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The shift from traditional employer-sponsored defined benefit pensions towards individual-account defined contribution plans involves a reallocation of risks and rewards from plan sponsors to employees. While much has been written about the transfer of investment risk and the potential consequences of bad investment choices, less attention has been focused on other potential hazards to retirement security such as the effect of job change and other labour market factors on contribution patterns, the chance of outliving one’s accumulated assets, and the tension between encouraging participants to save for retirement while allowing access to those assets for a variety of other pressing financial needs. This chapter examines these challenges to retirement income security, and identifies several legal and policy changes that might enable participants to cope better with such changes.

It is sometimes argued that firms sponsoring defined benefit pensions are led to take higher risks because pension insurance premiums and funding requirements do not reflect the riskiness of the pension plan portfolio or sponsor bankruptcy risk. This perspective is tested by linking company data on expected default probabilities with newly-available information on pension plan assets. It is shown that moral hazard induced by the current pension insurance environment has influenced corporate pension plan sponsor funding outcomes, even controlling for cash availability. There is no evidence that the share of plan assets invested in equities is related to firm bankruptcy risk or the plan’s contingent claims on the pension insurance entity.

Recent financial market and plan termination experiences have exposed the shortcomings of existing funding, disclosure, and premium rules governing private single-employer defined benefit pension plans in the United States. These rules were designed to provide predictability for plan sponsors and administrators by insulating pension plans from the realities of economic and financial market fluctuations. Unfortunately, current practice often overlooks key financial principles that arguably should inform a responsible set of pension rules and the insurance system backing the plans. This chapter outlines the key characteristics of pension plans needed to beneficially guide rule-making and offers examples drawn from proposed funding and premium rules.

While the first step in the implementation process involves analysing the architecture and structure of law, the second step involves looking into the social environment around the said architecture. In studying the social environment, one has to consider the legal environment, or understand the issues and effects that are directly linked with legal design. Also, the wider social context involved in the interaction of law with its environment must be looked at. It is furthermore important to look at the attitudes and goals that officials want to achieve because these are reflected in the way that laws are designed. Officials do not only interpret rules, but they also have to come up with decision-making procedures about how the rules should be applied.

The reception of law refers to the process of drawing ideas that involve law as a system of rules, the social context of rules, the acceptance and variability of law, social spheres, and other such concepts, in analysing how groups of citizens and officials handle the law, use the law, take care of its demands, or push this to the sidelines. The character of law is the first of several variables that affect the reception of law, and this is further divided into specific categories like relations between persons and the state, private relations, and other such relations, to discuss whether law has distinct functions and the relevance it may have to society. This chapter provides an overall structure that demonstrated how the reception of law takes place through discussing the concepts of legal architecture, the legal environment, and the social environment.

This chapter explores the development of the moral and legal environment of the City of London in general, and the Stock Exchange in particular, during the nineteenth century. It describes the market conditions at the beginning of the century and evaluates the changes in the principles and practices of commerce and finance by the end of the century. This chapter also examines two cases of Stock Exchange fraud, separated by more than seventy years, both involving current or prospective Members of Parliament who had a public reputation for fighting fraud and corruption.

This chapter examines the role or contribution of the law on environmental injustice in the Russian Federation. It analyzes the ways the Russian legal system can either help or hinder the protection both of the lands inhabited by indigenous peoples and of their rights to those lands and the resources on them. It suggests that while Russia’s laws on environmental protection and indigenous peoples’ rights are progressive in nature, the instability of the legal environment and the unequal access to information about the law and about changes in the law continue to be major problems for the Russian legal system.

Chapter 7 analyzes how international organizations negotiate the interpretation of legal obligations when changes occur in the international legal environment. It describes how the production of soft law and a truly global treaty – the NPT – affected the negotiation between the two existing international organizations in charge of verifying the legal obligations of their member-states with regard to the use of nuclear technologies and fissile materials: Euratom and the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. It shows that when opposite legal rules are inherited from a succession of treaties with overlapping jurisdiction, it is not always the newest and more general rules that survive the hard work of harmonization. In this case, European diplomats not only preserved Euratom’s exclusive control of nuclear activities in Europe after the NPT was signed, but they also convinced the IAEA to design a new global NPT safeguards system, which was adapted to the Euratom system. The outcome such a complex and sequential process of harmonization of opaque legal rules thus produced some loopholes in the global nonproliferation regime, as the goal of Euratom had never been to check nuclear proliferation in Europe.

This chapter presents an overview of health and human rights advocacy and describes a broad framework and the diverse strategies used by human rights advocates to advance their goals. Based upon documenting abuses, raising awareness, building coalitions, and engaging communities, human rights advocacy seeks to ensure that government laws, policies, and practices respect, protect, and fulfill the right to health of all. These rights arguments and advocacy strategies, first developed in response to the HIV epidemic, have become the basis for broader right to health campaigns. Health-related human rights advocacy, beyond specific strategies, seeks to elevate the voices of people affected by human rights violations, analyze structural barriers, and identify obligations and responsibilities. Focusing on the strategies and tools that human rights advocates use in documenting rights abuses, raising awareness, and seeking change, it is necessary to examine new advocacy partnerships and approaches for evaluating advocacy efforts.