Creditors "loosely lend" funds to third world nations controlled by despotic governments who in turn use the funds for their personal gain. According to the Doctrine of Odious Debts, debts incurred through the interests of corrupt leaders are odious and not enforceable. South Africa is a third world nation that is hindered from progress because they are drowning in debts incurred during the unjust apartheid era. This research examines the application of the doctrine of odious debts to South Africa and the legal effects of its application.

The standing doctrine is an evolving judicial tool to limit cases in the courtroom. However, the issue of how citizens are granted standing in environmental litigation remains unclear. This thesis will analyze the evolution of the standing doctrine and the requirements for future environmental litigation through an analysis of the more prominent cases that set the historical precedent. Particularly, this thesis is focused through the lens of climate change and the additional hurdles its standing requirements can bring to litigation brought by individual citizens. Jurisdiction has become a very complex issue in climate change lawsuits. While at first glance it may seem that causation is the largest obstacle for climate change plaintiffs, injury is equally difficult to prove. This thesis looks at the use of present and future injury in addressing the requirements for standing, as well as whether the injury can be redressed by the courts. Standing, which is a threshold issue for any court, has been limited to past harm. However, looking at issues regarding climate change requires the court to consider how the present impacts the future of litigation. Climate change litigation brings a new angle to these debates and will force the courts to reevaluate their previous conclusions.

No description available.

No description available.

Both federal and state statutes prohibit the intentional interception, use, or disclosure of an oral, wire or electronic communication yet an exception to this general rule is that a law enforcement officer, or someone acting on behalf of a law enforcement officer, is allowed to intercept. a conversation without a warrant when he is a party to the conversation. This practice is a violation of rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment. Society should be able to prosecute the guilty and protect the innocent with methods that do not produce violations of civil liberties. To protect the guarantees of the Constitution, changes must be made to current law to preserve the right to privacy.

Affirmative action has received tremendous attention since President Kennedy's 1961 Executive Order 10,925 that directed federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure they treat job, applicants and employees "without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin." Proponents argue the positive effects of affirmative action, while opponents argue the negative implications of affirmative action. This paper explores both sides of this heated political debate. The first part of this paper analyzes the historical events that prompted the initiation of affirmative action; the second part focuses on the positive and negative effects of affirmative action. Part three explores the Court's interpretation of race-based affirmative action programs. The final portion of this paper offers socioeconomic-based affirmative action as an alternative approach to replace race-based affirmative action.

This thesis explores the world of physical education and organized sport and the changes to these aspects as a result of legal liability. It focuses on exactly what bearing legal lawsuits have on our education and athletic programs. There have been extensive changes over the past years to the physical education curriculum in the public school system, many the result of legal action. This thesis explains exactly who is liable when a child is injured in an athletic event at school, and further suggests how athletic teachers and coaches can protect themselves against the ever-present threat of legal action. Finally, exploration is made into the world of negligence as it pertains to the sport arena. Anyone connected with the field of sport, be it coach, teacher, or trainer, might benefit by reading this thesis.

The Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) was an integral part of the Judiciary Act of 1789. In creating the judiciary, the Founding Fathers did not want to make the United States safe haven for enemies of nations. The ATCA provides a federal forum for suits involving foreign plaintiffs injured abroad by a person under U.S. jurisdiction in violation of the law of nations. Up until approximately twenty-five years ago, the ATCA remained predominantly unused in U.S. jurisprudence. In 1997, a suit was filed on behalf of Burmese villagers alleging human rights abuses. Doe v. Unocal involves claims that Unocal Corporation, a California corporation, enlisted the ruling military junta of Myanmar to provide security for a pipeline project. Egregious human rights abuses including murder, rape, torture, slavery, summary and arbitrary execution, forced relocation, and forced labor were committed upon the plaintiffs in furtherance of the joint venture. Drawing upon international law, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed the validity of plaintiffs' ATCA claims against Unocal for knowledge of the human rights abuses. This study intends to clarify issues relevant to parties in future ATCA cases. By distinguishing the need for a liability standard in cases filed under the ATCA and identifying the legal entities that can contribute to that effect, U.S. federal courts can develop sensible precedent in ATCA cases.

This thesis draws on the theory and method of social ontology to explore why labour law struggles to provide for wage security and clarity of employment status today. It starts by exploring at a conceptual level the relationship between law and capitalism, before moving on to engage more specifically with the concept of the wage, situating the analysis in a theory of the wage's socio-economic function. The thesis understands the 'wage' as, initially, the market price of the commodity, 'labour power', which is exchanged in the labour market. As with any other 'price', the wage functions to coordinate decision making in the market. At the same time, however, the wage is also the cost of reproducing that commodity, a process which is not confined to the market but takes place in society more generally: this is the function of social reproduction. These two functions are not only conceptually and materially distinct; they are frequently in conflict. The price the market assigns to the labour commodity is not always, and not necessarily, that which is required to cover its costs of (re)production. The thesis shows that these functions of the wage find their expression in the various concepts the legal system uses to describe the payment made by employers to their workers. For example, the legal concept of the 'wage' corresponds closely to the economic idea of the wage as price, and the concept of 'remuneration' to the wage as the cost of social reproduction, shifting some of the social costs of employment onto the employer. How these conceptual tools are deployed, however, and thus how effectively these functions are performed in practice, depends on law's own view of its ontological status: that is, the implicit position that the legal system takes on what constitutes 'social reality' beyond the text of a particular case or statute, and thus its view of whether, and to what extent, legal concepts can shape, as well as respond, to it. The thesis shows that whether the legal system sees its concepts playing an active role in constituting social and economic relations, or whether it sees them as passively reacting to the 'demands' of a 'pre-constituted' economic system makes a difference to the effectiveness of law in practice. Understanding law's implicit ontology in this sense helps us to see why labour law struggles to provide for wage security and clarity of status. Thinking about law's relationship with social reality can thus make an important contribution to our understanding of the problems of low pay and unclear employment status today.

This study investigates the knowledge that legal practitioners use to solve authentic practical legal problems in naturalistic settings. The study examines the declarative and procedural knowledge that practitioners use in that context and whether experienced practitioners use knowledge organised in encapsulated and script form (Boshuizen & Schmidt, 1992; Schmidt, Norman, & Boshuizen, 1990) to enable ‘expert’ performance. The purpose of the study is to provide an empirically-based understanding of the knowledge used in solving real-life practical legal problems, for the information of the providers of practical legal training in Australia and other common law countries. The providers of that training use assumptions about that knowledge and how it is acquired, which do not always rest on coherent theoretical or empirically-derived foundations. The study uses the lawyering literature to identify the knowledge such literature considers is required to solve practical legal problems in lawyer and client interview settings. The study also examines the assumptions about the nature of that knowledge, and how it is acquired, which are apparent in the approaches of the providers of practical legal training. The limitations of those assumptions are identified from a cognitive perspective. The study examines cognitive conceptions of the knowledge used in problem solving in particular fields and how that knowledge becomes proceduralised and organised into structures called chunks and schemas. A particular examination is made of cognitive theories developed in the field of medical problem solving, which use the concepts of ‘encapsulations’ and ‘illness scripts’ to explain ‘expert’ performance in diagnosing disease in clinical settings. This analysis is used to synthesise the prediction that experienced legal practitioners may develop and use structures similar to encapsulations and illness scripts in problem solving. This prediction is based on the similarities between the way medical practitioners and legal practitioners are educated and trained, and are taught to solve problems using a hypotheticodeductive method (or a domain variant in the case of law), and on the similarities between clinical settings and lawyer and client interview settings. The study also examines theories that explain human problem solving by reference to a metaphorical ‘problem space’, and synthesises the prediction that practical legal problem solving can be explained by a problem space theory that was developed to accommodate complex, ill-defined problems. That theory uses the concepts of a problem zone to reflect the ill-defined nature of the problem as presented to the problem solver, a search and construction zone to reflect the phenomenon that the problem solver will have to construct operators to use to solve the problem, and a satisficing zone to reflect the phenomenon that there will be no single unambiguous solution to the problem (Middleton, 1998). The study uses the lawyering literature to identify the characteristics of practical legal problems in a lawyer and client interview setting. The cognitive literature is used to identify the cognitive conceptions that correspond to those characteristics. It is argued that these problems are complex, ill-defined problems that have to be found by the problem solver using weak problem solving strategies such as problem decomposition, attribute identification and means-ends analysis (Simon, 1973; Dillon, 1982; Newell, 1980). Based on these predictions two research questions are developed as follows: How do legal practitioners find and construct practical legal problems? Are there differences in the knowledge that experienced legal practitioners use and that which novice practitioners use? Do those differences reflect differences in the individual practitioner’s underlying knowledge and how that knowledge is organised? These questions are investigated in four case studies. Two of these studies involve experienced legal practitioners and two involve novices. These studies reveal that all the subjects used similar general problem solving strategies to find and construct problems. The subjects all constructed a series of problems rather than one large problem. The subjects did not all find and construct the same problems and some subjects’ constructions of problems changed as new information came to light. Most subjects did not finish the construction of problems at the interview. The processes that the subjects use to construct problems can be explained by Middleton’s (1998) problem space model, although this study suggests that model needs to be modified to accommodate the on-going emergent character of practical legal problems as they occur in lawyer and client interview settings. The investigation revealed qualitative differences between the problem attributes and moves that the experienced subjects identified and those that the novices identified. In summary, the experienced subjects identified attributes and moves that were more detailed, more directly related to the ‘facts’ and more concrete than those that the novices identified. Both the experienced subjects and the novices appeared to rely on recognition (Newell & Simon, 1972) to identify problem attributes and moves rather than on any apparent step-by-step legal analysis and reasoning process. This study suggests that the superior performance of the experienced subjects may be explained by their use of knowledge in encapsulated and script form, as predicted. The study discusses the implications of its findings for practical legal training courses as a need to provide students with general problem solving knowledge, provide them with the knowledge that they will need to recognise problems in specific areas of practice, to help them start to develop knowledge in encapsulated and script form, and to develop an understanding of the limits of institutional training in developing professional expertise.