We explore one aspect of the structure of a codified legal system at the national level using a new type of representation to understand the strong or weak dependencies between the various fields of law. In Part I of this study, we analyze the graph associated with the network in which each French legal code is a vertex and an edge is produced between two vertices when a code cites another code at least one time. We show that (...) this network distinguishes from many other real networks from a high density, giving it a particular structure that we call concentrated world and that differentiates a national legal system (as considered with a resolution at the code level) from small-world graphs identified in many social networks. Our analysis then shows that a few communities (groups of highly wired vertices) of codes covering large domains of regulation are structuring the whole system. Indeed we mainly find a central group of influent codes, a group of codes related to social issues and a group of codes dealing with territories and natural resources. The study of this codified legal system is also of interest in the field of the analysis of real networks. In particular we examine the impact of the high density on the structural characteristics of the graph and on the ways communities are searched for. Finally we provide an original visualization of this graph on an hemicyle-like plot, this representation being based on a statistical reduction of dissimilarity measures between vertices. In Part II (a following paper) we show how the consideration of the weights attributed to each edge in the network in proportion to the number of citations between two vertices (codes) allows deepening the analysis of the French legal system. (shrink)

The word 'bisexuality', unknown to the ancients, is used here in two senses to indicate an individual with male and female sex organs or who copulates with people of both sexes. The phenomenon of bisexuality is then analysed with reference to the Greek myth of Hermaphrodite, a 'bisexual' being, born of a nymph's love for a young man of divine descent: in the guise of a fable, the myth recounts the birth of a 'monster', who raises a question-mark over the (...) fundamental rule of the division between the sexes. As regards behaviour, the paper then shows that in both Greece and Rome bisexual behaviour was the rule for men. The concept of 'homosexuality', in contrast to heterosexuality, was not introduced till the Christian era, and then not without difficulty. Condemnation of the practice as 'against nature' began with the emperor Justinian in the 6th century. (shrink)

After 40 years of attributing high rates of physician career dissatisfaction, attrition, alcoholism, divorce and suicide to ‘burnout’, there is growing recognition that these outcomes may instead be caused by moral injury. This has led to a debate about the relative diagnostic merits of these two terms, a recognition that interventions designed to treat burnout may be ineffective, and much perplexity about how—if at all—this changes anything. The current research seeks to develop the construct of moral injury outside military contexts, (...) generate more robust validity tests and more fully describe and measure the experiences of persons exposed to moral harms. Absent from the literature is a mechanism through which to move from the collective moral injury experience of physicians to a systematic change in the structure of medical practice. To address this, after providing a brief history, definitions and contrasts between burnout, moral distress and moral injury, we review the interplay of moral and ethical codes in the context of moral injury. We conclude by suggesting that professional associations can potentially prevent moral injury by providing protections for physicians within their codes of ethics. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Although cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was initially used very selectively at the discretion of clinicians, the use of CPR rapidly expanded to the point that it was required to be performed on all patients having in‐hospital cardiac arrests, regardless of the underlying condition. This created problems with CPR being clearly inadvisable for many patients. Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders emerged as a means of providing a transparent process for making decisions in advance regarding resuscitation, initially by patients and later also by (...) clinicians. Under hospital policies in many countries, however, CPR remains the default position for all patients having cardiac arrest in the hospital if there is no DNR order in place, regardless of whether CPR is medically indicated or in the patient's best interests. “Slow Codes” are the delayed or token efforts to provide CPR when clinicians feel CPR is futile or inappropriate. After giving a historical overview of the development and the changing use of CPR, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the cause of slow codes, namely, policies requiring CPR to be performed as the default action while simultaneously lacking implementing interventions such as advance care planning as a routine policy. This is ethically and legally inappropriate, and hospital policies should be modified to allow clinicians to consider whether CPR is appropriate at the time of arrest. Such a change requires a stronger emphasis on early recognition of patients for whom CPR is not in their best interests and to improve hospital emergency planning. (shrink)

Unlike usual real graphs which have a low number of edges, we study here a dense network constructed from legal citations. This study is achieved on the simple graph and on the multiple graph associated to this legal network, this allows exploring the behavior of the network structural properties and communities by considering the weighted graph and see which additional information are provided by the weights. We propose new measures to assess the role of the weights in the (...) network structure and to appreciate the weights repartition. Then we compare the communities obtained on the simple graph and on the weighted graph. We also extend to weighted networks the amphitheater-like representation of this legal network. Finally we evaluate the robustness of our measures and methods thus taking into account potential errors which may occur by getting data or building the network. Our methodology may open new perspectives in the analysis of weighted networks. (shrink)

The story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 is one of the most intriguing stories in the Hebrew Bible. While it yields many useful insights into the character of God, the nature of sin and the aspiration of our redemption, it is equally offensive when one looks at it from a human rights perspective, considering, in particular, the vulnerable and defenceless woman, Tamar. Her being returned to her father’s house is portrayed as acting in accordance with the law for (...) a childless widow. However, using the critical hermeneutical lens, it becomes apparent that the real motive that drove Judah to send her away was his fear lest his only surviving son Shelah should share the fate of Er and Onan, whose deaths he plainly attributed to Tamar’s doing. As such, Tamar was deprived of the right to marry Shelah as provided for in the levirate marriage law. Using feministic hermeneutics and the comparative approach, this article foregrounds the vulnerability experienced by women, especially when their husbands mysteriously or suddenly pass away. Because of the patriarchal hegemony of African and Israelite societies, childless widows often find themselves ostracised from the same families which they thought they were now part and parcel of by virtue of having married into that family. Much of the ostracism emanates from the fact that they are usually fingered as the prime suspects responsible for having played a part in their husbands’ deaths. Hence, the crux of this article is to present the interface between the Israelite and African worldviews, highlighting the parallels between the plight of widows in the Israelite and Shona societies. (shrink)

Legal codes, such as the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) examined in this article, are good points of entry for AI and ontology work because of their more straightforward adaptability to relationship linking and rules-based encoding. However, approaches relying on encoding solely on formal code structure are incomplete, missing the rich experience of practitioner expertise that identifies key relationships and decision criteria often supplied by experienced practitioners and process experts from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, political economics, logistics, operations research). (...) This research focuses on the UCC because it transcends the limitations of a formal code, functioning essentially as a composite. AI work can benefit from real-world codes like the UCC, which are essentially formal codes enlightened from a more realistic experience-base from centuries of development in international commercial transactions settings. This paper then describes our initial work in converting an expert system on the U.S. law governing the sale of goods from Article II of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), into a knowledge-based system using the Web Ontology Language OWL. (shrink)

Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China. By Ting Zhang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 252. $95, $30.

It is rare in the extreme for a judge to embed an enigma, here an intentionally encrypted message, in the text of a judgment. Using the occasion of the cypher inserted into the judgment of Peter Smith J in Baigent v Random House, this article patiently reconstructs the humanist concept of aenigmata iuris or legal enigmas so as properly to interpret this recent use. Legal enigmas are shown to be the residues of forgotten histories, references to lost texts, (...) marks left by encounters between law and its now marginal literary and poetic sources. Where current legal use treats enigmas as mere obscurities, this article argues that the enigma should be apprehended and appreciated as an image of juristic invention, the moment of devising a decision, the instant of creative encounter between ‘the sciences liberall’, doctrine and law. (shrink)

The draft Code of Conduct for Research is an important initiative towards assisting the scientific community in complying with the provisions of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). However, its approach towards cross-border data sharing should be reconsidered to clarify the ambiguities inherent in the legal requirements for the cross-border sharing of health data in the POPIA. These ambiguities include the concept of ‘transfer of information’, the application of adequacy as a legal mechanism for (...) transfer, the nature of consent for cross-border sharing and the scope of the recipient third party. We suggest that the draft Code of Conduct for Research can be improved by: Explaining or defining the concept of ‘transfer of information’ and when it applies to cross-border sharing in research Clarifying the application of adequacy as a legal mechanism for transfer vis-à-vis the other alternatives Expanding on the interpretation and application of consent as a legal mechanism for cross-border transfers Expanding the category of persons who may be recipients of personal information in a third country. (shrink)

Typical hermeneutical approaches to the Deuteronomic Code, and to scriptural legal codes more generally, attend to genre either for the sake of historical-critical concerns as an end in themselves, or as a gateway to abstracted content. This article argues, conversely, that the genre of the code is not disconnected from its content, and that its form—imaginative, pragmatic propositions based on communal hope—can and should be imitated in the practice of theological ethics. As best seen in Deuteronomy 15, the (...) communicative genius of the code is that it (1) imagines a specific, viable future, (2) empowers moral agency, (3) forges communal identity, and (4) addresses unique historical situations. Appropriating the genre, rather than the content, thus has unique potential to give traction to modern ethical scholarship through conscious, kerygmatic contingency. (shrink)

Archaeologists employed in governmental positions often deal with issues that produce conflicts between their professional duties to their employer, their ethical responsibilities to the resource, and their obligations as established by legislation. The paper examines some of the conflicts imposed on governmental archaeologists by each of these systems but focuses on the conflicts imposed by federal legislation and regulations on governmental archaeologists, using “Kennewick Man” as an example.

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

The article discusses the characterization of the visualization of visible reality in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The author suggests that semiotic and legal analysis should be used to understand the meaning of the color code of the novel. Semiotic discourse reduces the ambiguity, uncertainty, and expression of the color code to a conscious, discrete, and conditioned meaning of individual colors. Legal analysis helps to better understand the main idea and other aspects of the novel, encoded in (...) colors. Psychological, personal associations, and symbolic methods are used to reveal direct and indirect meaning of the colors used by Dostoyevsky. The basic characterization of colors proposed by Goethe is employed as a key for color decoding. The article also establishes the correlation of the color code of the novel with the colors of the flags of the Russian Empire and the German Confederation. The message and meaning of the same colors of these national flags are contrasted. The interpretation is complemented by the author’s drawings, which enable to visualize the color code that stores and transmits information about national identity. (shrink)

The French Code civil , including the tradition of legal practice and scholarship it stands for, is the child of two parents: Enlightenment and Restoration. They came together in the person of Jean Etienne Marie Portalis (1746-1807), who was the main drafter of the code under Napoleon. I want to investigate which line of philosophical argument he followed in uniting the two and critically assess the value of this argumentation. In section 1 I briefly sketch the codification of civil (...) law in the (post-)revolutionary setting of the time, as well as Portalis’ philosophical background. Section 2 turns to the principled and wide-ranging discourse he delivered at the occasion of the formal presentation of the draft civil code to the legislature. This discourse, in turn, found its deeper roots in an extensive treatise that he wrote prior to the former, on the use and abuse of reason in times of Enlightenment (Section 3). I will focus, in particular, on the twin concepts of knowledge (section 4) and nature (section 5) in this treatise. From this vantage point, section 6 analyzes the eclectic way in which Portalis uses his philosophical godfathers Montesquieu and Rousseau, while section 7 shows why his preoccupation with the protection of established property rights can explain such eclecticism. Section 8 takes stock and submits that at least one of Portalis’ arguments presents a real challenge to Enlightenment philosophy up until the present day. (shrink)

Global firms need to decide on the correspondence between their corporate ethics and the globalization of their activities. When firms go global, they face ethical complexities as they operate in different legal and cultural environments that may impact the admissibility and appropriateness of their approach to institutionalize and implement corporate ethics. Global firms may have good reasons to establish global codes of ethics that are to be obeyed by all employees worldwide. However, developing and implementing such codes (...) can be rather difficult due to various, and partly competing, conditions in the countries of operation. In this article, two legal disputes are analyzed to illustrate some of the difficulties that may emerge when firms globalize their codes of ethics. I argue that these conflicts can be mitigated when firms carefully design their codes and the processes of code implementation. (shrink)

This is a study of what constituted legality and the role of law in ancient societies. Investigating and comparing legal codes and legal thinking of the ancient societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and of the ancient Rabbis, this volume examines how people used law to create stable societies. Starting with Hammurabi's Code, this volume also analyzes the law of the pharaohs and the codes of the ancient rabbis and of (...) the Roman Emperor Justinian. Focusing on the key concepts of justice equity and humaneness, the status of women and slaves, and the idea of criminality and of war and peace; no other book attempts to examine such diverse legal systems and legal thinking from the ancient world. (shrink)

This paper highlights methods — other than legislative and regulatory directives — through which decision-makers may use law and the legal system to facilitate the systems-wide change that the IOM calls for.

Codes and Customs: Millennial Perspectives is a multifaceted collection of essays which trace the development of selected topics, such as: Justice, Punishment, Marketplace, Worldmaking, Contract, Illegality vs Legality, Ritual, Cooperation in Community, Codification in Italian Law, Jewish Law, and Legal Cultures. These topics are comprehensively developed in the subsequent books of this series, but here the various ideas that have evolved over the past thousand years are interrelated. In addition to the several ideas that are to be the (...) focal topics of future volumes, several related concepts, including the possibility of law/environment, enhance th book's richness. (shrink)

Companies often develop codes prescribing an ethical organizational environment. However, the ability of ethics codes to increase individuals' tolerance of diversity is not fully considered in the ethics literature. This relationship was explored using a sample of 143 business and legal professionals. After accounting for the impact of several covariates, results indicated that professionals employed in organizations that had an ethics code were more tolerant of societal diversity than were professionals working in organizations that did not have (...) an ethics code. The findings also showed that a traditional orientation toward gender roles was also related to the acceptance of diversity. These findings imply that companies to some degree define societal norms, possibly through training programs that make employees aware of their differences. (shrink)

In the wake of corporate governance scandals, questions arise about the effectiveness and intent of corporate ethical codes: Are they genuine governance mechanisms to enhance corporate responsibility, or are they mere shields against legal risks? This study delves into the linguistic choices within ethical codes, positing that these choices serve as communication devices that articulate a firm’s institutional logic. We use stakeholder theory to differentiate between code language that is governed by instrumental (legal-oriented) or normative (behavior-oriented) (...) logic. Upon analyzing the lexicon of Fortune 500 corporate codes, our findings reveal that behavior-oriented codes are associated with a decrease in the number of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Yet, they correspond to an increase in class action lawsuits. By contrast, legal-oriented codes are linked to an increase in ESG issues but to reduced legal litigation. Notably, firms that blend approaches from both logics experience lower litigation rates. These findings enrich the discourse on stakeholder theory and provide practical guidance for organizations aiming to refine their ethical codes. This refinement seeks to enhance ethical behavior and mitigate corporate risks. (shrink)

The adoption of the Legal Codes has generated a debate regarding use therein of the concept of family. Today, the family is in an area of decline due to profound socio-economic mutations, which have caused several processes to become acute, such as individualization, divorce, abandonment of the prospect of marriage, increase in number of abortions, deterioration of the condition of children and adolescents. In spite of all this, the Legal Codes have preserved the traditional concepts. Likewise, (...) the development of NRTs, insemination, surrogate mothers, demands for rights for the gay couples and their fight for acknowledgement have also contributed to this socio-cultural shift. We use the concept of family in its classical meaning; any other meaning configurations remain in the area signifying a couple/pair that do not have the possibility of procreation in themselves. Under the circumstances, we plead for the reconstruction of the family. (shrink)

End-of-life organ donation is controversial in Islam. The controversy stems from: scientifically flawed medical criteria of death determination; invasive perimortem procedures for preserving transplantable organs; and incomplete disclosure of information to consenting donors and families. Data from a survey of Muslims residing in Western countries have shown that the interpretation of religious scriptures and advice of faith leaders were major barriers to willingness for organ donation. Transplant advocates have proposed corrective interventions: reinterpreting religious scriptures, reeducating faith leaders, and utilizing media (...) campaigns to overcome religious barriers in Muslim communities. This proposal disregards the intensifying scientific, legal, and ethical controversies in Western societies about the medical criteria of death determination in donors. It would also violate the dignity and inviolability of human life which are pertinent values incorporated in the Islamic moral code. Reinterpreting religious scriptures to serve the utilitarian objectives of a controversial end-of-life practice, perceived to be socially desirable, transgresses the Islamic moral code. It may also have deleterious practical consequences, as donors can suffer harm before death. The negative normative consequences of utilitarian secular moral reasoning reset the Islamic moral code upholding the sanctity and dignity of human life. (shrink)

In this article, we distinguish between a ‘game code of conduct’, an ‘ethical and/or legal code of the military profession’, ‘codes of social intercourse’, and a ‘code of respect’, and we assess to what extent these codes are reflected in the chivalrous behaviour we see today. Chivalry has developed from archaic medieval game codes of conduct into a codification regarding the laws of war and humanitarian law, but also in behavioural standards that are formalized in books (...) of etiquette. However, these forms of moral codes of conduct do not overcome the problem of benevolent sexism, due to the fact that ‘chivalry’ is in essence a masculine ideology that excludes women from the military profession. Eventually, chivalric codes of social intercourse might develop into a code of respect, which may solve this issue. (shrink)

The article analyses the key issues of the legal status of the sole managing body from the perspective of the valid legal regulation, the established case-law and doctrine. The first part of the article analyses the dualism of the manager’s legal status from the perspective of civil law and labour law. The analysis of the latest case-law presented herein shows that the rule of “internal” and “external” relations between the manager and the company formulated in the case-law (...) is applied differently, and the criterion of distinguishing the manager’s as the subject of the labour law and that of the civil law statuses still remains unclear. The authors of the article are of the view that due to insufficient legal regulation in force rules established by the case-law to regulate the manager’s legal status cannot ensure the required legal certainty. Thus, the reform of the manager’s legal regulation is essential. The second part of the article strives to answer the question what legal regulation models exist and what are the main criteria of quality legal regulation. The comparative analysis of the legal status regulation of the sole managing body allows to determine the main available regulation models of the manager’s legal status and to distinguish their advantages and disadvantages. The authors of the article believe that it is necessary to take regard to other states’ practices regulating the relations at issue, however, while creating such legal regulation, the evaluation of economic, cultural and social peculiarities of Lithuania is also required. In search for the most appropriate model of the manager’s legal status, attention should be drawn to the fact that in some aspects the labour law regime is too restrictive (e.g., shareholders cannot recall the manager, who is on maternal leave, and the manager at interim does not have full authority) and uncoordinated with the doctrine of the companies’ law. Moreover, quite a few questions directly related to the issues of the manager’s authority do not fall or only partially fall into the scope of the labour law. On the other hand, the problem of the manager’s legal status involves a broader scope of points of the companies’ law than the dualism of the manager’s status, and a part of these points has already been regulated by the Law on Companies (the agreement conclusion, termination, removal from the register of legal persons, terms of notice). In regard to this, a question can be raised if it not be better to regulate the issues of the manager’s legal status by the provisions of the Law on Companies and not of the Labour Code. It is proposed to create a specific legal regulation of the companies’ law, which could meet the needs of business and match up to the doctrine of the companies’ law, which is already being applied. (shrink)

The degree to which the early dharma literature was an extrapolation from the earlier ritual codes can be seen from a number of shared features of form and content. One of these that has not received more than passing notice is the fact that the Dharmaśāstric principle of regarding customary norms as a valid basis of dharma, both in general and in limited spheres, has its origins in ritual rules in the śrautasūtras and gṛhyasūtras. Passages from the Baudhāyanaśrautasūtra and (...) numerous gṛhyasūtras show that already in these rulebooks established practices of particular social groups were accepted as a valid authority in certain contexts where explicit textual warrant was lacking, and that a further distinction was there made between the general norms of experts and the valid particular norms of locality or social group. (shrink)

Members of the legal, medical and accounting professions are guided in their professional behavior by their respective codes of ethics. These codes of ethics are not static. They are ever evolving, responding to forces that are exogenous and endogenous to the professions. Specifically, changes in the ethical codes are often due to economic and social events, governmental influence, and growth and change within the professions. This paper presents an historical analysis of the major events leading to (...) changes in the legal, medical and accounting codes of ethics. (shrink)

Judges in multiple US states, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, California, and Florida, receive a prediction of defendants’ recidivism risk, generated by the COMPAS algorithm. If judges act on these predictions, they implicitly delegate normative decisions to proprietary software, even beyond the previously documented race and age biases. Using the ProPublica dataset, we demonstrate that COMPAS predictions favor jailing over release. COMPAS is biased against defendants. We show that this bias can largely be removed. Our proposed correction increases overall (...) accuracy, and attenuates anti-black and anti-young bias. However, it also slightly increases the risk that defendants are released who commit a new crime before tried. We argue that this normative decision should not be buried in the code. The tradeoff between the interests of innocent defendants and of future victims should not only be made transparent. The algorithm should be changed such that the legislator and the courts do make this choice. (shrink)

Ethical codes have been hailed as an explicit vehicle for achieving more sustainable and defensible organizational practice. Nonetheless, when legal compliance and corporate governance codes are conflated, codes can be used to define organizational interests ostentatiously by stipulating norms for employee ethics. Such codes have a largely cosmetic and insurance function, acting subtly and strategically to control organizational risk management and protection. In this paper, we conduct a genealogical discourse analysis of a representative code of (...) ethics from an international corporation to understand how management frames expectations of compliance. Our contribution is to articulate the problems inherent in codes of ethics, and we make some recommendations to address these to benefit both an organization and its employees. In this way, we show how a code of ethics can provide a foundation for ethical sustainability, while addressing management intentions and employees’ ethical satisfaction. (shrink)

Mental health professionals frequently work with family caregivers in the provision of psychotherapy services to individuals with serious mental illness. To address the need for ethical guidelines for working with family caregivers, an analysis of relevant ethical and legal issues is provided within the context of dynamic mental health care and legal systems. When working with family caregivers, practitioners utilize the American Psychological Association’s Ethics Code (2010), legal codes, and a complex decision-making plan; identify and communicate (...) ethical obligations to family caregivers; consider the unmet needs of this population; avoid harm resulting from multiple relationships; and balance ethical duties of beneficence and respect for autonomy. (shrink)

Originally written in 1990, this reviews largely late 20th century debates on the study of law as Logic, Discourse, or Experience; the Unity of the Legal System and the Problem of Reference; Semiotic Presuppositions of Traditional Jurisprudence (Austin, Hart, Kelsen, Dworkin, Legal Realisms); then turns to legal philosophies explicitly Employing Forms of Semiotics (Kalinowski, the Italian Analytical School, Rhetorical and Pragmatic Approaches, Sociological and Socio-Linguistic Approaches, Peircian Legal Semiotics, Greimasian Legal Semiotics and Aesthetic/Symbolic Approaches). A (...) major section then offers (from a largely Greimasian point of view) some hypotheses for legal semiotics on the Problem of Reference, Semantic and Pragmatic Levels, Semiotic Groups and “The Legal Culture”, Normativity and Justification, and finally considers the implications for particular legal phenomena: the “Legal System”, Legal Institutions, Legal Codes, Legal Rules, Rights, Courtroom Behaviour: Witness and Counsel, The Judge: Justification of Decisions on Law, and the Criminal Justice Process. A conclusion addresses the status of legal semiotics. (shrink)

Presidential pardon has always existed in criminal law and continues to constitute a very important competence of the head of state in many modern day countries. In the past, the clemency given by the sovereign represented an act which showed his/her mercy upon their subjects. It was often used as a tool to show the arbitrary will of the sovereign that constituted the law, rather than the law itself. Therefore, the classical school of criminal law that appeared in the 18th (...) century and emphasized the importance of the principle of legality, opposed harshly every kind of arbitrary deciding that excluded the law at the interest of the sovereign. This school is among the only interpretations of criminal law that engages for a complete abandonment of institutes such as pardon or amnesty. The revolutionary French Penal Code of 1791, which was strongly influenced by the classical school, excluded clemency for the proved wrongs that were severely punished. However, due to imperfections of the criminal justice system, amnesty and pardon or clemency, continue to exist and to be used in modern day criminal law. They are no longer considered acts of arbitrary decisions of the sovereign, instead they should represent important instruments of criminal law, used rarely and wisely with specifically designed goals that aim to bring justice rather than deny it. However, there are many cases when these institutes have been inappropriately used in a very arrogant way which shows that the ancient regime is not yet over for some countries in which the highest institutions continue to act as old and middle age despots. This article will analyze the legal reasoning of the institution of presidential pardon. It will try to establish why the classical school was so strictly opposed to this institute making use of the studies and interpretations found in the writings of Cesare Beccaria. It will explain the philosophy of modern day institutions of amnesty and pardon and the way in which they are regulated in the legal theory and practice. The article will explain the recent developments in Macedonia in regard to the use of presidential pardon. The methods to be used consist of desk research, historical and comparative methods and analysis of legal texts, laws and judicial decisions. (shrink)

As a result of recent corporate scandals, several rules have focused on the role played by Boards of Directors on the planning and monitoring of corporate codes of ethics. In theory, outside directors are in a better position than insiders to protect and further the interests of all stakeholders because of their experience and their sense of moral and legal obligations. Female directors also tend to be more sensitive to ethics according to several past studies which explain this (...) affirmation by early gender socialization, the fact that women are thought to place a greater emphasis on harmonious relations and the fact that men and women use different ethical frameworks in their judgments. The goal of this paper is to determine the influence of these characteristics of the Board in terms of promoting and hindering the creation of a code of ethics. Our findings show that a greater number of female directors does not necessarily lead to more ethical companies. Moreover, within Europe as a continent, board ownership leads to an entrenchment of upper-level management, generating a divergence between the ethical interests of owners and managers. In light of this situation, the presence of independent directors is necessary to reduce such conflicts. (shrink)

In The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor seeks to trace out the ultimate sources of wealth and capital. Her central claim—that wealth and capital are ultimately created by law—is at once more commonsensical and intuitive, on the one hand, and more insightful and provocative, on the other hand, than it might initially seem. At a time when there is deep and widespread interest in and concern about wealth inequality, Pistor argues (successfully, I think) that much inequality can be traced back (...) to oft-ignored legal fixtures. She also argues (unsuccessfully, I think) that we can trace inequality back to law precisely because law is itself partly constitutive of wealth and capital. Fortunately, her more fruitful claims about how law affects the distribution of wealth and capital can be divorced from the less fruitful metaphysical claims about the nature of law and capital and lay the foundation for much future work of interest. (shrink)

With reference to the Dutch model, which has been adopted by the Lithuanian Civil Code, the possibility to renounce Investigation Proceedings in the Articles of Incorporation or shareholder agreements is analysed in this article. The mandatory nature of the Investigation Proceedings is derived from the provisions of the Code, mainly: from an active role of the court, typical to the cases with the element of public interest, from specific rules for protecting the public interest in the course of the Investigation (...) Proceedings, also taking into account statutory duties of managers, the scope of which may not be narrowed by SHA, and the fact, that the Investigation Proceedings is generally designated to be an instrument to safeguard the interests of minority shareholders against the abuse of their rights by the company, and, finally, acknowledging the extraordinary nature of remedies available in the Investigation Proceedings. (shrink)

According to some commentators of the Iranian Civil Code, the definition of sale stated in Article 183 is influenced by Article 1101 of French Civil Code. They have concluded that the essence of sale is confined to mutual consent, i.e. the sale would not be valid without the consent of either party. They have taken even a step further and considered the contents of Article 338 of the civil code, which describes contract of sale, contradictory to Article 183 and argued (...) that the sale of a specified concrete object is not contained in Article 183 while the sale of unascertained goods is obliged to that article. They believe that the definition of Article 183 of civil code excludes not only all commitments, but also swap contracts because there are two mutual commitments and two agreeing legal contracts in a swap contract while there is no mentioning of them in Article 183. However, the objections are not rightfully lodged because first, the contracts and obligations are not incompatible with the definition of Article 338 as the seller and the buyer within a contract of sale are obliged to give authority to the other party over the object of sale or the price. It means that there are two commitments and the obligation of the seller to give authority over the object of sale appears in two ways: dominion over concrete object while making a transaction and dominion over non-specified object with the obligation that it does not attend to fulfil possession by the time of the sale. Secondly, Article 183 contains the phrase “their acceptance” which includes swap contract too because this phrase indicates that the acceptance is mutual. (shrink)

What do we know when we know the law? Not a set of rules or theories, but a set of practices that are at bottom practices of reading--reading the texts of the law, reading the world--and writing (including of course speaking), especially writing in news ways in the inherited language of the law. Legal knowledge is a writer's knowledge. It always has as one of its deepest themes the question of justice. These themes are explored through an examination of (...) the Model Penal Code, which respect to which I ask what it would be like to learn this material with an eye to using it as a language of thought and argument. It is full of tensions and fissures about the most important matters, including its conceptions of justice and the purposes of criminal law, its central ideas of blameworthiness as a function of intention or state of mind, and its conception of proportionality. These can be seen as defects to be cured, or as reflections of irremediable tensions deep in our thought about these matters which it is a virtue not a vice of the Code to render explicit. To shift from legislative to judge-made law, I next examine Holmes's famous opinions in Shenck and Abrams, which I read in the light offered by the Model Penal Code, using that text to help define the criminal law issues presented in the two cases. This in turn helps define Holmes's achievement in these cases as a transformation of the criminal law, which leads to his constitutional doctrine. Finally, I analyze Brandeis's opinion in Whitney as an intellectual and rhetorical achievement of a different, and more extraordinary, kind. In all of these, the idea is to demonstrate how it is that legal knowledge is a writer's knowledge: for the drafter of statutes, for the composer of judicial opinions applying statutory and constitutional law alike, and for the lawyer thinking through and arguing a case. (shrink)

This article analyses the regulatory handbooks produced by the new regulators for solicitors and barristers, the main legal professions in England and Wales, following the Legal Services Act 2007. It focuses on the new codes of conduct and the 10 high-level regulatory standards that are a feature of each handbook. The article examines the ways in which key interests have been dealt with in the handbooks from the perspective of the historical narratives of the legal professions (...) and their publications, including their previous codes of conduct. It is found that the barristers’ and solicitors’ codes project different ethical orientations towards the supposedly universal ‘standard conception of the lawyer’s role’ based on the principles of neutrality and partisanship. The origins, meaning and significance of the high-level standards are considered. They are found not to reflect the content of the codes of conduct or to communicate cherished elements of the professions’ historical narratives. It is argued that this is problematic in terms of the professional functions of regulation, education and communication. (shrink)

In countries outside the developed world, although writers have written commentaries on specific legal codes, very little attention has been given to legal writing which has focused specifically on the ethics of the legal profession. This book makes a special contribution in that regard providing, as it does, a comparative study of prevailing efforts to enhance ethical standards in a profession potentially in crisis and under much public scrutiny. Countries which have been examined include the UK, (...) the US, Canada, South Africa, and countries in the Pacific, South East Asia and the Caribbean. Valuable guidance and learning are provided on such topical issues as wasted costs orders, conflicts of interests, legal and judicial codes, confidentiality, privilege and the ethics of the criminal process, where the jury system comes in for critical evaluation. This book will be a valuable text on the ethics and status of the profession. It will be of considerable interest to law students, practitioners and legal academics, Bar Associations, Attorneys-General and Directors of Public Prosecutions as well as members of the judiciary. (shrink)

Medical research with children has been the subject of ongoing debate. The reason for controversy is clear. As with research on adults, one must strike a balance between two goals – promoting the health of children through advances in scientific knowledge and protecting child research subjects from exploitation and harm. However, because of their age and relative immaturity, children cannot protect their own interests as well as adult subjects can. Yet as they progress toward adulthood, increasing care must be taken (...) to involve children in decisions that affect them, even to the extent of allowing them to make choices that may have serious and long-term consequences. (shrink)

This paper reports an analysis of the content of the codes of ethics of 15 professional business organizations in the United States, representing the broad range of disciplines found in business. The analysis was conducted to identify common ethical issues faced by business professionals. It was also structured to highlight ethical issues that are either unique to or of particular importance for business professionals. No attempt is made to make value judgments about either the codes of ethics studied (...) or of their content. General ethical values identified include honesty and integrity, general legal compliance, discreditable or harmful acts, and obligations related to social values. More business-specific issues include confidentiality, responsibilities to employers/clients, obligations to the profession, independence and objectivity, and business-specific legal and technical compliance issues. (shrink)

Current debate on business ethics in Australia continues apace as the excesses of the 1980s are exposed. Codes of Ethics have been a high profile instrument in the American business scene. A survey of Australia''s largest business corporations reveals a different situation. Codes are not as commonly used, tend to refer to legal requirements and do not have as high a profile within the corporation. Given the changing legal framework in Australia a greater role for (...) class='Hi'>Codes of Ethics may emerge. (shrink)

We create a database of company codes of ethics from firms listed on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and, separately, a sample of small firms. The SEC believes that "ethics codes do, and should, vary from company to company." Using textual analysis techniques, we measure the extent of commonality across the documents. We find substantial levels of common sentences used by the firms, including a few cases where the codes of ethics are essentially identical. We consider (...) these results in the context of legal statements versus value statements. While legal writing often mandates duplication, we argue that value-based statements should be held to a higher standard of originality. Our evidence is consistent with isomorphic pressures on smaller firms to conform. (shrink)

In this chapter we will argue that the capacities necessary to moral and legal agency can be understood as executive functions in the brain. Executive functions underwrite both the cognitive and volitional capacities that give agents a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing: to recognize their acts as immoral and/or illegal, and to act or refrain from acting based upon this recognition. When a person’s mental illness is serious enough to cause severe disruption of executive functions, she is very likely (...) to lack substantial capacities necessary to be law-abiding. Our analysis supports the Model Penal Code test for legal insanity over the traditional M’Naghten test, because the Model Penal Code test allows either severely diminished cognitive or volitional capacities to warrant an excuse to criminal culpability. We will provide a nuanced account of the ways in which mental illness can erode executive function, as well as an explanation as to why severe diminishment of executive functions caused by mental illness, but not some other causes, is exculpatory. (shrink)

Identifying, classifying, and analyzing arguments in legal discourse has been a prominent area of research since the inception of the argument mining field. However, there has been a major discrepancy between the way natural language processing (NLP) researchers model and annotate arguments in court decisions and the way legal experts understand and analyze legal argumentation. While computational approaches typically simplify arguments into generic premises and claims, arguments in legal research usually exhibit a rich typology that is (...) important for gaining insights into the particular case and applications of law in general. We address this problem and make several substantial contributions to move the field forward. First, we design a new annotation scheme for legal arguments in proceedings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that is deeply rooted in the theory and practice of legal argumentation research. Second, we compile and annotate a large corpus of 373 court decisions (2.3M tokens and 15k annotated argument spans). Finally, we train an argument mining model that outperforms state-of-the-art models in the legal NLP domain and provide a thorough expert-based evaluation. All datasets and source codes are available under open lincenses athttps://github.com/trusthlt/mining-legal-arguments. (shrink)