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Transparency has occupied a central place in the marketing management literature since the early 2000s, and its rise relates closely to the paradigm shift in corporate marketing, from consumer seduction to consumer engagement. In this paper we address the concept of transparency from the perspectives of law, communication science, and corporate marketing. Given that it is unclear how transparency can be achieved in practice, we conducted a qualitative empirical investigation among stakeholders of the transparency of legal information written by businesses for consumers, which has been an essential part of EU consumer legislation since the 1990s, with a view to further refining and concretizing this concept. We carried out 75 interviews with stakeholders in Germany, the largest national consumer market in the European Union. The results reveal the principles and benefits of transparent online consumer information according to these stakeholders and provide guidance for businesses and marketing professionals who wish to improve the clarity and accessibility of their online disclosures. The study concludes with an annotated, actionable definition of the transparency concept in corporate marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prosecution of criminal suspects is an integral part of a country's justice system. While substantial scholarly attention has been devoted to the study of the police and judges and their relevance to the rule of law, surprisingly little is known about prosecutors. The aim of this paper is to contribute towards filling this knowledge gap. We first demonstrate the rising importance of prosecutors in criminal justice systems around the world. We identify the independence of prosecution agencies from the other two branches of government as a centrally important characteristic and then proceed to analyse the determinants of de facto prosecutorial independence from a political economy perspective. We find that press freedom, the immunity of parliamentarians and belonging to the common law tradition are positively associated with higher de facto independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade empirical legal studies have become a popular subfield of legal research. Legal scholars have increasingly begun to employ social science research methods in their attempts to provide answers to research questions in the field of law. The goal of empirical legal research is to make a contribution to all subjects and phenomena that are of interest to law and for which no methods have previously been available. The use of empirical methods in legal science can lead to results that cannot be achieved by the methods of traditional law research. The ultimate aim of the approach is to contribute to a systematic understanding of our legal system based on empirical data. In this article I give an overview of the development of empirical legal studies as an independent subfield of legal research, followed by an introduction to two popular studies to illustrate the potential and limitations of this new field of research. I then discuss some controversial topics such as the widespread view that empirical research is objective and value-free, the relevance of methodological problems and the problem of over-simplification of the complexity of legal issues. I conclude with a look at future prospects for empirical legal research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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