Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty
WORK NOTES: with husband, Steven A. Ramirez
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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http://washburnlaw.edu/profiles/ramirez-mary.html * http://washburnlaw.edu/profiles/faculty/_docs/ramirez-mary-resume.pdf * https://nyupress.org/books/9781479881574/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Steven A. Ramirez (a law professor).
EDUCATION:University of Missouri, B.S., 1983; St. Louis University, J.D., 1986.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Washburn University School of Law, Topeka, KS, professor of law. Formerly worked as a prosecutor, Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and for United States’ Attorney’s Office, KS.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Washburn University law professor Mary Kreiner Ramirez has had a long career in investigating and prosecuting white-collar crime. Before beginning her work in higher education she worked for the United States Department of Justice “as a trial attorney,” explained the contributor of a short biographical blurb to the Washburn University School of Law website, “for … seven years prosecuting Sherman Act, mail and wire fraud and conspiracy.” She went on to work for the United States’ attorney’s office in Kansas, prosecuting civil cases. She draws on her experience with white collar crime in her first book, cowritten with her husband and fellow law professor Steven A. Ramirez, of The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street. The volume, wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “is a thought-provoking call for the prosecution of criminal bankers–and investigation into why such prosecution has not yet occurred.”
The Ramirezes construct The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty as an argument that some businesses can be so focused on their own self-interest and are so large and powerful that they should be effectively destroyed. “This new lawlessness,” opined a contributor to the NYU Press website, “poses a profound threat that urgently demands political action and proposes attainable measures to restore the rule of law in the financial sector.” The authors, declared Gregg Barak in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews, say ‘that the power of Wall Street and individual wealth has reached such “a level of concentration that certain financiers now operate above the criminal law insofar as financial crimes are concerned.’ For well over a decade, they argue that the government has shown ‘no interest in toppling current management or fragmenting these firms regardless of criminality and long-standing law.’ The Ramirezes conclude that the `fundamental threat to individual liberty and the rule of law arises from the concentration of economic power in the hands of the very few who exercise dominion over our financial system as well as our government.’” They state, said Harry Charles, writing in Library Journal, that the national economy and the political system would benefit if the government were “to break up large banks and thereby establish a kind of corporate death penalty.” “There are already signs that there will be a lot more ‘grassroots’ push back and professional litigation on behalf of the rule of law and due process,” Barak concluded. “Whether one is preparing oneself or not for one of those struggles to restore law and order, The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty provides an inspired and thoughtful roadmap for knowing the new lawlessness, reviving the old rule of law, and reclaiming our democratic nation in the process.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, November 15, 2016, Harry Charles, review of The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street, p. 100.
Publishers Weekly, October 31, 2016, review of The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty, p. 63.
ONLINE
Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews, http://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/ (January 1, 2017), Gregg Barak, review of The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty.
NYU Press Website, https://nyupress.org/ (August 2, 2017), review of The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty.
Washburn University School of Law Website, http://washburnlaw.edu/ (August 2, 2017), author profile.*
Mary Kreiner Ramirez is Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law, where she teaches a course on White Collar Crime. She is a former prosecutor for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, where she prosecuted white collar criminals. She has published numerous articles addressing the challenges in combating white collar crime.
Mary Kreiner Ramirez
Professor of Law
B.S., University of Missouri, 1983
J.D., St. Louis University, 1986
Contact Information:
mary.ramirez@washburn.edu
785.670.1631
Room 322
"The study of law is a process which should involve questions and debate in the search for a deeper understanding of the law, our system of government, and our pursuit of justice. Washburn provides a climate where students and faculty work together to enhance the learning experience in a comfortable environment which encourages this process."
Professor Ramirez is an experienced trial attorney. She began her legal career as law clerk to Edward L. Filippine of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. She then served as a trial attorney for the United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division for seven years prosecuting Sherman Act, mail and wire fraud and conspiracy. She also assisted the Department of Justice in appellate work before moving on to the United States' Attorney's Office in Kansas. Here she handled a wide range of civil matters on behalf of the United States, its agencies and employees and engaged in appellate advocacy before the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Professor Ramirez is Associate Director of the LL.M. program.
Teaching Responsibilities
Criminal Procedure I & II
Criminal Law
Antitrust Law
White Collar Crime
Support Staff
Shirley Jacobson
shirley.jacobson@washburn.edu
785.670.1106
Room 302
Links
Publications
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
Selected Works at The Berkeley Electronic Press
HeinOnline Author Profile
Resumé
CV: http://washburnlaw.edu/profiles/faculty/_docs/ramirez-mary-resume.pdf
Ramirez, Mary Kreiner & Steven A. Ramirez. The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street
Harry Charles
141.19 (Nov. 15, 2016): p100.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Ramirez, Mary Kreiner & Steven A. Ramirez. The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street. New York Univ. Jan. 2017.288p. bibliog. ISBN 9781479881574. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781479873166. LAW
Here, Mary Kreiner Ramirez (law, Washburn Univ. Sch. of Law) and Steven A. Ramirez (law & director, Business Law Ctr., Loyola Univ. of Chicago) offer a legal brief for the titular prosecution case. The authors, both former federal prosecutors, claim a simple thesis: it would be beneficial to break up large banks and thereby establish a kind of corporate death penalty. After an introductory chapter, they address each culprit in turn, discussing the misdeeds of Countrywide Mortgage, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Goldman Sachs. As with a legal brief, the book is not a balanced account--it simply presents an argument. The authors believe that politicians favor megabanks because of their largesse, and that financial incentives to succeed at these institutions promote fraud and therefore they must be dismantled. VERDICT Readers should choose first Samuel W. Buell's Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America's Corporate Age, which presents a more nuanced view of the issue and proposes more regulation instead of disassembling the banks, then decide who is correct.--Harry Charles, St. Louis
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Charles, Harry. "Ramirez, Mary Kreiner & Steven A. Ramirez. The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 100. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470367239&it=r&asid=44fd9b61ef8b8e3542e2c1a8ecba241e. Accessed 4 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470367239
The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street
263.44 (Oct. 31, 2016): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street
Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez. New York Univ., $30 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4798-8157-4
This is a thought-provoking call for the prosecution of criminal bankers--and investigation into why such prosecution has not yet occurred--from two who should know: Mary Kreiner Ramirez, a former prosecutor for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and her husband, Steven A. Ramirez, a former SEC enforcement attorney. They charge that in a "historically unprecedented breakdown in the rule of law," the U.S. government failed to prosecute the people at the center of the 2008 financial crisis, opting instead for a huge civil payment from shareholders. Providing some historical context, the authors demonstrate that never before in modern U.S. history have white-collar criminals enjoyed such immunity. At the time, the argument was made that prosecuting bank employees would irrevocably harm the financial industry and economy, but allowing lawlessness into finance, the Ramirezes observe, lowers trust from investors, both foreign and domestic, yielding just as much harm. Their solutions include a DOJ corporate fraud division, getting rid of nonprosecution agreements, the titular "corporate death penalty" (breaking up the national banks), and, most importantly, educating and engaging American voters. This is an informative and at its heart very angry book, and is fascinating--if slightly academic--reading for everyone who's still smarting from the crash. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street." Publishers Weekly, 31 Oct. 2016, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470462551&it=r&asid=e590284c4e3ca68e759c64358dd72ee8. Accessed 4 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470462551
THE CASE FOR THE CORPORATE DEATH PENALTY: RESTORING LAW AND ORDER ON WALL STREET
Author: Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez
Publisher: New York, NY: New York University Press, 2017. 254p.
Reviewer: Gregg Barak | January 2017
Regarding the state of economic inequality and lawlessness in the second decade of the 21st century, Mary Ramirez and Steven Ramirez contend that the power of Wall Street and individual wealth has reached such “a level of concentration that certain financiers now operate above the criminal law insofar as financial crimes are concerned.” For well over a decade, they argue that the government has shown “no interest in toppling current management or fragmenting these firms regardless of criminality and long-standing law.” The Ramirezes conclude that the “fundamental threat to individual liberty and the rule of law arises from the concentration of economic power in the hands of the very few who exercise dominion over our financial system as well as our government.”
A fundamental question that I have been wrestling with since the 2008 financial implosion is: Were the widespread securities violations perpetrated by the megabanks and other financial behemoths of Wall Street, which caused the economic crisis and global recession to follow as well as the similarly fraudulent trader behavior that remains unimpeded by the criminal law—not prosecuted because they were and are misdirected and indefensible exceptions to the history of policing and punishing the crimes of the powerful—or/and were these illegal acts beyond incrimination because they had more fundamentally become objects of the contradictions of capital accumulation and reproduction in general and of the super-financialization of the global political economy in particular?
In The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty, Ramirez and Ramirez make an affirmative argument for why the absences of Wall Street criminal indictments represent a new era of financial impunity that has moved away from the rule of law and toward lawlessness. The Ramirezes argue that these violations could, but not in all instances, be criminally enforced without dire consequences coming to financial organizations, the global economy, or to nations at large. In short, there are typically no reasonable justifications for not criminally indicting the perpetrators of these offenses.
While I agree with the Ramirezes about the plethora of Wall Street criminality and the case that they and others are making for the use of a corporate death penalty, in both Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding (2012) and Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About it (2017), I have tried to show why the punishment of the hegemonic and controlling crimes of the prevailing modes of production are rarely, if ever, criminally sanctioned relative to the quantity of the offenses. Historically, this has been the political-economic reality primarily because the appropriate criminal laws were either absent and unaccounted for, or if they did exist, these penal sanctions were at best underused.
These socio-legalistic relations are consistent with Donald Black’s theory of the “law in action” explicated in his classic work The Behavior of Law (1976, 2010). Not only does his “set of theoretical formulations predict and explain the variation in the quantity and style of law,” but they also imply that equality before the law does not exist. “The reality is legal relativism, not legal universalism.” In other words, law varies with its social geometry—its location and direction in time and space. Such “a theory completely flies in the face of the conventional conceptions of law and justice found among lawyers, judges, legal scholars, and members of the general public.”
Accordingly, rather than relying on the efficacies of an amped up criminal justice system to curb these monopolized crimes committed by Wall Street and other powerful multinationals, I have argued for alternative formations of corporate and democratic institutions, which would effectively break-up these financial cartels. Within a global and international economic arena, I think that organizational transformations would in the long run be the most effective way to diminish the dangerous concentrations of institutionalized wealth and to avoid future financial lawlessness in the securities markets.
At the same time, Ramirez and Ramirez have made me revisit and refine some of my arguments, if not, necessarily change my position on the relations of law, inequality, and unchecked corporate power.
Before turning to the contents of this outstanding book, let me testify that the Ramirezes’ examination of the absence of criminal prosecutions of securities fraud should become required reading not only for students of white-collar crime and for those practitioners engaged in corporate law enforcement, but also for the benefit of a well-informed public. There have been upwards of 150 books on the financial crisis, but none better than this one for demystifying and debunking the lack of crime control and financial justice on Wall Street.
The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty is composed of nine chapters, with those at the front and back ends a bit longer than the proofs of its arguments found in the middle five chapters. In the Introduction as well as Chapter One, A Short History of White-Collar Criminal Prosecutions, the prosecutorial context is provided and the agenda is set for exploring Wall Street’s undoing of the rule of law and what can be done about it.
For example, the very first heading in the book informs us that we are experiencing “a new criminal immunity for a new economic royalty.” We are told that by the end of 2015 the lack of criminal accountability for the Wall Street debacle accentuates that “a new and unprecedented lawlessness [has] emerged at the apex of American capitalism.” More precisely, “the most economically and politically powerful financiers [have] attained a broad criminal immunity for financial crimes.” These co-authors maintain that the crimes “committed by this new economic royalty are not deterred but [are] instead affirmed by the government’s new unspoken policy of indulgences for those most likely to shower government agents and political leaders with various forms of largesse and patronage.”
In framing the discussion for their affirmative case for “the corporate death penalty and the career death penalty in finance,” and in opposition to the “too big to fail” or “too big to jail” orthodoxy, the Ramirezes inform us that “if the size of some financial institutions creates problems with applying the rule of law to the Wall Street megabanks,” then the power of disqualification could operate “to fragment the financial services industry through spin-offs to shareholders with little or no harm to the economy. Furthermore, senior managers who tolerate criminality could face severe sanctions—even if they themselves did not commit crimes.”
Near the end of the introduction, the Ramirezes posit that the “instances of nonprosecution indicate that the DOJ will not pursue powerful players in the financial sector regardless of crisis conditions and regardless of whether the failure of the financial institutions where the criminality occurred is systemically important.”
In chapter one, Ramirez and Ramirez make their case that the “recent legal indulgences granted to financial elites for financial crimes stand without precedent in the modern American economy.” Here, the two law professors provide evidence of using the corporate death penalty as well as a succinct overview of prosecuting relatively powerful corporate offenders in the recent past. This history includes the “usual suspects” from the Savings and Loan Scandal to Enron to WorldCom to Arthur Andersen.
Chapter one also provides a modern overview of white-collar criminal liability and both legislative and case law in relation to the financial crisis as well as an overview of both the development and usage of deferred prosecution and nonprosecution agreements. These are all discussed in the context of prosecutorial discretion, abuse, and such other factors as the collateral consequences as to whether or not there is a “disproportionate harm to shareholders, pension holders, employees, and others not proven personally culpable, as well as impact on the public arising from the prosecution.” These considerations are spelled out in the guidelines for prosecutors when deciding whether or not to charge a corporation with a financial crime. This unique discretionary protocol used for corporate entities only was set forth in the revised 2008 Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations.
Chapters 2-6 usher in as much evidence as possible “in an effort to detail the most damaging misconduct at the firms that operated at the center of the crisis of 2008.” These case studies include Countrywide’s toxic subprime mortgages, Wall Street’s fraudulent sales of toxic mortgages, Lehman Brothers accounting frauds, AIG’s derivative casino, and Goldman’s Abacus scams. These stories of securities frauds and their lack of prosecutions are lucidly related for all to understand. No doubt that their clarity on the subject matter reflects the Ramirezes’ insider perspectives. They are former prosecutors and regulators who worked in the trenches during the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis to stop and jail those financial fraudsters of that era.
Before becoming law professors, Mary Ramirez had been a Prosecutor for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. She is also a former Assistant US Attorney for the District of Kansas. Steven Ramirez had been an Enforcement Attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission and a Senior Attorney for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Hence, their interest in this subject matter is more than academic. One might say, for them it is as personal as it is professional. Throughout the narrative and just below the surface is both their disappointment and anger with the current state of lawlessness in the world of high-stakes financial crime. Their state of being and motive forces surface in Chapter Seven, The Dimensions of Lawlessness.
After the previous five chapters have demonstrated how a series of DOJ decisions declining to prosecute high-profile cases involving the financial crisis and, after highlighting the regulatory inactivity at the FDIC, the Fed, and the SEC, the Ramirezes examine four post-crisis cases. Their objective here is to demonstrate the ways in which implied criminal immunity for powerful financial elites has spread and become the commonly practiced policy of TBTJ.
These cases include: (1) the robo-frauding, predatory mortgaging, and the 2012 announcement by the DOJ that the five largest mortgage servicers in the US had agreed to provide $25 billion in mortgage relief to distressed homeowners as well as to the states and federal government by direct payments; (2) MF Global, Jon Corzine, and the violations or failure to meet the customer segregation requirements as spelled out under the Commodity Exchange Act; (3) the pervasive megabanks’ manipulation of the benchmark interest rate known as the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate); and (4) the HSBC’s intensive money laundering on behalf of drug cartels and rogue states.
In the concluding chapter, Looking Forward: Reimposing Law, the Ramirezes summarize their argument and conclusions. Most importantly, they offer a four pronged “series of solutions to the current lawlessness plaguing the financial sector and the US economy.” These include the DOJ creating a separate division dedicated to investigating and prosecuting financial crimes committed by large public firms; eliminating the use of nonprosecution agreements; expanding the corporate death penalty across criminal financial institutions; and restoring the rule of law through the pressures of electoral engagement.
With respect to Ramirez and Ramirez’s vision of a restored law and order on Wall Street, I think that at least for the immediate future that it is a “pipe dream.” After all, under the Trump Administration and the rule of the US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, deregulation, cronyism, and risk-taking are rapidly becoming the new orders of the day; foreshadowing increased, not less, lawlessness in the financial markets.
On the other hand, over the next four years there are already signs that there will be a lot more “grassroots” push back and professional litigation on behalf of the rule of law and due process. Whether one is preparing oneself or not for one of those struggles to restore law and order, The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty provides an inspired and thoughtful roadmap for knowing the new lawlessness, reviving the old rule of law, and reclaiming our democratic nation in the process.
Gregg Barak is a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Eastern Michigan University and a 2017 Fulbright Scholar to Porto Alegre, Brazil.
NYU Press
The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty
Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street
Mary Kreiner Ramirez
and Steven A. Ramirez
288 pages
1 figure, 1 table
January, 2017
ISBN: 9781479881574
Table of Contents
Introduction
$30
Cloth
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Available: 12/30/2016
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Subjects:
Law
Political Science
Authors
Mary Kreiner Ramirez is Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law, where she teaches a course on White Collar Crime. She is a former prosecutor for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, where she prosecuted white collar criminals. She has published numerous articles addressing the challenges in combating white collar crime.
All books by Mary Kreiner Ramirez
Steven A. Ramirez is Professor of Law and Associate Dean at Loyola University of Chicago, where he also directs the Business and Corporate Governance Law Center.
All books by Steven A. Ramirez
A critical examination of the wrongdoing underlying the 2008 financial crisis
An unprecedented breakdown in the rule of law occurred in the United States after the 2008 financial collapse. Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and other large banks settled securities fraud claims with the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to disclose the risks of subprime mortgages they sold to the investing public. But a corporation cannot commit fraud except through human beings working at and managing the firm. Rather than breaking up these powerful megabanks, essentially imposing a corporate death penalty, the government simply accepted fines that essentially punished innocent shareholders instead of senior leaders at the megabanks. It allowed the real wrongdoers to walk away from criminal responsibility.
In The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty, Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez examine the best available evidence about the wrongdoing underlying the financial crisis. They reveal that the government failed to use its most powerful law enforcement tools despite overwhelming proof of wide-ranging and large-scale fraud on Wall Street before, during, and after the crisis.
The pattern of criminal indulgences exposes the onset of a new degree of crony capitalism in which the most economically and political powerful can commit financial crimes of vast scale with criminal and regulatory immunity. A new economic royalty has seized the commanding heights of our economy through their control of trillions in corporate and individual wealth and their ability to dispense patronage. The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty shows that this new lawlessness poses a profound threat that urgently demands political action and proposes attainable measures to restore the rule of law in the financial sector.
Reviews
"It’s abundantly clear that law enforcement on Wall Street is woefully broken. In the wake of the financial crisis, not one senior bank executive has been held accountable for the pervasive wrongdoing that brought our economy to its knees, undermining confidence in the fairness of our legal system as well as deterrence against future misconduct. The authors confront this troubling reality head on and in stark detail, leading readers into a fulsome debate about what is to be done to restore the rule of law to our financial markets."
—Phil Angelides, Chairman, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2009-2011)
"This is an informative and at its heart very angry book, and is fascinating...reading for everyone who’s still smarting from the crash."
—Publishers Weekly
"The Ramirezes have unleashed a powerful condemnation of government’s weak-kneed response to corporate crime in their impressive new study The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty...[This]book helps us not only understand the scale of criminality among America’s financial elites, but also the dynamics which propel elites like Trump into office. If action is not taken to rein in the lawlessness which the Ramirezes so thoroughly reveal, the economic and social implications for America are terrifying."
—Popmatters.com
"In detailing the cases of Countrywide Financial, AIG Financial Products Group, JP Morgan Chase, and Goldman, Sachs, among others, Ramirez and Ramirez find ample evidence to proceed with criminal indictments."
—Choice
"The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty provides an inspired and thoughtful roadmap for knowing the new lawlessness, reviving the old rule of law, and reclaiming our democratic nation in the process."
—Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
“The authors were among the regulators and prosecutors with the spine to stop and jail financial frauds of the 1980s. Wall Street's criminal elites so feared the crackdown that they unleashed their political allies to turn the regulatory leaders into invertebrates. The authors show how to regrow our spines, restore the rule of law on Wall Street, and reclaim our Nation.”
—William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, University of Missouri-Kansas City
“Exciting, well written, and potentially explosive… an extremely timely topic and one that may well prove to be controversial and garner national and international attention. The topic is critically important, as I have not before seen this subject dealt with as forthrightly or marshalled as effectively as here. To truly understand that, unlike the Enron-era scandals or the Savings & Loans scandals, the government has failed to bring criminal charges against any of the individuals responsible for the financial market crisis of 2007-09 defies logic and comprehension.”
—André Douglas Pond Cummings, Professor of Law, Indiana Tech Law School
"The incontrovertible value of this book lies in the fact that while it informs average Americans about the details of potentially criminal conduct, it also provides policy discussions that include specific proposals for reformers. Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez are excellent storytellers who expertly use salient narratives to support their theses."
—Cheryl Wade, Harold McNiece Professor of Law, St. John's University School of Law