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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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Corporate War Crimes: Prosecuting Pillage of Natural Resources
James G. Stewart
Pillage means theft during war. Although the prohibition against pillage dates to the Roman Empire, pillaging is a modern war crime that can be enforced before international and domestic criminal courts. Following World War II, several businessmen were convicted for commercial pillage of natural resources. And although pillage has been prosecuted in recent years, commercial actors are seldom held accountable for their role in fueling conflict.
Reviving corporate liability for pillaging natural resources is not simply about protecting property rights during conflict—it can also play a significant role in preventing atrocity. Since the end of the Cold War, the illegal exploitation of natural resources has become a prevalent means of financing conflict. In countries including Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Iraq, Liberia, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone, the illicit trade in natural resources has not only created incentives for violence, but has also furnished warring parties with the finances necessary to sustain some of the most brutal hostilities in recent history.
In Corporate War Crimes, available in its second edition, law professor James G. Stewart offers a roadmap of the law governing pillage as applied to the illegal exploitation of natural resources by corporations and their officers. The text traces the evolution of the prohibition against pillage from its earliest forms through the Nuremburg trials to today's national laws and international treaties. In doing so, Stewart provides a long-awaited blueprint for prosecuting corporate plunder during war.
[From Corporate War Crimes: Prosecuting the Pillage of Natural Resources - Open Society Justice Initiative]
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A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance
Stephen Clarkson and Stepan Wood
As citizens of a middle power, Canadians know how it feels to be objects of global forces. But they are also agents of globalization who have helped build structures of transnational governance that have highly uneven impacts on prosperity, human security, and the environment, often for the worse. This timely book argues that these imbalances need to be recognized and corrected.
A Perilous Imbalance situates Canada’s experience of globalization in the context of three interlinked trends: the emergence of a global supraconstitution, the transformation of the nation-state, and the growth of governance beyond the nation-state. The authors advocate a revitalization of the Canadian state as a vehicle for pursuing human security, ecological integrity, and social emancipation, and for creating spaces in which progressive, alternative forms of law and governance can unfold. This book shines an urgent light on the dangerous imbalances in contemporary forms of globalized governance that jeopardize not only Canadians but also citizens worldwide.
Written primarily with scholars and advanced students of law and politics in mind, this book will also appeal to policy-makers, activists, and general readers interested in the challenges Canada faces in a globalizing world.
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Securities Law in Canada: Cases and Commentary, 2nd ed.
Mary Condon, Anita Anand, and Janis P. Sarra
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Murder, Medicine and Motherhood
Emma Cunliffe
Since the early 1990s, unexplained infant death has been reformulated as a criminal justice problem within many western societies. This shift has produced wrongful convictions in more than one jurisdiction. This book uses a detailed case study of the murder trial and appeals of Kathleen Folbigg to examine the pragmatics of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It explores how legal process, medical knowledge and expectations of motherhood work together when a mother is charged with killing infants who have died in mysterious circumstances. The author argues that Folbigg, who remains in prison, was wrongly convicted.
The book also employs Folbigg's trial and appeals to consider what lessons courts have learned from prior wrongful convictions, such as those of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings. The author's research demonstrates that the Folbigg court was misled about the state of medical knowledge regarding infant death, and that the case proceeded on the incorrect assumption that behavioural and scientific evidence provided independent proofs of guilt. Individual chapters critically assess the relationships between medical research and expert testimony; the operation of unexamined cultural assumptions about good mothering; and the manner in which contested cases are reported by the press as overwhelming.[From Murder, Medicine and Motherhood: : Emma Cunliffe: Hart Publishing]
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The Constitution of Japan: A Contextual Analysis
Shigenori Matsui
Japan boasts the second largest economy in the world and almost two thousand years of history. Yet, its first modern constitution, the Meiji Constitution, was not enacted until comparatively recently (1889). Since then, following World War II, Japan adopted its current Constitution, the Japanese Constitution of 1946. This book is designed to explain the outline of Japan's Constitution, together with a number of its unique characteristics and to offer an historical background and context which help explain its significance. Major topics covered include the constitutional history of Japan, fundamental principles of the Constitution, the people and the Emperor, the Diet and legislative power, Cabinet and executive power, and the Judiciary and judicial power. Also discussed is the protection of fundamental human rights, individual rights - including freedom of expression,economic freedoms, and social rights - pacifism and national defence, and the constitutional amendment and reform. Although the Japanese Constitution was enacted under the strong influence of the United States Constitution, many of its features are very different. For instance the existence of an Emperor, the long dominance of a conservative party over the Government, the relatively strong power of government bureaucrats, the absence of a leadership role in the Prime Minister, the small role the judiciary play in solving constitutional disputes and the struggle over national defence. Written in an accessible style and comprehensive in content, the reader will find this account of the constitutional law of Japan both unique and stimulating.
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