Legal Aid New South Wales

This study investigates the challenges and opportunities pertaining to transportation policies that may arise as a result of emerging autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies. AV technologies can decrease the transportation cost and increase accessibility to low-income households and persons with mobility issues. This emerging technology also has far-reaching applications and implications beyond all current expectations. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the relevant literature and explores a broad spectrum of issues from safety to machine ethics. An indispensable part of a prospective AV development is communication over cars and infrastructure (connected vehicles). A major knowledge gap exists in AV technology with respect to routing behaviors. Connected-vehicle technology provides a great opportunity to implement an efficient and intelligent routing system. To this end, we propose a conceptual navigation model based on a fleet of AVs that are centrally dispatched over a network seeking system optimization. This study contributes to the literature on two fronts: (i) it attempts to shed light on future opportunities as well as possible hurdles associated with AV technology; and (ii) it conceptualizes a navigation model for the AV which leads to highly efficient traffic circulations.

People with a mental illness may be subject to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), depending on definitions of terms such as 'impairment', 'long-term' and the capaciousness of the word 'includes' in the Convention's characterisation of persons with disabilities. Particularly challenging under the CRPD is the scope, if any, for involuntary treatment. Conventional mental health legislation, such as the Mental Health Act (England and Wales) appears to violate, for example, Article 4 ('no discrimination of any kind on the basis of disability'), Article 12 (persons shall 'enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others in all aspects of life') and Article 14 ('the existence of a disability shall in no case justify a deprivation of liberty'). We argue that a form of mental health law, such as the Fusion Law proposal, is consistent with the principles of the CRPD. Such law is aimed at eliminating discrimination against persons with a mental illness. It covers all persons regardless of whether they have a 'mental' or a 'physical' illness, and only allows involuntary treatment when a person's decision-making capability (DMC) for a specific treatment decision is impaired - whatever the health setting or cause of the impairment - and where supported decision making has failed. In addition to impaired DMC, involuntary treatment would require an assessment that such treatment gives the person's values and perspective paramount importance.

Suicide is an important public health problem for which we have an inadequate public health database. In the United States, decisions about whether deaths are listed as suicides on death certificates are usually made by a coroner or medical examiner. These certification decisions are frequently marked by a lack of consistency and clarity, and laws and procedures for guiding these decisions vary from state to state and even from county to county. Without explicit criteria to aid in this decision making, coroners or medical examiners may be more susceptible to pressures from families or communities not to certify specific deaths as suicide. In addition, coroners or medical examiners may certify similar deaths differently at different times. The degree to which suicides may be underreported or misclassified is unknown. This makes it impossible to estimate accurately the number of deaths by suicide, to identify risk factors, or to plan and evaluate preventive interventions. To remedy these problems, a working group representing coroners, medical examiners, statisticians, and public health agencies developed operational criteria to assist in the determination of suicide. These criteria are based on a definition of suicide as "death arising from an act inflicted upon oneself with the intent to kill oneself." The purpose of these criteria is to improve the validity and reliability of suicide statistics by: (1) promoting consistent and uniform classifications; (2) making the criteria for decision making in death certification explicit; (3) increasing the amount of information used in decision making; (4) aiding certifiers in exercising their professional judgment; and (5) establishing common standards of practice for the determination of suicide.

Looks at an online strategy project at Legal Aid in Western Australia. Begins with an overview of e‐government and the Western Australian Government context, and then discusses the research model and methodology. Gives a background to the case and analyses the change management process against a comprehensive model of business process change. Concludes with some lessons learned and future directions for research in this area.

UNLABELLED: Reduction of nociceptive input through blockade of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors has been reported. We compared the effects of epidural S(+)-ketamine versus placebo on postoperative pain in a randomized, double-blinded study in 37 patients undergoing unilateral knee arthroplasty. After lumbar epidural anesthesia with ropivacaine (10 mg/mL, 10-20 mL), 19 patients received 0.9% epidural saline, and 18 patients received 0.25 mg/kg epidural S(+)-ketamine 10 min before surgical incision. After surgery, patient-controlled epidural analgesia with ropivacaine was provided. During the first 8 h after surgery, visual analog scale pain rating was similar between groups. Twenty-four and 48 h after surgery, patients anesthetized with ropivacaine had higher visual analog scale ratings at rest and during movement (P < 0.05) than patients anesthetized with S(+)-ketamine and ropivacaine. Forty-eight hours after surgery, patients anesthetized with ropivacaine also consumed more ropivacaine (558 +/- 210 mg) (P < 0.01) than those anesthetized with S(+)-ketamine and ropivacaine (319 +/- 204 mg). Adverse events were similar between groups. Patients who received S(+)-ketamine and ropivacaine rated the quality of their pain therapy better than those who received ropivacaine alone (P < 0.05). We conclude that the combination of S(+)-ketamine and ropivacaine in epidural anesthesia increases postoperative pain relief when compared with ropivacaine. IMPLICATIONS: Epidural S(+)-ketamine applied with ropivacaine before surgery is a rational approach to decrease injury-induced pain sensitization. Epidural blockade with an N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist and a local anesthetic may provide better analgesia in the postoperative period than a local anesthetic alone.

Background: Recent studies demonstrate the potential of Artificial Intelligence to support diagnosis, mortality assessment, and clinical decisions in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). However, explicit evidence of strategies to overcome the particular challenges for transformed health systems in these countries does not exist. Objective: The present study undertakes a review of research on the current status of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify requirements, gaps, challenges, and possible strategies to strengthen the large, complex, and heterogeneous health systems in LMICs. Design: After introducing the general challenges developing countries face, the methodology of systematic reviews and the meta-analyses extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) is introduced according to the preferred reporting items. Scopus and Web of Science databases were used to identify papers published between 2011-2022, from which we selected 151 eligible publications. Moreover, a narrative review was conducted to analyze the evidence in the literature about explicit evidence of strategies to overcome particular AI challenges in LMICs. Results: = 22). For both study groups, a descriptive statistical analysis was performed describing their technological contribution, data used, health context, and type of health interventions. For the secondary studies group, an in-deep narrative review was performed, identifying a set of 40 challenges gathered in eight different categories: data quality, context awareness; regulation and legal frameworks; education and change resistance; financial resources; methodology; infrastructure and connectivity; and scalability. A total of 89 recommendations (at least one per challenge) were identified. Conclusion: Research on applying AI and ML to healthcare interventions in LMICs is growing; however, apart from very well-described ML methods and algorithms, there are several challenges to be addressed to scale and mainstream experimental and pilot studies. The main challenges include improving the quality of existing data sources, training and modeling AI solutions based on contextual data; and implementing privacy, security, informed consent, ethical, liability, confidentiality, trust, equity, and accountability policies. Also, robust eHealth environments with trained stakeholders, methodological standards for data creation, research reporting, product certification, sustained investment in data sharing, infrastructures, and connectivity are necessary. Systematic review registration: [https://rb.gy/frn2rz].

This analysis explores the origins and constitutional implications of Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People (hereafter the Jewish Nation-State Law), enacted by the Israeli Knesset in July 2018. It examines the antecedents of the legislation in Israeli jurisprudence and argues that most of the law's provisions are the product of precedents established by Israel's Supreme Court, specifically the court's rulings delivered post-Oslo. The authors contend that the “two states for two peoples” vision of so-called liberal Zionists paved the way for Israel's right-wing politicians to introduce this law. Their analysis holds that the law is radical in nature: far from being a mere continuation of the status quo, it confers unprecedented constitutional status on ordinary policies and destabilizes the prevailing legal distinction between the area within the Green Line and the 1967 occupied territories.

The authors investigate the retail pricing tactics of the rent-to-own (RTO) industry through an examination of a recent court ruling and primary data. More specifically, the authors describe a typical RTO transaction and analyze a recent court case that is representative of current rulings. Next, the authors conduct a qualitative investigation of consumers’ experiences with RTO retailers that is grounded in public/social policy theory involving impoverished consumers. The article ends with a discussion of retail pricing options and disclosure requirements, as well as grass-roots opportunities for consumer protection.

Emerging evidence points to the transition to parenthood as a critical window for adult neural plasticity. Studying fathers offers a unique opportunity to explore how parenting experience can shape the human brain when pregnancy is not directly experienced. Yet very few studies have examined the neuroanatomic adaptations of men transitioning into fatherhood. The present study reports on an international collaboration between two laboratories, one in Spain and the other in California (United States), that have prospectively collected structural neuroimaging data in 20 expectant fathers before and after the birth of their first child. The Spanish sample also included a control group of 17 childless men. We tested whether the transition into fatherhood entailed anatomical changes in brain cortical volume, thickness, and area, and subcortical volumes. We found overlapping trends of cortical volume reductions within the default mode network and visual networks and preservation of subcortical structures across both samples of first-time fathers, which persisted after controlling for fathers' and children's age at the postnatal scan. This study provides convergent evidence for cortical structural changes in fathers, supporting the possibility that the transition to fatherhood may represent a meaningful window of experience-induced structural neuroplasticity in males.

The question of the extent to which "transplant" countries continue to exhibit a particular style and substance of company regulation that mimics that of their respective "origin" countries has become particularly salient since the influential "legal origins" theory was proposed. This Article examines in detail the long historical evolution of company law in Indonesia from the colonial period to the present. Inspired by the approach of Pistor et al. (2002), this research finds some "legal origins" effects in the ways that Indonesian company law has developed, but it also notes that patterns of change have been significantly different from that of its former colonizer, the Netherlands. Indonesia experienced an extended period of time in which no change to its main company law occurred and has displayed evidence of adaptation to local conditions only more recently. This research reveals, however, that many of the contributing explanatory factors for this long period of legal stagnation in Indonesia are found outside Pistor et al.'s analytical framework. They include the ongoing effects of "colonial legal history" rather than "legal family effects," particularly of the race-based plural legal system, competing ideological approaches to business regulation, and the existence of informal business entities. This suggests that a more nuanced understanding of postcolonial and developing economy realities is needed in order to redefine the category of "transplant" countries in comparative studies of company law.

Excessive occupational sitting is not a “safe system of work”: time for doctors to get chatting with patients

Abstract In ferroelectrics, complex interactions among various degrees of freedom enable the condensation of topologically protected polarization textures. Known as ferroelectric solitons, these particle-like structures represent a new class of materials with promise for beyond-CMOS technologies due to their ultrafine size and sensitivity to external stimuli. Such polarization textures have scarcely been demonstrated in multiferroics. Here, we present evidence for ferroelectric solitons in (BiFeO 3 )/(SrTiO 3 ) superlattices. High-resolution piezoresponse force microscopy and Cs-corrected high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy reveal a zoo of topologies, and polarization displacement mapping of planar specimens reveals center-convergent/divergent topological defects as small as 3 nm. Phase-field simulations verify that some of these structures can be classed as bimerons with a topological charge of ±1, and first-principles-based effective Hamiltonian computations show that the coexistence of such structures can lead to non-integer topological charges, a first observation in a BiFeO 3 -based system. Our results open new opportunities in multiferroic topotronics.

A randomized trial was conducted to assess whether the offer of advice to those experiencing debt problems and who had yet to obtain any formal advice, had a positive impact on their financial and general circumstances. The participants were drawn from 16 Jobcentres (welfare offices) in 13 areas of England and Wales. In all, 402 participants were included in the trial at its outset; 234 participants remained in the trial at the 20‐week followup. There was no significant difference in the rate at which intervention and control group respondents had resolved their debt problems at the 20‐week followup. However, the former were significantly more likely to describe their financial position as “better” than at baseline. There was also evidence that they became more knowledgeable about their financial circumstances, more focused on dealing with priority debt, and more optimistic about their future prospects, relative to control group counterparts. These findings, though, fell short of statistical significance. The findings provide the first experimental evidence of a positive impact of the offer of debt advice. The study also highlights the difficulties of applying experimental methods in a social setting. One lesson drawn from the difficulties encountered in running this trial is that takeup is likely to be low for some forms of pro‐active advice for sensitive problem types experienced among disadvantaged communities.

Abstract Over recent years there has been increasing policy concern in the UK about whether citizens are equipped with sufficient legal ‘know-how’. In January 2006, the Department for Constitutional Affairs, now Ministry of Justice, announced a Public Legal Education and Support Task Force to develop and promote the case for a national strategy. This comes after UK government strategies have recently been developed for both consumer education and financial capability. Drawing on empirical data, this article explores whether there is indeed a lack of awareness and confidence among the population of England and Wales in regard to legal issues. The results from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey, a large-scale face-to-face survey representative of the population, illustrate the case for targeted as well as general public legal education initiatives.

Family cohesion is crucial to refugee and immigrant children. National immigration policies frequently give discretionary preference to family reunification, but subject it to restrictions, and seldom does domestic law grant the refugee or the alien resident a right to prompt reunification with foreign family members. While recognizing a right to family life, international law did. not in the past recognize a right of entry for the alien for the purposes of family reunification. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, however, requires states to ensure the child's right to family unity and entitles all children to family reunification.

Kinship care as a form of protective care in Australia has grown considerably over the past decade. The University of Melbourne Family Links: Kinship Care and Family Contact research project comprised a survey of kinship carers and consultations with key stakeholders. Given the significant over-representation of Indigenous children in kinship care arrangements, the project included a nested study of Indigenous kinship care. Research participants stressed the imperative for Indigenous children to be connected to family, community and culture. However, survey responses indicated that in many cases, family and cultural connections were not being assisted by cultural support planning. Indigenous caseworkers described the complexities of facilitating family contact, highlighting good practice as well as dilemmas and shortcomings in culturally sensitive practice. There was much evidence of the straitened circumstances of Indigenous kinship carers and unmet support needs among carers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Suggestions are made about ways in which children in kinship care might be better supported to maintain their family relationships.

Lauren Benton is Professor of History, Affiliated Professor of Law, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. Her research focuses on the comparative legal history of empires and the relation between imperial and international law. Benton's books include A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the prize-winning Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). A volume coedited with Richard Ross, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850, is forthcoming in 2013. Benton received her Ph.D. in History and Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, and her A.B. from Harvard University. Within the recent “imperial turn,” the pivot toward the history of law and empire has occurred at a head-spinning pace. Even as late as 2000, only a few comparative works on law and empire existed.1 Each colonial or imperial subfield claimed a small handful of high-quality studies, some of which belonged to an older tradition of imperial history that sought to expose the administrative sinews of empire without investigating connections to social and cultural trends. An important and influential strand of social history incorporated law, but many historians continued to avoid legal sources or mined case records solely for their narrative or cultural content. Recent scholarship on law and empire has produced a very different landscape. Careful and imaginative studies explore colonial legal processes as elements of social history. Comparative analyses tie together the legal histories of different parts of empires, while some also reach across empires to probe wider patterns. It is now well accepted that understanding law is essential to writing the history of such topics as imperial sovereignty, rights, and constitutions, and to investigating the evolution of the international order. Legal history, meanwhile, has been instrumental in the extension of imperial perspectives to periods and places formerly viewed through a national lens. Both the study of colonial law and the field of comparative legal history—closely related enterprises—now support a varied literature that has given rise to important research at every scale and in every world region. The three articles in this forum illustrate the field's potential to ask and answer new questions. The authors sample legal conflicts from three different periods. In “The Paternal Obligation to Provide: Political Familialism in Early-Nineteenth-Century Chile,” Sarah Chambers explores the ways in which “political familialism” and in particular conflicts about “paternal responsibility” influenced the formation of state power and legitimacy. Struggles to define the obligation to provide for vulnerable dependents such as war widows and illegitimate children in Chile shaped the state and paralleled rhetorical links between paternal authority and state capacity. Nandini Chatterjee's article, “Muslim or Christian? Family Quarrels and Religious Diagnosis in a Colonial Court,” analyzes the cultural and legal meanings of a child custody case that originated in Meerut, India, near Delhi, in 1870. In an appeal to the Privy Council, relatives of Victoria Skinner were upheld in their suit for custody on the grounds that her mother was an unfit guardian because she was raising the girl as a Muslim rather than as a Christian, reportedly the religious affiliation of the girl's late father. Chatterjee uncovers multiple subtexts of the case, including the basis for the unsuccessful argument by Victoria's mother that her family had for several generations occupied a culturally hybrid and religiously fluid middle ground in which it was possible to count oneself a Muslim and also agree to be wed in a Christian church. The outcome of the case reflected a classificatory shift that caught some legal actors off guard while offering others new opportunities to jockey for advantage in struggles over the control of the Skinner estate. In “The Irony of Legal Pluralism in U.S. Occupations,” Alan McPherson explores courts as sites of resistance to the twentieth-century U.S. occupation of Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Plural legal systems erected by the United States and designed to promote an orderly occupation spurred and organized opposition, a history that McPherson argues indicates the “partialness” of U.S. empire in these cases when compared to other empires and other phases of U.S. imperialism. Elements of the three articles relate to a set of themes and analytical moves taken up in the recent literature on law and empire. The broad rubric of “legal politics” serves well to group these approaches. The term (or others like it, such as “jurispractice” or “legal practice”) conveys the experience of strategic engagement with the law and reminds us that law is fluid and contingent, not a phenomenon reducible to legal codes, legislation, or even rules or norms.2 This perspective draws particular attention to jurisdictional conflict as a dimension of legal politics in empires. All legal orders are multi-jurisdictional; in colonial settings, legal actors often perceived that locating and defining jurisdictional divides entailed especially high stakes, and they sometimes associated the defense of jurisdictional autonomy with the preservation of political communities defined by religious affiliation or other cultural markers.3 Two key methodological problems persist within this perspective. One is the challenge of merging the study of legal politics with the analysis of cultures of law, broadly defined to include the political imagination of participants in legal conflicts. The other involves the question of how best to combine a focus on legal politics with comparative, imperial, and global histories. The two problems overlap methodologically since cultural legal history and world history face the shared task of situating singular cases within wider patterns. When viewed together, the fields also command attention to sticky problems of periodization; historical shifts in law are often not in sync with other kinds of transformations. The intellectual projects converge in a more profound way, too, in pursuit of crafting and revising narratives of the history of “international” or global law that take cultural processes into account. Here we contemplate a deep theoretical puzzle: how to understand the relation of law within polities to law between or across polities—the “inside/outside” problem of the history of global law.4 In the long nineteenth century, jurisdictional jockeying intensified in colonies and generated calls for empires and emerging states to assert greater legal hegemony over subordinate jurisdictions. This remarkably widespread shift toward claims of jurisdictional hierarchy focused attention on what was labeled as the despotic or arbitrary judicial power of a range of figures, from ship captains to slave owners to caudillos.5 Representations of imperial sovereignty as an overarching political and legal authority arranged in relation to an assortment of subordinate jurisdictions emerged within and influenced new constitutional projects.6 At the same time, such projects preserved the possibility of layered and divisible sovereignty that had structured expansion across a wide range of empires.7 And while new visions of imperium occupied political theorists at the heart of global empires, shifts in understandings of sovereignty also developed as a direct consequence of a series of sharp conflicts in colonial settings, especially over criminal jurisdiction, land rights, credit, and religious authority.8 As historians have labored to produce studies of halting and often incomplete jurisdictional shifts, an area that has received insufficient attention is the relation of household authority and family law to shifting configurations of sovereignty.9 Chambers shows that this oversight is significant. The construction of state legitimacy in Chile involved a repositioning of both state and patriarchal responsibility. Like Malick Ghachem, who has highlighted continuities between ancien régime slave law and the revolutionary legal politics of slavery in St. Domingue, Chambers notes that the intricate process leading to claims of enhanced state authority depended on continuities within a long-established legal discourse, in this case one of responsibility.10 The legal definition of the obligation to care for vulnerable dependents can be traced back to the thirteenth-century Siete Partidas. At the same time, legal continuities did not prevent references to protecting subordinates from taking on new meanings in the context of battles over the control of political authority at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This point is a reminder that jurisdictional politics was intertwined everywhere with culturally transmitted expectations. To signal the role of culture is not necessarily to argue that legal pluralism consisted of a layering of distinct normative orders. Actors observed and invoked norms, sometimes with great conviction, but it is nearly impossible for historians to trace adherence to norms or rules in order to map the contours of legal orders; even while championing rules, people regularly bent, broke, and invented them.11 Chatterjee's case explores a dimension of this unsteady relation between legal politics and cultural positioning. She points out that the plaintiff in the custody case had at first joined forces in a bid for a greater share of the Skinner estate with the child she later plotted to remove from her mother's home. Religious categorizations turned out to be significantly more pliable in cultural practice than the courts were willing to recognize. Here, too, jurisdictional politics takes an unexpected twist. Rather than establishing legitimacy by insisting that the authority of heads of household be reduced, the courts upheld the power of heads of household to command the religious affiliation of dependents, even from beyond the grave. Here the legitimacy of state courts drew from their restraint in confronting the authority of household heads over the family; the claim to the monopoly on judging the extent of that power (and marking the boundaries of religious affiliation) served to proclaim the power of imperial jurisdiction, and even a suspended right to intervene in family affairs had a similar effect. Chatterjee's case study is thus also highly relevant to a new history of familial politics as symbolically and politically central to emergent colonial and imperial state legal authority. The term “legal politics” should not be taken to mean that law and politics are the same. To be sure, historians are in some cases able to identify legal moves as the result of careful calculation, the product of “pure” strategic thinking. But engagement with the law typically blends strategy and the referencing of notions of justice, while legal stories and performances also have been shown to have a powerful grip of their own. The recent historiography on law and empire has paid careful attention to this artful combination. Historians have observed the effects of legal ritual and narrative, and they have noted, too, the impeccable logic in many places of combining legal maneuvering with violence.12 The frequently blurred boundary between violence and law has inspired a productive line of inquiry into the political meanings of declarations of martial law in empires and the construction of exceptional or anomalous legal spaces, especially penal colonies.13 The move of bringing together cultural and legal factors in the analysis of power—one that we might trace to E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters or to Douglas Hay's seminal article on terror and the law in Albion's Fatal Tree—should come with its own special set of warnings.14 The tightness of focus required to assign cultural meanings to legal actions can block contextual influences from view or invite facile generalizations. In colonial cases, a particular challenge lies in efforts to recover multiple cultural understandings surrounding jurisdictional tensions. An example of a brilliant case analysis with insufficient contextualization is Inga Clendinnen's dissection of the spearing of Governor Arthur Phillip by an aboriginal man outside Botany Bay as an act of legal retribution.15 The parsing of four records of the encounter transforms the appearance of a random act of violence into a compelling story about the clash of legal cultures. But in the careful effort to reconstruct the logic of punitive violence, Clendinnen ironically depicts her protagonists as bound by a close circle of experience—and perhaps as too limited by cultural scripts. The example relates to a broader danger of treating law as culture. The slow pace of legal change requires special attention; even revolutionary legal change can look more like shape-shifting than radical newness.16 And as Chambers observes in describing the ancient power of familial authority, meanings of legal concepts may change perceptibly even as they are invoked precisely because they appear to be timeless. The daily workings of the law can possess a formality and remoteness that also neutralize cultural symbolism. The stale air of Dickens's Bleak House seems to surround the slow unfolding of many colonial cases, including that of the Skinner appeal. In Chambers's account, the moving parts of legal change are the creaky administrative structures erected to look after war widows and orphans. Such bureaucratic formations and other dry forms of the law contrast in these accounts, as the authors adroitly note, with the emotional pull of legal stories: in Chatterjee's case, the wrenching, if inaccurate, tale of a girl forced to convert, and in Chambers's account, the moral affront of unprotected widows and abandoned illegitimate children. The art of cultural legal history lies in the ability to expose the intricate relation between institutional and cultural practices. None of this is to imply that the legal history of empires is severely marred by imperfections. Although the need to move nimbly from individual case to comparative or transregional analysis represents a methodological challenge, it should by now be evident that the tendency of legal conflicts to appear in the historical record in the form of discrete cases also makes the field especially rich. Some works have met the methodological challenges by constructing a thick context around one case, in an exercise that can extend across borders and regions. James Epstein, for example, explores the controversies surrounding the trial of General Thomas Picton for the torture of Louisa Calderon in early-nineteenth-century Trinidad, tracing a spiral of references to the case on both sides of the Atlantic that conjured a new discourse of imperial constitutionalism.17 A vibrant strand of intellectual history has contributed in important ways to the history of law and empire, producing startlingly original readings of imperial arguments threaded through classic texts and showing that ordinary litigants, lowly lawyers or officials, and indigenous actors contributed in important ways to traditions of imperial and international law that used to be described as the property of European jurists.18 Such efforts demonstrate the promise of the history of law in empires to connect diffuse trends in political culture with shifting narratives about global order. Comparative analysis offers one path to making such connections. The articles in this forum invite wide-ranging comparative history, even when they cannot develop this dimension fully. McPherson's framing is itself comparative, bringing together practices from three U.S. occupations. In addition, he directs our attention to other comparisons situated slightly offstage: the contrast of the occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic to three other key examples of U.S. imperial might in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines; the comparison of U.S. empire to European empires; and the more abstract comparison of the experience of occupation that he is describing with the imagined construct of “informal empire” that has served so long to characterize twentieth-century U.S. and European involvement in Latin American and the Caribbean. Chambers offers comparisons to family law in early modern Europe and the Americas, in an invitation to produce a narrative of the “independence” period across the region that highlights family legal politics. Even while focusing mainly on one case, Chatterjee wants to draw our attention to the influence of shifting classificatory systems in colonial history. Such messages are a sign that the perspective of legal politics opens new possibilities for addressing the “inside/outside” problem of global law. Recent studies have developed a set of insights about links between studies of legal politics and global narratives of law and order. The first insight begins with the observation—also made by both Chambers and McPherson—that the legal history of nation-states cannot be separated from the legal history of empires.19 Once we begin to view and as of a we not only a for comparative legal history but also a of analysis to the international engagement of both and political communities of and have or sought of the to and legitimacy as “international” actors in what might be a field of Law across polities also into view in the formation of global legal through of jurisdictional can begin to look for and as in of like conflicts in social formations that a similar on legal and political In this Chambers calls our attention to “political familialism” as one such in conflicts. of legal polities to efforts by emergent states not only to legitimacy but also to as international legal politics across sites within one empire or across polities in one area can produce imperial formations or legal with historical is of legal politics can to the heart of about and sovereignty in a can from that the problem of of political that is both and the of early modern political in particular to define the relation of law and the or the law of of the problem produced at but more often within political as between the emerging of as a of the individual and the observed of the individual to of the and also that of for the One the of a the of or of which or as In a world of social depended on the of The is to us that legal defined by jurisdiction, law, religious or legal a in practice and in political legal It is of that of the and relation between law and order and outside formations to analyses of the jurisdictional conflicts produced global legal and if we close we historical actors that sought to the effects of and global As they have to be in so many studies of empire us face to face with to in early modern Atlantic empires, for example, and on new as imperial participants to the pursuit of their own as the In this of in structures of power rather as is often understandings of as to The articles in this forum in by such Chambers that the legal politics of produced new claims about Chatterjee notes that the of her case invoked particular of of religious as essential to McPherson this logic in that to a legal order generated a new of Such insights the promise of the beyond the cases they and even beyond the comparisons they In a wider effort to of to the between the promise of structures of authority and the of conflict within and across the articles to understandings of a new legal empire, and world history.

“The Trolley Problem” is the name Judith Jarvis Thomson has given to a difficult problem in moral philosophy and legal theory. The problem arises by considering a series of cases, all of which involve a choice of evils. Many, but not all of these cases, involve an out-of-control trolley about to run over a group of five people. In each case we are asked for our intuitive judgment as to whether it would be permissible to save the five people at risk when doing so would require the death of, or the imposition of a high risk of death on, another human being.

Negotiating a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism has been a long and intense process. The legal regime to be created by this instrument has significant legal and political consequences. The main issues, which would frame such consequences, are how to define the crime and decide the scope of application of such a Convention. These have proven to be problematic, as negotiators have revisited issues that have been a source of debate for years, even centuries. Who has the right to participate in an armed conflict without being described as a terrorist by the Convention? To what extent do we allow the overlap between international humanitarian law and the Convention's law, if any? Do military forces have the right to be outside the scope of the Convention even in peace time? These are the main questions that the negotiators have been trying to answer in order to reach a compromise that will satisfy all parties. If genuine political will exists to conclude the Comprehensive Convention, there is no absence of legal answers that can guarantee an effective law enforcement instrument against international terrorism, without infringing on legal rights and positions under international law.

The Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) was the first jurisdiction to fully deregulate law firm structure and allow alternative business structures in the legal profession. At the same time it also introduced an innovation in regulation of the legal profession, requiring that incorporated legal practices implement ‘appropriate management systems’ for ensuring the provision of legal services in compliance with professional ethical obligations. This paper presents a preliminary empirical evaluation of the impact of this attempt at ‘management‐based regulation’. We find that the NSW requirement that firms self‐assess their ethics management leads to a large and statistically significant drop in complaints. The (self‐assessed) level of implementation of ethics management infrastructure, however, does not make any difference. The relevance of these findings to debates about deprofessionalization, managerialism, and commercialism in the legal profession is discussed, and the NSW approach is distinguished from the more heavy‐handed English legal aid approach to regulating law firm quality management.