Unlike the United Kingdom and a majority of the United States, there is no legislated right to compensation for wrongful convictions in Canada. For those who have suffered tremendous personal and financial damage as a result of a wrongful incarceration, the available remedies include the expensive and time-consuming routes of litigation for malicious prosecution, negligent investigation and a Charter breach, or the highly-politicized exercise of mercy by a government to make an ex gratia payment. While the State’s failure to prove guilt in the criminal justice process as a fundamental operation of the presumption of innocence should provide relief to an accused in the pursuit of financial redress from a wrongful conviction, the requirement that evidence of factual innocence be adduced is a burden few can meet. While the Supreme Court of Canada has taken a broader approach than other common law jurisdictions in allowing law suits to proceed seeking compensation against police, the Crown and crown counsel, the legal doctrines applied have been questionable. The Court has utilized tenets embodied in corrective justice models employing issues of fault, deterrence and vicarious liability which have severely limited recovery for a plaintiff who cannot prove the requisite level of neglect or malfeasance. It can be argued that the more principled approach would be one appropriate to the arena of public law employing distributive justice and strict enterprise liability. The question becomes who should bear the burden of the harm of a wrongful conviction: the individual as the victim of the criminal justice system, or the State, as the party who inflicted that harm.

Modern civil legal aid, has its roots in the post war United Kingdom, being a fundamental component of the welfare state, recognised as such by the political parties of the time. The provision of civil legal aid today is a different animal and does not share the same values as the 'old' scheme. This analysis will assess the evolution of civil legal aid, its success and failure, and consider the changes it has undergone and the forces behind those changes in dictating its current profile as a limited and franchised public services provision. Legal expenses insurance, unlike civil legal aid, is a relative newcomer as a provider of access to civil justice. The scepticism that accompanied its arrival in this country, some 20 years ago, has dissipated. Insurers battled with the problems of adverse selection, European regulation and the public perception of their product, all of which have influenced market penetration. The position of legal expenses insurance within the civil justice system has begun to strengthen and is now openly recognised and supported by the legal establishment. A key objective of this analysis is to consider the rise of the legal expenses insurance market in the United Kingdom. This analysis seeks to assess the history of legal expenses insurance and evaluate its current position as a viable addition, or possible alternative, to State funded civil legal aid. Therefore, it becomes necessary for this study to consider the position of comparative European jurisdictions. In addition, the role and reaction of the legal practitioner situated amidst such significant and fundamental change is solicited and evaluated since they have, at once, fought change and yet accepted it in equal measure. Finally, this analysis explores the future position of civil legal aid and legal expenses insurance. It considers the survival of the former, growth of the latter and the dynamics of the State and private sectors working together to mould a new model for the provision of access to civil justice in the United Kingdom.

In the period from 1675 to 1720, the Justices of the peace in the English and Welsh counties were appointed by royal authority delegated to the Lord Chancellor. The Chancellor thus possessed a formidable instrument of patronage, which he operated both by power of appointment and by power of dismissal. This patronage extended principally to a class of persons of considerable influence within the political nation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that is, the country gentry. It has long been surmised that, within the period under review, the local patronage of the Chancellor was employed to secure political advantage. Such a purpose might be defensive, to safeguard the state against those not wholly committed to the Anglican Church, the principles of the Revolution of 1688, or the Hanoverian Succession; or it might be aggressive, to reward friends with, and deprive enemies a local authority which it was generally thought to be both honourable and desirable to exercise. The commission of the peace was thus a means by which changes in central policy, and shifts in central power, were extended into the localities. In a period when Parliamentary and electoral politics, and, to a lesser but still important extent, ministerial politics, became influenced by distinctions of party, it is a reasonable hypothesis that local politics became similarly influenced through the medium of appointments to the local magistracy. The object of this study has been to confirm or deny this hypothesis. To do so, it is necessary to measure how widespread the regulations of the county commissions of the peace were; there were fifty-five counties, one county palatine, and two liberties analagous to counties (besides several small liberties and corporations) for which separate commissions of the peace were issued. Substantial changes in any one of these might attract attention from contemporaries of a kind which would give a possibly misleading impression that similar changes took place in other counties as well. It is also necessary to measure the relative scale of the alterations that were made. The bench of magistrates varied in size in different counties at the same time and in the same county at different times. The commission of the peace for a given county could be remodelled by adding names to the list of gentlemen who were empowered to act as justices, or by omitting names from it. Such remodelling can only be put in perspective in the context of the total length of the list at the time that the regulation took place, furthermore, it is of importance to ascertain the precise timing of changes in the commissions, in order to judge how far such changes originated in changes at the centre of politics, and how far the changes at the local level themselves resulted in political consequences of wider significance, in, for instance, general elections.

Saudi Arabia in 2012 introduced a new Arbitration Law and an Enforcement Law designed to conform to international best practice, but still requiring that arbitration conform to the principles of Sharia, and that the award should not conflict with Saudi public policy or Sharia. Many former limits are removed, so that although arbitrators must apply Sharia principles, there is no longer a specific exclusion of non Muslim or female arbitrators. However, although Sharia is the basic law of Saudi Arabia, the different schools of legal philosophy interpret it differently, and there remains a reluctance on the part of foreign commercial parties to accept arbitration under the new laws. Meanwhile, Gulf Coast states such as Qatar and the UAE have permitted the French based International Chamber of Commerce to establish arbitration centres. A study of the way in which the new law is viewed by the Saudi Arabian judiciary, arbitrators and academics gives insight into problems remaining since the new laws were introduced, and into perceptions of the new laws, explaining continuing issues, such as the preference for traditional methods of resolving disputes, concerns about the role of the Sharia and public policy, and suggesting that the law on paper is overshadowed by false perceptions.Following interviews with the judiciary, arbitrators and academic lawyers, a further series of interviews were conducted in the business community, giving insight into their preference for traditional methods of dispute resolution, and their experience of the continuing reluctance of the international business community to enter into trade agreements specifying arbitration by Saudi laws. This insight suggests that Saudi Arabia would find more willingness to adopt the new laws if there were an international arbitration centre in Saudi Arabia and if Sharia law were codified.

This thesis investigates whether English law ought to be further developed to provide fuller protection for the privacy of the corporation. As an essential preliminary step, the thesis first explores the concept of privacy in general – privacy interests, definitions of privacy, rationales of privacy; and then proceeds to formulate a concept of privacy for the corporation. The thesis advances to consider the level of protection of the privacy of the corporation in English law, and finds that only a limited level of protection is provided – in broadcasting matters – by the Broadcasting Act 1996. The thesis then proceeds to critically examine whether the extended action for breach of confidence which protects an individual's privacy can and ought to be further developed to provide protection for the corporation’s privacy, and argues that the corporation’s privacy can and ought to be so developed. The thesis also investigates whether, in the alternative, the corporation’s privacy would be more suitably protected if it were developed as a property right under Article 1 of Protocol 1 ECHR, and finds that Article 1 of Protocol 1 would not suitably protect the corporation’s privacy. Instead, the thesis upholds the extended action for breach of confidence as a more natural and suitable home for the protection of the privacy of the corporation in English law. The thesis concludes with recommendations on the structural framework for the proposed protection of the corporation’s privacy under the extended action for breach of confidence. This research is undertaken primarily through doctrinal analysis; it analyses English Courts’ jurisprudence, the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence, as well as the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union where it concerns the administration of Article 8 ECHR. Theoretical arguments are also engaged in when it comes to defining and justifying the protection of the corporation’s privacy.

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The topic of this thesis is the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in the GCC states with the aim of offering a proposal for unifying the substantive and procedural rules for enforcing foreign arbitral awards under the ambit of the New York Convention for the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, the Riyadh Convention, and the ICSID Convention to which all the GCC states are signatories. The significance of this thesis is its comprehensive comparison of the Shari’a, international arbitration agreements, and the arbitration laws of GCC states. The research argues that the weaknesses in the arbitral enforcement mechanisms of GCC states do not necessarily stem from the Shari’a, as most Western scholars suspect, but from the very same problems facing non-Islamic countries regarding the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards. These include the failure to create an international consensus on the enforceability of a foreign arbitral award that has been previously set aside, overt judicial activism, and protectionist attitudes against foreign arbitral awards. As research into the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards under the New York Convention have been shaped largely by the interpretation and analysis of Western scholars, this thesis gives voice to the perspectives of Shari’a scholars to address many of the uninformed criticisms lodged at the GCC states regarding arbitration as a whole and the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards more specifically. The methodologies employed in this thesis include both (1) a review and comparison of the existing literature, including scholarly works on the topic, cases in the GCC states and elsewhere, national rules and legislation in the GCC states, and regional/international agreements or conventions; and (2) a survey of those engaged in the field of arbitration in the GCC states, using survey methodology and Survey Monkey, an online survey design, collection and analysis tool. The survey measures the perspectives of practitioners engaged in the field of arbitration in the various GCC states.

Aunque las normas que regulan la impugnación de los acuerdos en la cooperativa son casi exclusivamente una traslación literal de los textos legales de las sociedades de capital (fundamentalmente la LSA), la especial identidad cooperativa dota de trazos propios a la institución. La mutualidad que caracteriza a la cooperativa, con la obligatoriedad para los socios de participar en la actividad cooperativizada, se traduce en una multiplicidad de órgano sociales. Además, la participación comporta un riesgo más elevado de conflictividad interna, por lo que adquieren más trascendencia los procedimientos de resolución de los conflictos, tanto la impugnación como otros alternativos, como el arbitraje, o previos, como el procedimiento de revisión interna ante los órganos sociales. Por otra parte, la proliferación de normas cooperativas en el Estado español origina un problema competencial que no se da en relación con otras personas jurídicas. Nosostros nos centramos fundamentalmente en la Ley 27/1999. De 16 de julio, de cooperativas, y en el Derecho legislativo 1/1998, de 23 de junio, por el cual se aprueba el Texto refundido de la Ley de cooperativas de la Comunidad Valenciana.