This thesis approaches key areas of insurance contract law and their reform from the perspective of Adams and Brownsword’s theory of contract law ideologies. Pursuant to this theory, there are two layers of ideologies underlying contract law. One is the formalist versus realist judicial approaches. The other is that the realist approach being broken down into two limbs, namely market-individualism and consumer-welfarism in contract law. The theory of contract law ideologies is relevant to insurance contract law, because there is substantiated homogeneity between general contract law and insurance contract law, and the relevance consists in the theory’s usefulness both as an interpretive framework and as an evaluative standard. Specifically, from that particular ideological perspective, the thesis interprets the law of disclosure and warranty in insurance, of the requirement of insurable interest, and of the legal rules for insurance payment. Under the theory of contract law ideologies as an interpretative framework, the current law of insurance as far as those three key areas are concerned is found to be much more formalist than realist. The thesis also evaluates the core proposals tentatively put forward by the Law Commission and the Scottish Law Commission for reform in those key areas of insurance contract law. From the theory of contract law ideologies, it can be derived an evaluative standard that, for law reform through legislation, the realist approach is more preferable, and market-individualism should prevail in business insurance whereas consumer-welfarism should prevail in consumer insurance. By this standard, most of the core tentative proposals by the two Law Commissions for reform in the law of disclosure in business insurance and of warranties in insurance are realist and therefore desirable, but two of the proposals need to be amended. The recent proposals in 2011 to retain the requirement of insurable interest are not realist and instead it is better to return to the proposals in 2008. Among the proposals regarding the legal rules of insurance payment, the Scottish approach is preferable for its realist re-characterization of insurers’ primary contractual obligation.

Research into the use of project management procedures has mostly been directed at the private sector of the construction industry, despite the fact that the public sector contribute almost half of the UK's construction output, in the repair and maintenance sector of the construction industry. Indeed, since the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) in 1980, the public sector has had to carry out a continually increasing proportion of their work under competitive conditions, bidding for work along with private sector construction contractors. This thesis focuses on the use of project management procedures in both private and public sector construction contractor organisations, looking at the utilisation of a number of different project management procedures, including organisation profile, project planning and control, quality management, and human resource considerations. It is believed that all these aspects must be considered together, if an accurate picture of an organisation's approach to the management of projects is to be achieved. The argument employed throughout this study is that where project management procedures are adopted in the management of projects, a project manager will have the potential to better manage the project, than would otherwise be the case. Empirical research was carried out using both a quantitative approach (structured mail questionnaire) and a qualitative approach (semi structured interviews). 100 responses were received in all, 80 to a questionnaire for construction contractors, 63 in the private and 17 in the public sector. Personal interviews were carried out with 20 project managers. Analysis of the data investigated the use of a number of different project management procedures and identified differences in their use between private and public sector contractors. The results showed that despite tendering for and carrying out work in the same market area, there were notable differences in the use of project management procedures between private and public sector construction contractors. In the main, private sector construction contractors utilised project management procedures to a greater extent than contractors in the public sector; however, in many instances the use of such procedures could hardly be described as extensive. For example, planning in many instances did not extend to the monitoring and control phase once projects were underway; the 'baseline' plan was effectively disregarded for updating project status, particularly so in the public sector. Despite the powerful nature of performance monitoring techniques, such as 'earned value analysis', little use was made of them. This general lack of project control was further exacerbated because both private and public sector construction contractors tended to operate separate 'stand alone' project costing systems, remote from those used for project planning and control purposes. There was a strong commitment to quality in both the private and public sectors. However, a noticeable difference wast that the private sector tended to apply their quality management systems to all areas of their business, whereas, the public sector normally only operated such systems for restricted areas of work, when compared to the 'overall' project. Of further concern was that both private and public sector construction contractors took account of the 'human' element to a much lesser degree than issues of time, cost or quality, even though they said they viewed it as important. Notwithstanding the existence of project management procedures for many years, there was a common lack of awareness and under utilisation of all but the most straightforward procedures in both sectors of the industry. This was especially so within the public sector. Essentially, private and public sector construction contractors must initiate familiarisation and training programmes within their organisations to enable their project managers to access the best project management 'tools' available to assist them in their projects.

This dissertation studies three different aspects linked to the literature on self-enforcing dynamic contracts. Namely, this dissertation examines how a solution to this type of economic models may be obtained numerically, how important enforcement issues might be for a common question in economics, and how the presence of self-enforcing constraints may be investigated empirically. It is composed of three essays. The first essay develops a numerical method designed to approximate the solution of models with self-enforcing constraints using a dynamic programming approach. This method may also be used to approximate the solution of general dynamic models with occasionally binding inequality constraints. It complements standard value function iteration algorithm with an interpolation scheme which preserves the concavity and the monotonicity of the value function. It has the advantage over usual value function iteration algorithms of procuring a reasonable degree of accuracy at a relatively lower computational cost. The second essay uses dynamic contract theory to analyze the joint behavior of investment decisions and financial flows when contracts between lenders and borrowers are subject to enforcement constraints. In contrast to the usual belief that financing constraints lead firms to underinvest, this essay shows that firms are likely to overinvest. While overinvestment is shown to be consistent with the empirical finding that investment spending is excessively sensitive to variations in internal funds' abundance, it does not give rise to a financial accelerator. The key feature of this model is that firms' production and financial capacities are simultaneously determined. Firms overinvest when external funds are relatively inexpensive if they apprehend the possibility of becoming financially constrained in the future. By increasing their production capacity in such a way, firms alleviate eventual shortages of funds arising from the fact that external finance has become limited. Finally, the third essay studies how a common implication arising from the literature on self-enforcing contracts may be tested empirically. A key feature of a long-term self-enforcing contract is that the quantity subject to its terms evolves over time according to a simple updating rule; it is set to its full-enforcement level whenever doing so does not induce one of the agents to renege. Otherwise, it is set to a self-enforcing level. Using the example of Thomas and Worrall's (1988) labor contract model (to which productivity growth is added), it is shown that this updating rule may be expressed as an endogenous switching-regression model. Panel data may be used to estimate this model. When there are measurement errors, Monte-Carlo experiments show that the switchingregression model usually has a poor goodness of fit in small data sets. However, despite this finding, tests of the null hypothesis that conventional contract models generate the data under scrutiny still have a high power against the alternative hypothesis that this data is characterized by the presence of enforcement constraints.

The re-usability and modularity of components reduce the cost and complexity of the software design. It is difficult to predict run-time scenarios covering all possible circumstances to ensure that the components are full compatible with the system. Monitoring run-time behaviours of components presents a close view of the component qualities. The existing monitoring approaches either implement applications with built-in monitoring features, or observe the external resource and events to predict the status of the components. In this thesis work, we propose an approach to monitor the run-time behaviours of components with aspect-oriented wrappers and contracts. We design monitoring wrappers to encapsulate the monitored components. The wrapper has the access to interfaces and properties of the wrapped component. We adopt the methodology of Design by Contract to enforce security policies on component wrappers. The contracts define the mutual obligations of two interacting components. The policies implemented in contracts are woven into component wrappers as separate aspect modules. If the component contains any flaws, the wrappers can monitor the behaviours and prevent failures propagating into the wrapped components and the rest of the system. This approach assures that the system is running in a safe environment with the erroneous behaviours or failures detected appropriately. Secure access between the wrappers guarantees a secure environment for the wrapped components. We conducted experiments on the run-time monitoring of SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting attacks. We designed cross-cutting concerns such as logging for components to illustrate monitoring components without touching the underlying components. Monitoring on access control is also possible and feasible to add as an additional concern and is also demonstrated in the experiments. The results show that the framework is very flexible to impose separate policies as aspects on component wrappers without the modifications of the underlying components. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2011-01-02 20:43:16.884

Our study pertains to the contractual overridability of copyright by the use of end user licence agreements. Our analysis is divided into three parts: first, we try to solve which legislator is responsible of the contractual overridability of copyright according to Canadian federalism. In the second part, we examine the contractual overridability issue under copyright law and we consider multiple doctrines that can be used to protect the copyright balance and its exceptions. The third part, is devoted to the study of the contractual overridability under provincial private law. / Under copyright law, the most important remedies are definitely the copyright balance and exceptions imperativity and the copyright misuse doctrine. Private law can already be used to intervene under the true and informed consent requirements, the Consumer Protection Act specificities and the abuse of right theory.

This thesis addresses the question of the application of a supra-national legal regime to the substance of disputes arising from State contracts in the context of international arbitral dispute settlement. Foreign private parties seek to subject the merits of their contractual relationships with a State arising from a State contract to a legal regime superior to the national law of the State party. Such a supra-national legal regime has been advanced through a de-localization trend in international arbitration. In the main, the de-localization trend defies a jurisdictional concept of the legal regime governing a State contract with a view to dissociating the contract from the legal jurisdiction of the State party. How paradoxical the idea of subjecting the substance of a State contract to a Stateless legal regime proves is an issue that the present thesis embarks upon.

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