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The vast majority of children and young people appearing in criminal courts in England and Wales are sentenced through a youth court by lay magistrates. The magistrates court deals with 96% of all criminal cases in England and Wales and it is lay magistrates who decide on questions of fact, and sentence those convicted in 91% of these cases. Therefore, how Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) and magistrates work together is a matter of interest. This research explores the extent to which magistrates' confidence in the YOT's service provision can make a difference to the decisions made with regards to bail/remand, sentencing, enforcement and revocation on grounds of good progress. Furthermore, the research considers how YOTs might improve the confidence of magistrates in their service provision and makes recommendations for practice in this regard.

New Labour's youth justice legislation and the "Every Child Matters" programme contained contradictory imperatives. This research examines how Police Officers and Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) in a community policing setting operationalised those imperatives in order to reach decisions when dealing with children and young people. The review of literature focusses firstly on New Labour policy relating to children and young people, and secondly describes previous research into the practice of policing juveniles, the resilience of police culture and the key factors identified relating to police officer decision making. No recent British research in this area was located. Four overlapping hypotheses were identified, which were: officers will be more responsive to the "Every Child Matters" policy imperatives; officers will be more responsive to the criminal justice imperatives; managerialism will trump both sets of policy imperatives because it is in the officer‟s interests to respond to the demands of management; and both sets of policy imperatives and managerialism notwithstanding, officers will resort to "common sense" responses informed by their own lay criminologies, scales of values, police culture, and police "practice wisdom". These hypotheses were tested using quantitative and qualitative data from 198 self-reporting postal questionnaires and eight follow-up interviews. The research population comprised Police Officers and Police Community Support Officers engaged in Neighbourhood Policing. The research found that the majority of officers operated according to their own lay methodologies (hypothesis four) within the constraints of managerialism (hypothesis three), which led to officers and PCSOs taking actions which they did not always believe to be the most appropriate. Additionally, ambiguities in the legislation and lack of guidance led to the space for the exercise of officer discretion expanding when they were dealing with children and young people, whilst at the same time there was a lack of training on how they should best engage with this age group.

Legal systems such as those in the United States and Canada, which include fundamental rights of political morality in their constitutions, present an interesting and difficult problem for legal positivists. Are such moral standards to count among the existence or validity conditions of laws, or are they better understood as fundamental objectives or justification conditions which laws may or may not achieve or respect in practice? The first option, known as inclusive legal positivism, expands the traditional positivist separation thesis to mean that although there is no necessary connection between law and morality in general, it is possible that in some systems it is a necessary truth that laws reproduce or satisfy certain demands of morality. The second option, known as exclusive legal positivism, denies this possibility, and maintains instead that it is never a necessary condition that laws reproduce or satisfy certain demands of morality, even if such demands are constitutionally recognized. On the exclusive account, in the context of constitutional states such as the U.S. and Canada, the separation thesis is expanded to mean that there is no necessary connection between the existence and content of laws and the demands of political morality typically included in constitutions. In this thesis I defend exclusive positivism and argue that it best follows from the traditional positivist commitment to separate existence conditions oflaw from justification conditions of law, and further, avoids what I take to be decisive problems with inclusive positivism. Specifically, I argue that Joseph Raz's notion of a directed power, and not reliance on an inclusive rule of recognition, best explains the duty of judicial review in Charter cases. The fundamental rights of political morality recognized in the Charter are best understood as constitutional objectives which all subordinate laws in Canada ought to respect, yet may fail to do so in practice. Finally, I argue that the concepts, distinctions, and arguments deployed in the internal positivist debate are also of value in the wider and ongoing debate between H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin over the nature of law. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a country composed of thousands of tribes, clans, cultures and customs, with well over a hundred languages and totemic groupings spread sparsely across its lands (Bonney 1986: 2) (see Map A). Today the country has a total population of four million people (NSO 1991). Before colonisation, Papua New Guinea’s indigenous settlement patterns and social organisation reflected the fragmented nature of the country’s environment, its isolation from the eastern and western centres of civilisation, and the needs of small-scale subsistence economies. Over thousands of years, Melanesian societies have been too diverse for any particular area or group to typify the country’s culture or to maintain a dominant role within government. Deviance, regulatory mechanisms and methods used by each tribe or cultural group to resolve disputes, varied according to the community’s culture and customs. At the time of colonisation the indigenous people were artificially united in one nation-state. With the introduction of Western social, political, economic and judicial systems, they were forced to live under alien dispute resolution procedures and to accept an imposed Western system of sanctions, which overlaid or supplemented the customary dispute resolution procedures. Since colonisation, a Western legal system of sanctions has been imposed on Papua New Guineans in which the colonialists have overlooked traditional, unwritten customary systems.

Dentro da Educação a Distância (EaD), os softwares de apoio como os Ambientes Virtuais de Aprendizagem (AVA) são considerados recursos que favorecem a comunicação entre os atores envolvidos, permitindo a troca de informação. Atribuir Inteligência Artificial a esses AVAs, utilizando Sistemas Multiagentes (SMA) e uma forma de procurar que os mesmos tenham um bom desempenho e que seus recursos facilitem o processo de aprendizagem. Esse trabalho cont em um estudo sobre os principais AVAs existentes e sobre os métodos alternativos de integração de AVA com SMA. Ao analisar o estado da arte dos AVAs pode-se observar que todos trabalham como ferramentas de auxílio ao aluno, por em nenhum deles trabalha aspectos da gestão da EaD dando suporte aos aspectos relevantes da legislação dessa modalidade. Por esse motivo, essa Tese tem por objetivo a criação de um modelo de integração AVA-SMA que possa tornar o AVA MOODLE capaz de auxiliar os gestores da EaD em suas diferentes tarefas, com base na incorporação, ao mesmo, de um modelo de representação de legislação. Para realizar essa integração do modelo AVA-SMA orientado a Legislação foi desenvolvido um espec co modelo organizacional de Sistema Multiagente. Por m com base em um estudo de caso, ser a realizado simulações para veri car as funcionalidades do Modelo de Sistema AVA-SMA orientado a Legislação, proposto nesta Tese. / In Distance Learning (EaD), supporting software such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) are considered resources that favor communication between the actors involved, allowing the exchange of information. Assigning Arti cial Intelligence to these VLEs, using Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is a way of ensuring they have a good performance and that its resources facilitate the learning process. This work contains a study on the major existing VLEs and on alternative methods to integrate VLE with MAS. When analyzing the state of the art of the VLEs it is possible to see that all of them work as aid tools for students, but none of them work on management aspects of distance learning that support the relevant aspects of the legislation for this type of education. Therefore, this thesis aims to create a VLE-MAS integration model that can make the VLE MOODLE able to help distance learning managers in their di erent tasks, based on incorporating a legislation representation model to it. To accomplish this integration of the legislation-oriented VLE-MAS model, a speci c Multi-Agent System organizational model was developed. At last, based on a case study, simulations will be conducted to verify the functionalities of the VLE-MAS System Model oriented to legislation, proposed in this thesis.

This thesis is a study of the coerciveness of legal systems. I defend two main claims: that typical legal systems are much less coercive than most legal and political philosophers think, and that legal systems are not necessarily coercive. My defence is developed in three parts. The first is dedicated to building the necessary theoretical framework to defend the main claims of this thesis. This is where I offer a rigorous formulation of the questions that this thesis addresses and contextualise them within broader debates about the relationship between law and coercion. A substantial portion of the first part of the thesis is devoted to the development of two accounts: an account of coercion and an account of the conditions legal systems must satisfy in order to be coercive. The second part is where I advance two arguments for the claim that typical legal systems are much less coercive than it is usually thought. The first is an argument that establishes that our legal systems rarely issue conditional threats. Given that issuing conditional threats is a necessary condition for any legal system to be coercive - or so I claim in the first part of the thesis - the fact that our legal systems rarely do so undermines the view that our legal systems are pervasively coercive. The second argument is based on the reasons why citizens comply with legal mandates. I analyse the relevant empirical data and show that compliance is not frequently owed to the threat of unwelcome consequences. This should not have been the case had our legal systems been as coercive as philosophers generally think. The third part deals with the claim that legal systems are necessarily coercive. There I address some methodological concerns that this claim gives rise to and propose two arguments for viewing coerciveness as a contingent feature of our legal systems.

Africa has during the past decades experienced vast difficulties in inducing greater levels of economic growth, which in turn has stirred intensive debates in an attempt to unveil its causes. A dawning debate to surface during recent years places corruption as a potent obstacle to impede and dent African economic progress. Embracing a theoretical and regression analysis, this thesis sets out to unravel the causes of African corruption, its implications, and its effects upon the economic standards of a number of selected countries. The findings reveal that corruption, amid all time-periods analyzed, discloses a strong deleterious impact upon GNI per capita primarily by damaging and undermining the African insti-tutional framework, which in turn is unable to function optimally. The outcome is that less economic progress [and thus lower levels of income] is being generated as resources are allocated and squandered in a non-optimal way. It is also substantiated that Protestantism and a high degree of homogeneity are factors that exercise a positive influence upon corruption and economic standards. The thesis finally illuminates the intricate and ubiquitous impediments that obscure Africa’s economic progress. It is concluded that inept governments and institutions too often lie at the core of the quandary. The current standard of Africa’s governments and institutions thus often leave much to be desired.