Metso Paper in Karlstad is acquiring Kvaerner Pulping and Kvaerner Kamfab, also located in Karlstad. Following this acquisition, there are going to be changes in the organizational structure and some employees might even loose their jobs. There are guidelines from the European Union how to handle situations like this, the purpose of these are to protect the employees. There are also Swedish laws that regulate the protection of the employees when a company is acquired, who is going to keep their job and who is to be made redundant. The transaction between the companies is large why they need an approval from the European Union. The European Union has certain demands for the approval. Metso and Kvaerner have to sell some parts of the production to another company in order to not become too dominant in the market. In this essay we are investigating what the law says about layoffs and how it is handled in reality. We have kept focus on the paragraphs 6 b and 22 of the law regarding employment protection. These paragraphs regulate the protection for the employees in an acquisition, they also regulate who has to leave first in a potential of layoff situation. Important parts of the legislation protect employees with high age and those who have the longest employment time in the company. A prerequisite for keeping their jobs is that the employees have necessary knowledge and skills for the tasks he or she is going to perform. We have used traditional legal method so-called dogmatic method with empirical elements. The traditional method means to search through literature such as doctrine and dissertations for information and the empirical elements means for example the information we’ve gathered from the companies. We got the idea for this essay when we were doing our internships at Metso Paper and Kvaerner Kamfab, a part of our examination in this course. We were informed about the transaction and got curious about what was going to happen with the employees in the companies. Our result shows that almost everything is negotiable through collective bargaining agreements. Another conclusion is that when a Swedish company sells parts of the production to a company located in another country and with no intent to keep the production in Sweden, the law is not preventing them executing their plans.

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Parenthood, from a legal perspective, has always been perceived as a rather unambiguous concept in Swedish legislation. It is the biological parent of a child who should be given legal status as parent and thereby also all the rights and duties of a parent. In the first part of the thesis examines some of the reasons for studying the legislation concerning parenthood. The laws regulating the relationship between parent and child originate from laws enacted at the beginning of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, changing family patterns and the development of different techniques for assisted reproduction are only a few of the factors that puts legislation concerning parenthood in a new light. Of even greater importance is a changing view of the child and the ambition to always put the interests of the child first. It is submitted that the regulation concerning the attainment of legal status as parent must be re-examined, like any other legislation concerning children, in view of the best interest of the child. The second part of the thesis examines the grounds for legal status as parent according to applicable Swedish laws. Particular attention is given to the question of the extent to which biological kinship can be replaced as the basis for legal status and the reasons behind this. The third part of the thesis analyses the legal construction of parenthood. The various interests of parent and child that are met by the present legislation are clarified, in particular the interests of the child in this context. It is concluded that the child has several interests that should be satisfied when establishing legal status. A question discussed in this part of the thesis is whether it is possible to satisfy the child's various interest in this context, independently of one another and without having to change the child's legal family status. The fourth and final part of the thesis discusses legal parenthood and how the legislation could be formed in order to protect the interests of the child in a more effective manner than today. It is argued that the legal regulation of parenthood needs to be more flexible, allowing for the various interests that the child has in connection with parenthood to be met independently of one another. This means that there might be a need to let go of biological parentage as the model for legislation on parenthood. A child perhaps needs not two but several parents during childhood.

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<p>In FL some of the paragraphs consist of a different set of regulations concerning exercise of public authority towards privates then towards other parts, such as authorities. I investigate the underlying causes for this separation of norms and in this investigation I also define the term exercise of public authority. My investigation leads me to conclude that the legislator has weighed two types of claims against each other and the result of this weighing are the differentiating of regulations of exercise of public authority towards privates and other parts. The claims are efficiency and legal security. When it comes to privates the claim for legal security weighs heavier and when it comes to other parts the claim for efficiency weighs heavier, resulting in different sets of regulations for the different parts. Ensuing, effective administrative handling leads to less legal security. Is it worth it?</p>

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<p>One of the main objectives of the European Community (EC) is to avoid the distortion of competition in the internal market. This aim is to be achieved through the application of the more detailed competition provisions in the EC Treaty, namely the Articles 81 and 82. Article 82 states that any abusive conduct of a dominant undertaking which may affect trade between Member States is prohibited. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has, through a wide stream of judgements, set the frame for which conducts that may be considered as abusive. These judgements have also led to the development of the so called “essential facilities doctrine” in EC law, which concerns the grant of access to a facility or resource controlled by a dominant firm. The central concept of the essential facilities doctrine is that a dominant firm's refusal to provide access to something it owns or controls, to which the access for other firms is essential in order for them to provide products or services to customers, may be held as abusive and therefore also prohibited. This means that a dominant undertaking may have a duty to share its facilities – which it many times has developed during many years – with competitors. A broad application of the essential facilities doctrine could therefore risk removing incentives for research and innovation, as it would become less fruitful for undertakings to invest in such facilities. On the other hand, if the essential facility is a monopoly asset of a dominant undertaking, a non-application of the essential facilities doctrine could allow the undertaking to set abusively high access prices or to permanently exclude competition on the related market by refusing to share the facility.</p><p>The essential facilities doctrine was first developed in cases where a dominant firm refused to supply a physical facility to other firms. In more recent cases, however, the European courts have also held a dominant firm's refusal to license intellectual property (IP) rights as infringing Article 82.6 The reason for such an approach has mainly been that exclusive rights, such as IP rights, give the right-holder a temporary monopolistic position and that a refusal to license therefore may lead to the elimination of all competition on the market as it will be impossible for competitors to enter that market without a license. Thus, in exceptional cases, the exercise of exclusive rights, in means of a refusal to license, has been prohibited by Article 82.</p><p>One particular area of refusal to license concerns “interface information” within the information technology sector. Interface information is such information that providers of software need in order to create products which can operate with other programs and systems. This information is many times either protected by IP rights, such as patent or copyright, or kept as a non-patented know-how and thus only protected by its secret nature. In a recent judgement of the European Court of First Instance (CFI) Microsoft was held to infringe Article 82 by refusing to license secret interface information. This case is highly interesting not only because it may clarify the relation between EC competition law and IP rights in essential facilities cases, but also because of the way the CFI equalled secret information – know-how – with other IP rights in its judgement by stating that</p><p>“… there is no reason why secret technology should enjoy a higher level of protection than, for example, technology which has necessarily been disclosed to the public by its inventor in a patent-application procedure.”</p><p>As mentioned above, one of the main reasons for competition rules to interfere with exclusive rights is that such rights may give the owner a legally protected monopolistic position for a longer period and that it is feared that the exercise of exclusive rights may eliminate all competition in that area from the market. This is however not the case with trade secrets which, once they are revealed, cannot be protected from other's exploitation. One may therefore question if trade secrets in reality endanger competition to the same extent than IP rights.</p>

<p>Uppsatsens huvudsakliga syfte är att utreda vilken innebörd domstolarna har tillmätt de olika anknytningsmomenten samt vilken betydelse respektive anknytningsmoment har tillmätts vid avgörandet huruvida väsentlig anknytning föreligger eller ej. Genom analys av relevanta rättsfall avser jag att på ett överskådligt vis klargöra vad som krävs för att väsentlig anknytning skall anses föreligga. Jag avser även att belysa hur reglerna kan anses vara ett hinder mot EG-rättens fria rörlighet.</p>