FACTS An officer in Midvale, Utah was doing some paperwork in his patrol car when he was approached by man, later identified as Nitokalisi Fonua (hereinafter, “Nick”). Nick “looked suspicious,” mainly because he was “jittery, looking around and appeared to be very nervous.” Nick’s suspicion rating jumped dramatically when, for no apparent reason, he informed the officer he had stolen a white GMC Blazer, which he had parked nearby. Naturally, the officer asked Nick if he would show him the Blazer, and Nick said sure. When they located the Blazer, the officer walked over and looked inside. The first thing he saw was a sawed-off shotgun on the back seat. Then he noticed some markings on the shotgun, “markings that looked gang-related.” Nick told the officer that the key to the Blazer was inside his motel room at the Days Inn. Also in the room, he said, were his “cousins,” meaning “people he knows from the streets.” The officer asked Nick “if we could obtain the keys to the vehicle so we could turn those back over to the owner.” Nick said the keys “were in the room somewhere” and that he “didn’t care” if the officer went in and retrieved them. Nick also gave the officer his key to the room. When backup arrived at the motel, officers knocked on the door which was opened by a man named Vake. There were two other occupants: a woman and Kimoana, the defendant. By this time, the officers were aware that Kimoana—not Nick—had rented the room. The first thing the officers saw as the door opened was the woman pointing “an unidentified black object” at the wall. Concerned for their safety, they ordered the occupants to “show their hands.” Then they pat searched them. Finding no weapons (the “unidentified black object” was a television remote control), they holstered their guns. Although the officers already had Nick’s consent to search the room, they sought and obtained consent from Vake. During the search, they found a “long-barreled revolver” under a mattress. As the result, Kimoana was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

United States V. _____

The rapidly growing biofuel sector in Africa has, in recent years, been received with divided interest. As part of a contemporary wave of agricultural modernization efforts, it could make invaluable contributions to rural poverty. Conversely, it could also engender socioeconomically and environmentally detrimental land use changes as valuable land resources are converted to plantation agriculture. This research analyzes the impacts and impact pathways of biofuel feedstock development in Ghana. It finds that companies are accessing large contiguous areas of customary land through opaque negotiations with traditional authorities, often outside the purview of government and customary land users. Despite lack of participation, most customary land users were highly supportive of plantation development, with high expectations of ‘development' and ‘modernization.' With little opposition and resistance, large areas of agricultural and forested land are at threat of being converted to plantation monoculture. A case study analysis shows that this can significantly exacerbate rural poverty as communities lose access to vital livelihood resources. Vulnerable groups, such as women and migrants, are found to be most profoundly affected because of their relative inability in recovering lost livelihood resources. Findings suggest that greater circumspection by government is warranted on these types of large-scale land deals.

/pdf/land-based-investments-for-rural-development-a-grounded-3xum4mfbjw.pdf

Land-based investments for rural development? A grounded analysis of the local impacts of biofuel feedstock plantations in Ghana.

‘Once a miner, always a miner’: Poverty and livelihood diversification in Akwatia, Ghana

Proposals for more effective natural resource governance emphasize the importance of institutions and governance, but say less about the political conditions under which institutional change occurs. This book synthesizes findings regarding the political drivers of institutional change in extractive industry governance. The authors analyse resource governance from the late nineteenth century to the present in Bolivia, Ghana, Peru, and Zambia. They focus on the ways in which resource governance and national political settlements interact. Special attention is paid to the nature of elite politics, the emergence of new political actors, forms of political contention, changing ideas regarding natural resources and development, the geography of natural resource deposits, and the influence of the transnational political economy of global commodity production. National elites and subnational actors are in continuous contention over extractive industry governance. Resource rents are used by elites to manage this contention and incorporate actors into governing coalitions and overall political settlements. Periodically, new resource frontiers are opened, and new political actors emerge with the power to redefine how extractive industries are governed and used as instruments for development. Colonial and post-colonial histories of resource extraction continue to give political valence to ideas of resource nationalism that mobilize actors who challenge existing institutional arrangements. The book is innovative in its focus on the political longue durée, and the use of in-depth, comparative, country-level analysis in Africa and Latin America, to build a theoretical argument that accounts for both similarity and divergence between these regions.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/181039/1/1000322.pdf

Governing Extractive Industries: Politics, Histories, Ideas

Influence of land tenure practices on artisanal mining activity in Ghana

This Note addresses the intersection of customary and statutory land law in the land tenure policy of Ghana. It argues that improving the current land tenure policy demands integration of customary land law and customary authorities into the statutory system. After describing why and how customary property practices are central to the economic viability of any property system, the Note gives a brief overview of Ghana’s customary and statutory land law. The Note concludes with specific policy suggestions about how Ghana could better draw on the strength of its customary land sector.

/pdf/building-on-custom-land-tenure-policy-and-economic-jt5n6bple3.pdf

Building on Custom: Land Tenure Policy and Economic Development in Ghana

If any area of constitutional law has been defined by a metaphor, the First Amendment is the area, and the "marketplace of ideas" is the metaphor. Ever since Justice Holmes invoked the concept in his Abrams dissent, academic and popular understandings of the First Amendment have embraced the notion that free speech, like the free market, creates a competitive environment in which the best ideas ultimately prevail. But as with the free market for goods and services, there are discontents who point to the market failures that make the marketplace metaphor aspirational at best, and inequitable at worst. Defenders of the free economic market have responded to these criticisms by developing a thicker understanding of how the market actually functions. Their most successful model is the New Institutional Economics (NIE), which incorporates and explains the transaction costs and institutions that populate and effectively regulate that market. The marketplace of ideas model, however, remains faithfully wedded to a neoclassical view of the market that depends on a perfectly costless and efficient exchange of ideas. It is thus vulnerable to the same criticisms economists answered decades ago, and it fails to take into account the rich view of market mechanisms and institutions they have developed since. In recent years, First Amendment scholars led by Frederick Schauer laid the groundwork for a solution by describing an "Institutional First Amendment" that would accord special treatment to certain institutions like schools and the press. But just as the marketplace of ideas fails to account for institutions, the Institutional First Amendment fails to account for the marketplace of ideas. As it turns out, the two theories are not only reconcilable, but complementary. This Article brings them together, using the New Institutional Economics to describe the "speech institutions" - such as schools and universities - that play the same cost-reducing role in the marketplace of ideas as other institutions do in the market for goods and services. For the same reason and to the same degree as economists defer to the private norms of market-enhancing institutions, so too should courts defer to the speech rules of marketplace-of-ideas-enhancing institutions. The Article then tests the descriptive and normative validity of this "New Institutional First Amendment," finding that it both explains and justifies much of the Court's recent school speech doctrine, including its recent ruling in Morse v. Frederick, and also justifies the special status of universities as speech institutions. By addressing the economic objections to the marketplace metaphor, the Article attempts to better describe, explain, and rehabilitate the marketplace of ideas.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1153981_code734237.pdf?abstractid=1008851&rulid=184396&mirid=4

Institutions in the Marketplace of Ideas

The least discussed element of District of Columbia v. Heller might ultimately be the most important: the battle between the majority and dissent over the use of categoricalism and balancing in the construction of constitutional doctrine. In Heller, Justice Scalia’s categoricalism essentially prevailed over Justice Breyer’s balancing approach. But as the opinion itself demonstrates, Second Amendment categoricalism raises extremely difficult and still-unanswered questions about how to draw and justify the lines between protected and unprotected “Arms,” people, and arms-bearing purposes. At least until balancing tests appear in Second Amendment doctrine—as they almost inevitably will—the future of the Amendment will depend almost entirely on the placement and clarity of these categories. And unless the Court better identifies the core values of the Second Amendment, it will be difficult to give the categories any principled justification.

/pdf/categoricalism-and-balancing-in-first-and-second-amendment-1pty4id5ug.pdf

Categoricalism and Balancing in First and Second Amendment Analysis

As a matter of constitutional doctrine, the right to keep and bear arms is coming of age. But although the doctrine has begun to mature in the decade since District of Columbia v. Heller, scholars, advocates, and judges disagree about (and sometimes simply do not know) how to characterize it. 
This Article is the first comprehensive empirical analysis of post-Heller Second Amendment doctrine. Beginning with a set of more than one thousand Second Amendment challenges, we have coded every available Second Amendment opinion — state and federal, trial and appellate — from Heller up until February 1, 2016. The dataset is deep as well as broad, including dozens of variables regarding the content of each challenge, not just whether it prevailed. Our findings help provide an objective basis for characterizing Second Amendment doctrine and framing new scholarly inquiries. This is a particularly important task now, as the Amendment becomes a part of “normal” constitutional law and increasingly susceptible to the standard tools of legal analysis.

Joseph Blocher

Papers

Influence of land tenure practices on artisanal mining activity in Ghana

Building on Custom: Land Tenure Policy and Economic Development in Ghana

Institutions in the Marketplace of Ideas

Categoricalism and Balancing in First and Second Amendment Analysis

From Theory to Doctrine: An Empirical Analysis of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms after Heller