This work was inspired by the well-ventilated current problems around the use of digital file sharing technologies and their promotion of infringement of copyright leading to the alleged destruction of entertainment industries. Different legal systems have applied different analyses to such problems, and there is no clear and coherent answer to the question of whether file sharing, especially in the form of peer-to-peer (P2P), is legal. The particular focus of this thesis flows from the realisation that litigation around file sharing has uniformly explored it from the perspective of users downloading entertainment materials such as music and videos. Comparatively little attention has been paid to whether research and educational users have, or should have, rights to use the same digital file sharing technologies to access copyright materials important to their work. If digital file sharing is declared illegal by the courts at the behest of the entertainment industries, then what will happen to research and educational users of these networks? To explore this key problem, this thesis focuses on how fair use doctrine, the most important exception and limitation to copyright, has transferred from the traditional copyright environment into the context of digital file sharing. By undertaking a study of relevant legislation and cases, such as the well known Napster, Grokster and MP3.com, the “who” issue, namely, who is the party entitled to benefit from a fair use defence will be highlighted. Having established that fair use as a defence operates ineffectively in the digital file sharing environment, the thesis then looks at existing alternative or “fared” use models, and particularly the disadvantages of “fared” use system in serving research and educational file sharing. Finally the thesis turns to what is termed the “voluntary model”: a model in which copyright owners make their works available to academic users for free, via an institutional repository, the authors gaining non-pecuniary benefits while the commercial publisher being cut out as a “middleman”. Although future work to develop the details of this approach would be required, the thesis asserts this is a promising way towards ensuring access to copyright works in research and education thus benefiting society, whilst at the same time establishing fair compensation to authors for their efforts.

From the first post-war trials to the recent libel trial in the London High Court brought by Holocaust denier David Irving against Penguin Books and American academic Deborah Lipstadt the real-life courtroom has provided more than a legal judgment in respect of the Holocaust. As legal scholar Lawrence Douglas has shown in The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001), this formal, institutionalised and controlled setting has also been the forum for an increasingly nuanced, often intentionally pedagogic, examination of the Holocaust. After nearly sixty years of trials there is a corpus of judicial proceedings that chronicles not only society's desire for justice but also the changing understanding of the Holocaust, how it is remembered and how that memory is to be safeguarded. Analogous to this sequence of trials, American film has consistently utilised the law and the dialectic of the courtroom in its own attempts to represent, understand and explain the horror of the Holocaust, hi this thesis I provide a cultural history of these films (a generic term that encompasses both cinema releases and television movies/miniseries) to examine how the depiction, pertinence and understanding of the Holocaust in American life have altered since the 1940s. It is a thesis grounded in the tension between film and history as it explores how the fictive courtroom has represented the real-life trials as well as the Holocaust. This explores how the cinema has used different strategies of representation to bear witness in the cinematic courtroom to an event which is said to defy representation. In conclusion it argues that the courtroom is a setting with its limitations in respect of Holocaust representation, but it is these very limitations which are the reason for the courtroom genre's continued appeal.

This thesis seeks to answer the question of how can insur-gent networks of/networked jihadist violent non-state actors be legally conceptualized, what limits are imposed by international and US domestic law on campaigns against such networks, and do those limits allow for effective and legitimate counter-terrorism? It will employ a basic interdisciplinary research de-sign, as defined by Mathias Siems, which uses a legal research question as a starting point, but relies on insights from other disciplines to reach an informed analysis. The thesis will first establish the insurgent nature of ji-hadist groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State by taking the claim of their desire to re-establish the Caliphate seriously. It will establish that 'jihadist international relations' — as op-posed to the broader notion of Islamic international relations — divide the world into the dar al-Islam, the world of Islam, and the dar al-harb, the territory of war, which are in a perpetual state of war. It will show that the attempts to pursue this in-surgent aim are increasingly carried out by affiliate organiza-tions. It will then move on to address the gap in the legal litera-ture, which relates to the problem inherent in the United States' 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF), which authorizes the use of force against al Qaeda and increas-ingly groups connected to it, but does not provide a mechanism to legally conceptualize when such groups are covered by the AUMF. It will put forward a legal framework to conceptualize re-lationships between the al Qaeda and Islamic State core groups and their affiliate and associate organizations by drawing on Is-lamic principles of statehood and by drawing an analogy to es-tablished principles on the responsibility of states and interna-tional organizations for wrongful acts. It will argue that affiliate organizations, through offering an oath of allegiance, become de jure members of the overall network and that attribution of their conduct to the overall network should therefore not de-pend on the level of command and control exercised. Actions of associate groups, on the other hand, should only be attributable to such groups if they exercise overall control. The thesis will then move on to investigate the use of force against affiliate organizations under the jus ad bellum, arguing that such of force is possible in self-defence and with the con-sent of the host state. It will establish that states that become the victim of an armed attack can use force if the host states is unable and unwilling to suppress an imminent armed attack by such groups, and that states can, in certain circumstances, rely on the accumulation of events doctrine, provided that such at-tacks are carried out by members of the same network. It will furthermore argue that the jus ad bellum's necessity require-ment should be understood to mandate non-lethal responses, which the thesis refers to as extraterritorial law enforcement, in certain circumstances. The thesis will then move on to the jus in bello. It will reengage with the idea of a "global" armed conflict frequently invoked by the United States. However, the thesis will argue that such conflicts do not encompass the entire globe, but are, in line with the Tadić decision of the International Criminal Tri-bunal for the Former Yugoslavia, limited to the territory under the control of a party to this conflict. It will then draw heavily on US case law to establish when individuals are part of such organizations, and on principles of the law of armed conflict to establish when strikes against those members are lawful. Finally, it will establish the possibility of extraterritorial law enforcement against such organizations, which refers to extra-territorial operations that have the primary aim of apprehend-ing individuals suspected of unlawful activity, or contribute to such operations, for the purpose of criminal prosecution. It will be stablished that such operations are lawful in self-defence for the purpose of preventing an imminent armed attack and that US law does not put up any significant obstacles for prosecuting individuals brought to the United States in such a manner.

The thesis uses the doctrine of the separation of powers as the conceptual framework to analyse the jurisprudence of the German Federal Constitutional Court on EU matters from its early decisions to the latest cases on the European Stability Mechanism. The court’s decisions have been widely discussed in terms of the impact of European integration on democracy and democratic participation at the national level. The aim of the thesis is to put the court’s jurisprudence into a different context by reading it from the perspective of separation of powers in order to assess the impact of EU integration on the relationship between national institutions, specifically the German Federal government and parliament. The analysis will show that while the decisions on the ESM have overall strengthened the position of the Federal parliament in the particular subject-matter of those cases (budgetary control), this should not necessarily be understood as a re-definition of the relationship between the Federal government and parliament in the context of EU matters as a whole. By using the separation of powers as a framework for analysis, it becomes apparent that while the German constitutional system may seem to have acknowledged the different constitutional nature of the EU, the political institutions as well as the Federal Constitutional Court have yet to draw the necessary consequences for the relationship between the Federal government and parliament at national level: by treating EU matters merely as a ‘special kind’ of foreign affairs, the fundamental alteration of the balance of power between the executive and the legislative caused by European integration has gone unchecked by the German Federal Constitutional Court and has led to constitutional practices which arguably undermine not only the democratic accountability of the actions of the German Federal government but also the concept of separation of powers itself.

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of third party funding of litigation which is a recent phenomenon in academic circles. Few of the existing papers on commercial litigation funding are empirically based and those that are, with one exception, use surveys and interviews to collect data. Within the legal boundaries of litigation funding, economic theory predicts that in perfectly competitive markets consumers control what is supplied, prices cover costs without excessive profits and inefficient producers are eliminated. However reality rarely conforms to prediction, and regulation may be appropriate in the public interest to overcome market failures arising from information asymmetries. The research focus is: ‘How effectively are commercial third party litigation funders governed and/or regulated?’ Chapter 2 proceeds to consider the literature on regulation, it’s applicability to litigation funding and the interests of stakeholders. A major concern is the ability of a litigation funder to pay the costs of a winning defendant. The conclusion reached in Chapter 3 is that litigation funders have too much choice in the way they report and disclose information and what they actually report and disclose is deficient in meeting the needs of investors. In Chapter 4, using single firm event study methodology I discover that the stock exchange market does not always react as predicted to disclosure by litigation funders and consequently the market is not an adequate proxy for a regulator. Chapter 5 extends chapter 3 on the solvency issue and also considers other stakeholder issues e.g. ethical ones which may require regulation. The conclusion reached is that a light touch independent regulator overseen by the legal services board would be appropriate. This work narrows the literature gap for empirically based economic research and augments and extends the existing literature by examining third party funding of heterogeneous high value, low volume cases in contrast to homogenous, low value, high volume cases. It is the first work on the accounting regulation of litigation funding. This work will also assist investors, the judiciary and other stakeholders to better evaluate the risks of this new industry.

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This thesis explores the trade related aspects of environmental standards. It assesses the potential for trade related conflict between Developed and Developing countries arising out of Unilateral Environmental Action (UEA). Furthermore it analyses the concept of Mutual Recognition (MR) and Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) to understand how the inherent characteristics may potentially be utilized to reduce friction in international trade while implementing standards. The thesis also looks at the WTO compatibility of environmental standards, UEAs and MRAs. It uses a “Black Letter” methodology of doctrinal analysis, concentrating on doctrinal principles associated with the transnational governance of environmental standards and includes the analysis of statutes and cases of the WTO.

Whilst the adoption of commercial transgenic plant agriculture continues to spread globally, it is not necessarily indicative of universal support, and would appear to belie the inherent existential tensions and conflicting rights between transgenic, organic, and conventional plant agricultural systems. These tensions are typically vented via the inevitable adventitious presence of transgenes in non-transgenic crops, and the competing, and often conflicting scientific and acrimonious claims and counter-claims on the merits and proprieties of transgenic plant agriculture for the environment and public health. Nevertheless, the virtual irreversibility of transgenic plant agriculture, the exigencies of feeding the growing world population amidst continuing global food security scares, and the continuing dependency of livestock farming on transgenic plant feedstuff, especially in Europe, underscore the imperatives for mutual co-existence of all three forms of plant agricultural systems. Drawing on the socio-legal theory that risks and responsibility are correlatives, it is argued in the thesis that our “technological society” is also a “risk society”, and as it is for comparable “technologies of risk” in the post-industrial era, the regulatory framework for the co-existence of transgenic and non-transgenic plant agriculture, must of necessity, invoke corresponding responsibility in law for any consequential economic loss and damage to the environment and public health, in order balance and moderate the conflicting rights in the coexistence paradigm for transgenic and non-transgenic plant agriculture. Whilst drawing on relevant and analogous case law and legislations from the United Kingdom, the European Union and North America, the thesis defines the boundaries of inherent risks, responsibility and rights in the current coexistence paradigm for transgenic and non-transgenic plant agriculture, and proposes a modality for an effective sui generis compensation regime, as an integral part of the broader coexistence policy, on the grounds that such a regime could moderate conflicting rights, increase public acceptance, and build public confidence in transgenic plant technology, rather than hinder its continuing global growth and promise.

This research looks into forms of state crime taking place around the U.S.-Mexico border. On the Mexican side of the border violent corruption and criminal activities stemming from state actors complicity with drug trafficking organisations has produced widespread violence and human casualty while forcing many to cross the border legally or illegally in fear for their lives. Upon their arrival on the U.S. side of the border, these individuals are treated as criminal suspects. They are held in immigration detention facilities, interrogated and categorised as inadmissible ‘economic migrants’ or ‘drug offenders’ only to be denied asylum status and deported to dangerous and violent zones in Mexico. These individuals have been persecuted and victimised by the state during the 2007-2012 counter narcotic operations on one side of the border while criminalised and punished by a categorizing anti-immigration regime on the other side of the border. This thesis examines this border crisis as injurious actions against border residents have been executed by the states under legal and illegal formats in violation of criminal law and human rights conventions. The ethnographic research uses data to develop a nuanced understanding of individuals’ experiences of state victimisation on both sides of the border. In contributing to state crime scholarship it presents a multidimensional theoretical lens by using organised crime theoretical models and critical criminology concepts to explain the role of the state in producing multiple insecurities that exclude citizens and non-citizens through criminalisation processes.

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