The new Equality Bill in the UK attempts to bring domestic law regarding positive action into line with EU norms. The author addresses two key criticisms of the provisions, namely: a) that they allow positive discrimination; and b) that they will be ineffective in practice. It is argued that the first criticism is misconceived; preference of a minority candidate where they are equally as qualified as a male candidate simply recognises that equality is not about treating everybody the same, but having a relevant reason for treating them differently. The second criticism is more compelling. The author recommends that the UK make the transition to a systemic model and impose positive duties on employers in a similar vein to that which has developed in Canada. However, a delicate equilibrium must be achieved; special treatment of women and minorities regardless of merit is not conducive to a society that values diversity.

This article explores the corporate governance in the developed countries and China from a comparative perspective. Following the analysis of principal-agent model, this article examines the dispersion-to-concentration ownership span to explore its influence on the majority/minority ownership and the shareholder/manager conflicts. It compares the positive and negative edges of concentrated shareholding with empirical analysis of Canada, the U.S., and China, and finds the different roles of institutional shareholders in various countries. This article then turns to two-tier agency model which is another way to enhance corporate governance. Compared with the vertical construct with the vanguard of Germany, it illustrates that the supervisory board in china is situated parallel to the board of directors and loses the supervising purpose. This article finally explores the independent director system which has obtained credits in the developed countries. While in China, it lacks legal protection and is not effective as expected.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has set for itself goals that go beyond bringing perpetrators of crimes to account. Some of these functions directly depend on the media for their fulfilment, because it is precisely the media who transmits these functions to the public. This ever-increasing reliance on the media brings a need for a minimal standard of balanced reporting,which seems to be lacking in Serbia. I will examine Serbian media reporting and conclude that it does not further the Tribunals purposes, thus negatively affecting the Serbian public. I will contrast Serbian to Rwandan news reporting in order to show that a higher standard can be expected of these news outlets. Nevertheless, regardless of what kind of reporting is prevalent, the effect on the ground may not be negative if it motivates people to access other sources and thus widen their outlooks on the issues.

Limitations on the customizability of property rights (the numerus clausus principle) are a puzzling feature of the common law conception of property. An economic rationale, built upon 1) the pivotal role that rules of exclusion play in fostering user innovation, and 2) the role that psychological ownership plays in preventing recontracting around governance rules, is offered to explain the modern persistence of the doctrine. Application of the numerus clausus principle limits the proliferation of governance rules in the economy (governance), replacing them with rules of exclusion (exclusion). Exclusion unifies rights of use and possession in assets, while governance separates, to a greater or lesser degree, possession from use rights. Full user, sale and the policy against restraints on alienation are the paradigmatic examples of exclusion; while governance is exemplified by servitudes and contractually-burdened assets. Exclusion plays a critical role in user innovation because it allows the possessors of assets to unilaterally seek out new uses of those assets. Whenever the law replaces governance with exclusion, user innovation is more likely to occur because the possessors of assets can apply their unique, rival and nontransferable human capital inputs to tangible assets, generating outputs (the new uses) that move resources to their higher-value uses. This is how all innovation, both high-tech and low-tech, occurs. In addition to negatively impacting user innovation, governance hinders recontracting because both possession and legal entitlements (rights of use in an asset) give rise to feelings of psychological ownership, and individuals will not recontract over uses that they feel they already ‘own’. The user innovation theory’s focus on search, innovation and human capital explains why the numerus clausus principle remains most robust in the areas of personal and intellectual property (where users generate a significant amount of innovation), and why it has been somewhat attenuated in the area of real property (where we restrict search in order to facilitate coordination of land uses). It also explains why the law enforces the principle even when the cost of providing notice of governance rules is low.

The new Equality Bill in the UK attempts to bring domestic law regarding positive action into line with EU norms. The author addresses two key criticisms of the provisions, namely: a) that they allow positive discrimination; and b) that they will be ineffective in practice. It is argued that the first criticism is misconceived; preference of a minority candidate where they are equally as qualified as a male candidate simply recognises that equality is not about treating everybody the same, but having a relevant reason for treating them differently. The second criticism is more compelling. The author recommends that the UK make the transition to a systemic model and impose positive duties on employers in a similar vein to that which has developed in Canada. However, a delicate equilibrium must be achieved; special treatment of women and minorities regardless of merit is not conducive to a society that values diversity.

This article explores the corporate governance in the developed countries and China from a comparative perspective. Following the analysis of principal-agent model, this article examines the dispersion-to-concentration ownership span to explore its influence on the majority/minority ownership and the shareholder/manager conflicts. It compares the positive and negative edges of concentrated shareholding with empirical analysis of Canada, the U.S., and China, and finds the different roles of institutional shareholders in various countries. This article then turns to two-tier agency model which is another way to enhance corporate governance. Compared with the vertical construct with the vanguard of Germany, it illustrates that the supervisory board in china is situated parallel to the board of directors and loses the supervising purpose. This article finally explores the independent director system which has obtained credits in the developed countries. While in China, it lacks legal protection and is not effective as expected.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has set for itself goals that go beyond bringing perpetrators of crimes to account. Some of these functions directly depend on the media for their fulfilment, because it is precisely the media who transmits these functions to the public. This ever-increasing reliance on the media brings a need for a minimal standard of balanced reporting,which seems to be lacking in Serbia. I will examine Serbian media reporting and conclude that it does not further the Tribunals purposes, thus negatively affecting the Serbian public. I will contrast Serbian to Rwandan news reporting in order to show that a higher standard can be expected of these news outlets. Nevertheless, regardless of what kind of reporting is prevalent, the effect on the ground may not be negative if it motivates people to access other sources and thus widen their outlooks on the issues.

The Supreme Court of Canada has attempted several times to reform the way it approaches the issue of curial deference in judicial review. Each attempt however, has been in vain. This paper argues that the cause of this failure of each reform of the deference test proposed by the Supreme Court is not necessarily one of content, but instead one of structure. Each of the reforms retained a ‘multifactorial approach’ to the deference test, involving the weighing of several factors leading to a prescribed level of deference. Through critical analysis of the approach, and the postulation of an alternative, this paper argues that the multifactorial approach is what thwarts the Court’s intentions, and that it needs to abandon it should it wish to achieve clarity and coherence within judicial review.

This thesis is a cross-jurisdictional, multidisciplinary study of the use of potentially deceptive conduct in negotiation by lawyers and the regulation of such deceptive conduct through the legal ethics codes.

The main issue that this thesis deals with is the interaction between the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in ESA vs. SOCAN and the new making available right introduced in Canada’s Copyright Modernization Act. The thesis analyzes the approach of the Supreme Court of Canada in ESA vs. SOCAN and examines the legislative history of the making available right on both global and domestic levels. A conclusion drawn by this thesis is that, the scope of the communication right in Canada’s Copyright Act should be expanded after the introduction of the making available right in order to cover a variety of digital transmissions including downloading, P2P file sharing and other interactive transmissions.