная собственность: Метаморфоза российских законов о порочащих сведениях
This article examines the history of Russian laws protecting citizens’ dignity and honor. Pre-revolutionary Russian legal scholars assumed that ethical dignity could not be legally protected because it was not contingent on social esteem: it could be tarnished only by the bearer himself. But when the Moral Codex of the Builder of Communism outlined the norms of morality, the law extended its protection to citizens’ ethical dignity, among their other immaterial personal values. The Moral Codex disappeared after the Soviet collapse, but the legal protection of “honor and dignity” remained: today, the law defines dignity as a “moral-legal category,” determined by commonly accepted social standards.
The case law of the European Court of human rights on article 10 in its significant part may be referred as well-established. However, in addition to the well-established criteria new types of cases appear and new approaches emerge. The present article analyses the Court’s practice on protection of dignity and honor in the light of Article 8 in conjunction with Article 10, on arising positive obligations of the state under Article 10, on interpretation of “reputation of others” as a legitimate aim under part 2 of Article 10, and on legal regulation of political advertising.
‘The General Part of Private Law: Historical Roots – Efficiency in the 21st Century’ is the collected papers published as the 12th volume in the series ‘Writings on the development of the system of private law’ edited by Christian Baldus und Christian Pohl. It is a follow-up to ‘Der allgemeine Teil des Privatrechts: Erfahrungen und Perspektiven zwischen Deutschland, Polen und den lusitanischen Rechten’ Peter Lang GmBH, 2013 – 556 S. The collected papers result from two conferences and two research seminars held in Poznań and Heidelberg in 2010–2016 in order to investigate the efficiency of the general part of private (civil) law for lawmaking, legal scholarship, education, and, to lesser extent, judicial decision-making in the historical and comparative perspective.
This article begins with the heroic stories former Leningrad residents tell about making their own outdoor-tourist gear out of illicitly obtained industrial materials. Reading these stories not as evidence of illicit circulation, but as expressions of ethical claims, I show that they are united by common assumptions of goodness, and argue that these assumptions cannot be understood through analytic frameworks concerned with private, acquisitive interest. Instead, I argue that they must be understood in terms of the “personal:” an idiosyncratic Soviet property regime that was not opposed to, but co-constitutive of, socialist property. Analyzing 1960s political statements, juridical arguments and media texts, I show that the 1961 Third Party Program reforms extended the juridical logic of personal property to personal ethical realms. Specifically, the Program demanded that people place their ethical obligations – to strive for the overall greater good – above their formal obligations to follow letter of the law. By framing necessary but unplanned transactions in the a-legal terms of “mutual aid,” this ethical stance helped the economy appear functional despite its endemic circulation problems.
The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.
The results of cross-cultural research of implicit theories of innovativeness among students and teachers, representatives of three ethnocultural groups: Russians, the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens and Ingushs) and Tuvinians (N=804) are presented. Intergroup differences in implicit theories of innovativeness are revealed: the ‘individual’ theories of innovativeness prevail among Russians and among the students, the ‘social’ theories of innovativeness are more expressed among respondents from the North Caucasus, Tuva and among the teachers. Using the structural equations modeling the universal model of values impact on implicit theories of innovativeness and attitudes towards innovations is constructed. Values of the Openness to changes and individual theories of innovativeness promote the positive relation to innovations. Results of research have shown that implicit theories of innovativeness differ in different cultures, and values make different impact on the attitudes towards innovations and innovative experience in different cultures.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.