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Modern Warfare: Armed Groups, Private Militaries, Humanitarian Organizations, and the Law
Benjamin Perrin
The face of modern warfare is changing as more and more humanitarian organizations, private military companies, and non-state groups enter complex security environments such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti. Although this shift has been overshadowed by the legal issues connected to the War on Terror and intervention in countries such as Rwanda and Darfur, it has caused some to question the relevance of existing international humanitarian law.
To bridge the widening gap between the theory and practice of the law, Modern Warfare brings together both scholars and practitioners who offer unique, and often divergent, perspectives on four key challenges to the law’s legitimacy: how to ensure compliance among non-state armed groups; the proliferation of private military and security companies and their use by humanitarian organizations; tensions between the idea of humanitarian space and counterinsurgency doctrines; and the phenomenon of urban violence. The contributors do not simply consider settled legal standards – they widen the scope to include first principles, related bodies of law, humanitarian policy, and the latest studies on the prevention and mitigation of violence.
By bringing to light international humanitarian law’s limitations – and potential – in the context of modern warfare’s rapidly changing landscape, Modern Warfare opens a path to preventing further unnecessary suffering and violence.
Modern Warfare is mandatory reading for academics and practitioners of international law and students and scholars of security studies, international relations, and political science.
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Gender Equality Rights and Trade Regimes: Coordinating Compliance
Pitman B. Potter, Heather Gibb, and Erika Cedillo
Taken together, the symposium papers and presentations illustrate the rich diversity of perspectives and issues emerging from the discourse of Coordinated Compliance with regard to specific issues on gender equality and trade, revealing a fundamental concern over human well-being along with an abiding commitment to scholarly rigor.
[From Gender Equality Rights and Trade Regimes: Coordinating Compliance by Pitman Potter :: SSRN]
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Rule of Law and Economic Development: A Comparative Analysis of Approaches To Economic Development Across the BRIC Countries
Nandini Ramanujam, Mara Verna, Julia Betts, Kuzi Charamba, and Marcus Moore
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Human Trafficking: Exploring the International Nature, Concerns, and Complexities
John Winterdyk, Benjamin Perrin, and Philip Reichel
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A Property Law Reader: Cases, Questions and Commentary, 3rd ed.
Bruce Ziff, Jeremy de Beer, Douglas C. Harris, and Margaret E. McCallum
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Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children
Joel Bakan
Joel Bakan reveals the astonishingly callous and widespread exploitation of children by profit-seeking corporations, and also society’s shameful failure to protect them. Bakan shows how corporations pump billions of dollars into rendering parents and governments powerless to shield children from a relentless commercial assault designed solely to exploit their unique needs and vulnerabilities.
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Report on Proposals for Unfair Contracts Relief
Joost Blom, Margaret Easton, Russell Getz, Do‐Ellen Hansen, Allan Parker, Lisa Peters, Peter Rubin, Tony Wilson, Kevin Zakreski, and Unfai r Contract s Relie f Project Committee
The basic purpose of the law of contracts is to ensure that promises made for consideration are enforced. Achieving this basic purpose offends the conscience of society in some cases. The courts have a longstanding jurisdiction to refuse to enforce contracts that are determined to be unfair.
This report recommends reforms to the leading concepts used by contract law to tackle the problem of unfairness. These concepts are unconscionability, duress, undue influence, good faith, and misrepresentation. Over the past years, they have been considered in an increasing number of court decisions. This has led to an expansion of, and a degree of confusion about, their scope. It is now timely to rationalize and consolidate these concepts.
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Maritime Security in Southeast Asia
John Bradford, Tim Cook, Hasjim Djalal, James Manicom, Meredith Miller, Neil A. Quartaro, Clive Schofield, Sheldon W. Simon, Ian Storey, and Ian Townsend-Gault
This NBR Monograph examines maritime security issues in Southeast Asia, including disputes over resources, piracy, and other threats to strategic waterways, and draws implications for U.S. policy in the region.
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Is Your Defined-Benefit Pension Guaranteed?: Funding Rules, Insolvency Law and Pension Insurance
Ronald B. Davis
This study analyzes the security of pension benefits in the case of a plan sponsor’s insolvency. Current pension regulation does not provide complete security to defined-benefit plan members, since it allows underfunding to occur. Indeed, argues author Ronald Davis, regulations often encourage practices that lead to questionable risk-taking in pension asset investment, and obscure some of the risks being carried on plan balance sheets.
In recent high-profile cases, large sponsors became insolvent, and pension fund assets were insufficient to pay the benefits earned by workers and retirees. In response, bills were introduced to give higher priority of payment for claims against the sponsor by pension plan members. Davis finds a legal rationale for providing higher priority for unremitted employer contributions but not for the remaining part of an asset shortfall (as a result of depressed asset values or of differences between projected and realized inflation or interest rates, for example). Consequently, he finds insolvency law as a means to improve the security of pension benefits has only limited potential.
Another policy option that is widely discussed is a national pension benefit guarantee scheme to insure benefits against a shortfall in pension assets in the event of the plan sponsor’s insolvency. If carefully designed, Davis believes such a scheme could mitigate the limitations of current plan funding regulations and the poor communication of these limitations to plan members. However, in addition to facing the same problems as any insurance plan, a benefit guarantee scheme would involve extensive federal-provincial negotiations. This is because the regulatory tools to control these insurance problems are under provincial jurisdiction, while presumably the fiscal risk of a national scheme would rest on the federal government.
Regardless of whether governments wish to introduce a national pension benefit guarantee scheme, Davis recommends first reforming the funding and governance of pensions to make explicit some risks and conflicts within pension plans that current regulations hide from stakeholders’ view. These reforms would have to promote target-benefit plans in order to clarify the “pension deal” for plan members; support joint sponsor and member governance of pension plans; and enable small pension plans to use larger plans’ expertise and cost structure. He also suggests holding a royal commission on employer-based pensions to foster public discussion of these plans’ structure and value among regulators, sponsors, members and retirees.
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The 2012 Annotated Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act
Lloyd W. Houlden, Geoffrey B. Morawetz, and Janis P. Sarra
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The Evolution of Fundamental Rights Charters and Case Law: A Comparison of the United Nations, Council of Europe and European Union Systems of Human Rights Protection
Liora Lazarus and et al.
This report examines the human rights protection systems of the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Union. It explores the substantive rights, protection mechanisms, modes of engagement within, and the interactions between each system. The report also outlines the protection of minority rights, and the political processes through which human rights and institutions evolve and interact. A series of recommendations are made on how to advance the EU human rights system.
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Law, Policy, and Practice on China's Periphery: Selective Adaptation and Institutional Capacity
Pitman B. Potter
This book examines the Chinese government’s policies and practices for relations with the Inner Periphery areas of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, and the Outer Periphery areas of Hong Kong and Taiwan focusing on themes of political authority, socio-cultural relations, and economic development. China’s history may be seen as one of managing the geographic periphery surrounding China proper. Successive imperial, republican, and communist governments have struggled to maintain sovereignty over the regions surrounding the great river valleys of China.
The importance of the periphery is no less real today, concerns over national security, access to natural resources, and long-held concerns about relations between Han and other ethnic groups continue to dominate Chinese law, policy and practice regarding governance in the Inner Periphery regions of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. In the Outer Periphery, Beijing sees engagement with the outside world (particularly the West) as inextricably tied to Chinese sovereignty over former foreign colonies of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Using the case study of national integration to indicate how policies are articulated and implemented through law and political-legal institutions, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of the peripheral regions. It will also appeal to academic and policy communities interested in legal reform in China
[Law, Policy, and Practice on China's Periphery: Selective Adaptation a]
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Globalization and Local Adaptation in International Trade Law
Pitman B. Potter and Ljiljana Biuković
The trade principles of Western liberal democracies are at the core of international trade law regimes and standards. Are non-Western societies uniformly adopting international standards, or are they adapting them to local norms and cultural values?
This volume presents a new conceptual approach – the paradigm of selective adaptation – to explore and explain the reception of international trade law in the Pacific Rim. It brings together scholars from Australia, Canada, China, and Japan who reveal how the World Trade Organization’s standards are being interpreted – and in some cases disputed – in selected countries. Building on a conceptual discussion of the normative and institutional contexts for international trade law, the authors draw on examples from China,Japan, Thailand, and North America to show that formal acceptance of international trade standards through accession to the World Trade Organization and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade does not necessarily lead to uniform enforcement and acceptance at the local level.
Globalization and Local Adaptation in International Trade Law provides compelling evidence that non-uniform compliance will be a legitimate outcome of the globalization of international trade rules.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars who want a better understanding of the development and enforcement of international trade law and anyone interested in the comparative study of legal systems.
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Protecting Information Privacy
Charles D. Raab and Benjamin J. Goold
This report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (the Commission) examines the threats to information privacy that have emerged in recent years, focusing on the activities of the state. It argues that current privacy laws and regulation do not adequately uphold human rights, and that fundamental reform is required. It identifies two principal areas of concern: the state’s handling of personal data, and the use of surveillance by public bodies. The central finding of this report is that the existing approach to the protection of information privacy in the UK is fundamentally flawed, and that there is a pressing need for widespread legislative reform in order to ensure that the rights contained in Article 8 are respected. The report argues for the establishment of a number of key ‘privacy principles’ that can be used to guide future legal reforms and the development of sector-specific regulation. The right to privacy is at risk of being eroded by the growing demand for information by government and the private sector. Unless we start to reform the law and build a regulatory system capable of protecting information privacy, we may soon find that it is a thing of the past.
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