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As the increase of direct investment in China, Taiwanese businessmen are encountering more and more disputes there, which makes this issue be worthy of attention. Among the various types of disputes, this present study focuses on investment disputes and attempts to figure out the types, causes and dispute resolution mechanism of investment disputes through the method of case study, literature review and expert interview. The conclusions of this study are as follows: There are 6 common types of investment disputes that Taiwanese businessmen usually encounter in China: 1. Disputes on contributing investment; 2. Disputes on the right of management¡F3. Disputes on profit distribution; 4. Disputes on suspending equity joint-ventures or contractual joint-ventures; 5. Disputes on partners¡¦ illicit behaviors; 6. Disputes between Taiwan shares holders or anonymous investment disputes. It is revealed that the causes of investment disputes are 1. China¡¦s restrictions against foreign investment; 2. Taiwanese businessmen¡¦s unfamiliarity with the investment laws and regulations of China; 3. Taiwanese businessmen are not discreet in choosing their China partners; 4. Taiwanese businessmen tend to sign contracts and building cooperation constitutions carelessly. Taiwanese businessmen resort to three kinds of dispute resolution mechanisms, including Adjudication, Mediation, and Arbitration, when encountering investment disputes in China. This study conducts a comparative analysis between these three mechanisms in terms of six dimensions, i.e. ¡§efficiency¡¨, ¡¨cost¡¨, ¡¨professionalism¡¨, ¡¨confidentiality¡¨, ¡§relationship maintenance¡¨ and ¡¨enforceability¡¨. The result shows that mediation and arbitration perform better than adjudication in almost all dimensions except the dimension of ¡§enforceability¡¨. It is also suggested that Taiwanese businessmen prefer mediation to any other dispute resolutions in practice. Since arbitration is also an excellent dispute resolution mechanism, this phenomenon implies that arbitration is ignored by the Taiwanese businessmen. Therefore, the regulation, exercise and notice of China¡¦s arbitration are further demonstrated for Taiwanese businessmen in the final part of the study.

Thèse (LL.M.)--Université Laval, 1997. / Bibliogr.: f. [128]-132. Publié aussi en version électronique.

The overrepresentation of youth of color in the juvenile justice system, often referred to as disproportionate minority contact (DMC) can be found at many stages of the juvenile justice continuum. Further, research has shown that overrepresentation is not necessarily related to higher rates of criminal activity and suggests that case processing disparities can contribute to DMC. Risk assessment instruments (RAI) are objective techniques used to make decisions about youth in the juvenile justice system. This study examined the effects of implementing an RAI designed to make detention decisions, in a predominantly rural parish in Louisiana. Police officers from three law enforcement agencies investigated 202 cases during the evaluation period. The measures included an objective detention risk screening instrument, a contact form which contained juvenile demographic information, a two-item questionnaire assessing law enforcement's impression of the youth's need for detention placement and risk to public safety, and an arrest coding sheet which assessed subsequent police contacts and arrests among youth over 3 and 6 months of street time (i.e., time outside of secure confinement). Results revealed that overall law enforcement was unwilling to consistently complete the tool and continued to use subjective decision making, with completion rates ranging from 61% to 97% across the participating agencies. Also, subjective decision making by law enforcement actually helped minority youth as law enforcement consistently disregarded formal overrides included in the RAI, resulting in fewer minority youth being detained than were indicated by the RAI. Further, implementation of the tool, as constructed, resulted in small but insignificant reductions in the rates of overall confinement and rates of minority confinement when compared to the rates of confinement during the same time period of the previous year. Additionally, the RAI did not significantly predict future police contact due to items that did not predict recidivism in this sample. Use of a three-item version resulted in a significant increase in the tool's predictive ability. This study demonstrates the importance of additional validity testing following the implementation of detention risk assessment instruments to ensure that these tools reduce unnecessary confinement while protecting public safety.

Dissertation--Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät--Universität Freiburg Schweiz, 2004. / Bibliogr. p. XIX-XXXIII.

Magister Legum - LLM

This thesis claims that temporality can provide a novel means through which to distinguish between different types of judgment. Specifically, it focusses upon how the adjudicative process determines factual construction and argues that the resultant construction is, at least in part, contingent upon temporality. As the first of two starting points, the thesis begins by rejecting the subsumption thesis of judgment which states laws simply subsume facts that they ‘correspond to’. It attributes this rejection to the generality of laws and their flexibility as either rules or standards. Second of the two starting points, though related to the first, is what the thesis refers to as the ‘Kantian axiom’ which argues that time shapes consciousness. Extending this, the thesis posits that, filling in the lacuna created by the shortcomings of the subsumptive theory of judgment, adjudication’s temporality shapes its factual construction. Having established these preliminary points, the thesis describes the different ends of a spectrum of judgment in which legal decisions can tend toward. Adjudication as Cognition (abstract judgment), predicated I argue on a spatial-temporality at one end, and Adjudication as Understanding (concrete judgment), grounded on a creative reading of Bergsonian and Gadamerian temporality at the other. The main differences between these forms of judgment is the qualitatively different types of fact they produce, made possible through the temporalities upon which they are contingent. This results in different constructions of the subject and event (facts which law gives meaning to) which may impact upon ascriptions of responsibility. In addition, it is with adjudication as understanding that a potentially transformative form of judgment is possible and in which the radical difference of the subject and event of law emerges. Temporality is thus capable of reframing old problems of jurisprudence as well as articulating new ones. It argues that factual construction, in particular subjectivity is, in part, predicated upon time, and that temporality, as unproblematised, may conceal an exercise of judicial power. It also highlights the general marginalisation of temporality in (legal) modernity and reveals the ‘temporal trap’ of legal subjectivity in which futures are bound and pasts are arbitrarily selected.

This thesis claims that if law has a distinctive and genuine normative force, then it is thanks to the fact that law’s authority originates from a particular institutional layout that allows for a division of moral labour between legislation and adjudication. After establishing what the moral dimension of authority is a matter of, and how law’s normative force can be justified by reference to it, this thesis defends a comprehensive-moral account of law’s authority. In this respect, the thesis argues that the moral dimension of law’s authority can be highlighted well if we consider it as emerging through a morally meaningful institutional distinction between legislation and adjudication: the institutional profile of legislative authority and that of adjudicative authority differ from each other, in that each can be said to be underlain by its own evaluative standards. On the one hand, the particularity of legislative authority is a matter of its community-driven, forward-looking character and of its consensual structure; as well as of the declaratory nature and the agent-relative status of reasons issued by legislative provisions. On the other hand, adjudicative authority is distinctive because it has a litigant-driven, remedial character and employs an adversarial structure so that it accomplishes its impartial investigatory task through the issuance of agent-neutral reasons. So understood, the institutional profile of legislative authority is considered to be morally meaningful in the sense that it incorporates a rule-consequentialist and value-pluralist rationale; while that of adjudicative authority is taken to owe its own moral meaningfulness to the fact that it fosters reciprocity between litigants.

Student Number : 0215058X - PhD thesis - School of Law - Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management / Socio-economic rights have the potential to contribute to the achievement of social justice through insisting on the satisfaction of vital material needs. However, their effectiveness in this regard is compromised when they are incapable of tangibly contributing to the satisfaction of the needs that they represent. By including justiciable socio-economic rights in the text of the 1996 South African Constitution, its drafters indicated that South Africans are entitled to demand effective relief that amounts to adequate reparation for the harm suffered through the non-satisfaction of their vital material needs. The legitimacy of the constitutional order partially depends on the ability of socio-economic rights to live up to this promise. This dissertation examines the extent of this promise and the extent to which it is currently being fulfilled, in relation to a discrete set of rights - those that operate together to achieve the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. I argue that successful reliance on healthrelated rights in litigation must, in appropriate circumstances, produce tangible benefits for individual rights-bearers. I explore the extent to which constitutional health rights may realistically be expected to render tangible benefits, examine the degree to which this potential of health rights is realised through current judicial approaches to their vindication and suggest manners in which such approaches may be modified and/or supplemented in order for tangible benefits to result more readily from successful vindication of health rights. In doing this, I attempt to show that a benefit-orientated approach to the interpretation and enforcement of health rights is not only required, but also facilitated by the Bill of Rights in the 1996 Constitution. Moreover, the Bill of Rights enables South African courts to interpret and enforce health rights in accordance with their benefit-rendering potential, without overextending judicial capabilities or transgressing the institutional boundaries of the judicial function. Courts are accordingly implored to acknowledge and affirm the justiciable nature of healthrelated rights and to adopt interpretative, evaluative and remedial practices that enable their tangible vindication in appropriate circumstances.

BACKGROUND: Adjudication is a standardized, objective, and often blinded mechanism designed to assess clinical events with increased accuracy. It is performed by a centralized committee of independent reviewers, who are specialized, expert physicians who have no involvement with either the treatment of study subjects or the trial sponsor. Adjudication can decrease variability and bias in study results and increase the likelihood of correct identification, assessment, and categorization of clinical events such as potential malignancies diagnosed through histopathology. Histopathology is highly variable due to the subjective nature of the assessments. THESIS: If it is the case that there are clinically significant discrepancies between local and central diagnoses and that central adjudication yields more accurate diagnoses than a local pathologist, then it should be accepted that adjudication ought to be more widely used in clinical trials to assess histopathology-related safety outcomes and endpoints. METHODS AND STATISTICS: This is a retrospective cross-sectional study assessing interrater variability between local and central diagnoses of biopsy samples in a clinical trial setting using kappa scores and percent agreement. Certified Professional Coders (CPC) and central pathologists used the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology revision 3 (ICD-O 3) to codify the local and central assessments to permit comparison. Three statistical groups (group A: the full dataset, group B: pathology sub-specialty reading groups, and group C: non-melanoma skin cancers versus all other malignancies) were assessed for interrater variability in seven separate analyses: neoplasm versus non-neoplasm (analysis 1), benign versus malignant including non-neoplasms (analysis 2.1), benign versus malignant excluding non-neoplasms (analysis 2.2), discrepancies in morphology and/or behavior including non-neoplasms (analysis 3.1), discrepancies in morphology and/or behavior excluding non-neoplasms (analysis 3.2), all discrepancies leading to differences in treatment (analysis 4.1), and all discrepancies leading to difference in treatment with round 1 matches removed (analysis 4.2). RESULTS: 602 cases comprised the dataset. Based on kappa scores, there is near perfect agreement between the central and local lab diagnoses in analyses 1, 2.1, and 2.2 in group A (all cases in the dataset). The percent agreement for these analyses is above 90%. The group A (full dataset) kappa score and percent agreement decreased to 0.59 and 68.3%, respectively, in analysis 3.1 (discrepancies in morphology and/or behavior codes, including non-neoplasms). When non-neoplasms were removed (analysis 3.2), the kappa score and percent agreement were 0.52 and 57.0%, respectively. In group C, NMSC had substantial kappa agreement in analyses 1, 2.1, and 2.2, whereas all other malignancies had near perfect kappa agreement. All percent agreements were above 88% and surpassed the minimally acceptable threshold for interrater percent agreement in healthcare (80%). Group B divided the data set into 10 sub-specialty reading groups. Kappa scores ranged from 0.66 (GYN) to 1.00 (lung) in analysis 1; the analysis 1 kappa score for lymphoma was 0.55, but this was not statistically significant. In analysis 2.1, lung and sarcoma had the highest kappa scores (1.00) and dermatology and GYN had the lowest (0.71). As in analysis 1, the kappa score for lymphoma was 0.55 but was not statistically significant. When non-neoplasms were removed from analysis 2.2, 6 of the 10 sub-groups had kappa scores of 1.00, but all 6 had sample sizes less than 10. Percent agreement ranged from 80 to 100 percent. When all cases were considered regardless of number of rounds of review (analysis 4.1), about 90% of diagnoses would have similar courses of treatment. All sub-groups except sarcoma reached the minimally acceptable agreement rate in healthcare (80%). In the remaining 33% of cases that did not have matching diagnoses in round 1 (analysis 4.2), 34% may have different courses of treatment depending on whether the local or central diagnoses was used. Mid-study updates to the charter and CPC/reviewer manuals and processing of specimens did not have a significant impact on results. CONCLUSION: Although there is little discrepancy between local and central pathologists on whether malignancies exist among samples, there is discord regarding specific diagnoses and their associated treatments. Adjudication can assist in decreasing this discordance in order to develop the most specific and accurate safety profile for a compound.