The current state of China’s legal system is a popular subject of on-going academic debate. Most observers of the Chinese legal system have identified China as a state of rule by law. A smaller but increasing number of analysts tend to describe China as a deficient form of the rule of law. Instead, this dissertation departs from both of the conventional views, and argues that the CCP China is a state of the transitive legal system, a middle category different from both the rule of law and rule by law state. / Arguing that the two existing models are inadequate to explain China’s legal system in the reform era since 1978, the purpose of the thesis is to develop a new model, which aims to provide a coherent interpretation of the paradoxical state of the Chinese legal system. Through definitional and doctrinal analysis of the concept of the rule of law, and inspired by Lon Fuller’s account of the “internal morality of law”, the thesis puts forward an analytical framework of legal systems comprising of two variables. One is the legitimacy type of a regime, the other the regime’s lawmaking competence. These two variables correspond to the two fundamental constitutive elements of the rule of law, i.e. the regime’s commitment to the law and the formal qualities of the law. By the two variables, legal systems can be divided into five stable categories, namely, the rule of law, the deficient rule of law, the transitive legal system, the rule by law, and rule of men. Different types of legitimacy and levels of lawmaking competence of a regime determine the category of its legal system. / In comparison to both rule by law systems whose legitimacy mainly rely on non-legal source(s), and deficient rule of law states whose legitimacy primarily depend on the formal law but whose lawmaking competence is restricted, the thesis argues that China’s legal system belongs to the category of the transitive legal system whose legitimacy (performance legitimacy in the case of reform China) is in a transitive relation to the formal law and whose lawmaking competence is restricted. While the rule by law model fails to explain why the CCP regime has proactively pursued a formal legal system, the deficient rule of law model is incapable of responding to the fact that the CCP regime has not been subjected to institutionalized constraints of the law. The transitive legal system model provides a coherent explanation for the seemingly conflicting image of China’s legal system. / The concluding chapter also applies the framework to discuss the future development of China’s legal system on two analytical levels. It is argued that while, on the first level, the CCP China’s transitive legal system is moving toward the direction of the rule of law, on the second level, a paradigmatic change between types, either from the transitive legal system to the deficient rule of law state, or to the rule by law system, is unlikely to happen in the near future. The framework may also provide implications for rule of law promotion programs and might be useful for comparative studies of legal systems all over the world. / 中国的法律制度是什么性质？大多数人认为中国充其量是法制国家，权力不受限制。少量人认为中国是缺陷型法治。然而，本文认为，法制和法治两种理论都无法充分解释改革时代中国的法律制度。本文提出，改革时代的中国是一种传递性的法律体制，是介于法制和法治之间的一种新类型。 / 本文的目的在于发展一种新的分析框架，以更好地阐释充满矛盾现象的中国法律制度。通过概念和教义分析，受朗·富勒“法律内在德性”理论的启发，本文提出了一个由两个变量构成的分析框架，分别是政权合法性的类型及其立法能力。这两个变量对应于法治的两个要素：一个政权对法律的专注度，以及法律的形式合理性。不同的合法性类型和不同层次的立法能力组合起来，形成了五种稳定的法律体制，分别是法治、有缺陷的法治、传递性法律体制、法制，和人治。 / 法制国家的合法性来源于非法律的根源，而缺陷型法治国家的合法性主要来源于合乎理性的法律，但是这类国家的立法能力一般存在问题，使得法律在文本上和实践中都存在缺陷。本研究认为，当前中国属于传递性法律体制。一方面，它的合法性来源是绩效，这是一种传递性的法律合法性。换言之，合乎形式理性的法律之所以对统治者重要，是因为它有助于实现绩效目标。但是，当存在便利的非法律手段，或法律本身成为绩效实现的障碍之时，法律会受到损害或限制。另一方面，中国的立法能力也有所欠缺，直接导致法律存在诸多不符合“内在德性”的情况。这两方面特点决定了中国属于传递性法律体制。法制理论无法解释为什么中国发展出了相当程度的形式合理性法律，而法治理论则无法解释为什么中国的执政党没有受制于制度化的法律约束。传递性法律体制理论可以很好地解释这两个看上去相互矛盾的现象。 / 本文结论部分也用这个新的分析框架讨论中国法律制度的发展趋势。中国的传递性法律体制将会往法治的方向发展，但在短期内不太可能发生类型之间的突变，也就是说不会从目前的类型变回法制，或是发展为法治。这个分析框架也可用于世界上法律体制的比较研究，还可能对法治推广项目有所启发。 / Ye, Zhusheng. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014. / Includes bibliographical references. / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on 14, September, 2016). / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only.

This piece examines the lack of rule of law in Mexico through an analysis of police and judicial reform efforts. After providing a historical overview of the development of Mexican policing and the judicial branch, it pinpoints shortcomings of reform operations in the justice sector. It suggests that without addressing corruption and informal procedures in those institutions, meaningful reform and true rule of law in Mexico will be unlikely. The piece then focuses on civil society's capacity to bolster justice reform and act as an agent of rule of law.

<p>When anyone acquires control over a listed company the mandatory bid rule is triggered. This means that the person who acquires the control has to make an offer to buy the remaining shares in the company. The purpose of the rule is to protect the minority shareholders from the buyers. This rule has been considered to be burdensome and thus it is followed by an exemption rule which under some special circumstances may make the mandatory bid rule void. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze if the exemptions given by the Swedish securities council (in Swedish Aktiemarknadsnämnden) are in accordance with the purpose of the mandatory bid rule and if a review of these rules are needed.</p><p>To answer the purpose, the Swedish securities councils statements has been analyzed, to determinate if the exemptions are in accordance with the purpose of the mandatory bid rule. The result of the analysis is that the rules need to be changed because exemptions from the mandatory bid rule are given to arbitrary in Sweden.</p>

This paper presents numerical solutions to integration problems with bivariate integrands. Using equally spaced nodes in Adaptive Simpson's Rule as a base case, two ways of sampling the domain over which the integration will take place are examined. Drawing from Ouellette and Fiume, Voronoi sampling is used along both axes of integration and the corresponding points are used as nodes in an unequally spaced degree two Newton-Cotes method. Then the domain of integration is triangulated and used in the Triangular Prism Rules discussed by Limaye. Finally, both of these techniques are tested by running simulations over heavily oscillatory and monomial (up to degree five) functions over polygonal regions.

When anyone acquires control over a listed company the mandatory bid rule is triggered. This means that the person who acquires the control has to make an offer to buy the remaining shares in the company. The purpose of the rule is to protect the minority shareholders from the buyers. This rule has been considered to be burdensome and thus it is followed by an exemption rule which under some special circumstances may make the mandatory bid rule void. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze if the exemptions given by the Swedish securities council (in Swedish Aktiemarknadsnämnden) are in accordance with the purpose of the mandatory bid rule and if a review of these rules are needed. To answer the purpose, the Swedish securities councils statements has been analyzed, to determinate if the exemptions are in accordance with the purpose of the mandatory bid rule. The result of the analysis is that the rules need to be changed because exemptions from the mandatory bid rule are given to arbitrary in Sweden.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are essentially a 'black box' technology. The lack of an explanation component prevents the full and complete exploitation of this form of machine learning. During the mid 1990's the field of 'rule extraction' emerged. Rule extraction techniques attempt to derive a human comprehensible explanation structure from a trained ANN. Andrews et.al. (1995) proposed the following reasons for extending the ANN paradigm to include a rule extraction facility: * provision of a user explanation capability * extension of the ANN paradigm to 'safety critical' problem domains * software verification and debugging of ANN components in software systems * improving the generalization of ANN solutions * data exploration and induction of scientific theories * knowledge acquisition for symbolic AI systems An allied area of research is that of 'rule refinement'. In rule refinement an initial rule base, (i.e. what may be termed `prior knowledge') is inserted into an ANN by prestructuring some or all of the network architecture, weights, activation functions, learning rates, etc. The rule refinement process then proceeds in the same way as normal rule extraction viz (1) train the network on the available data set(s); and (2) extract the `refined' rules. Very few ANN techniques have the capability to act as a true rule refinement system. Existing techniques, such as KBANN, (Towell & Shavlik, (1993), are limited in that the rule base used to initialize the network must be a nearly complete, and the refinement process is limited to modifying antecedents. The limitations of existing techniques severely limit their applicability to real world problem domains. Ideally, a rule refinement technique should be able to deal with incomplete initial rule bases, modify antecedents, remove inaccurate rules, and add new knowledge by generating new rules. The motivation for this research project was to develop such a rule refinement system and to investigate its efficacy when applied to both nearly complete and incomplete problem domains. The premise behind rule refinement is that the refined rules better represent the actual domain theory than the initial domain theory used to initialize the network. The hypotheses tested in this research include: * that the utilization of prior domain knowledge will speed up network training, * produce smaller trained networks, * produce more accurate trained networks, and * bias the learning phase towards a solution that 'makes sense' in the problem domain. In 1998 Geva, Malmstrom, & Sitte, (1998) described the Local Cluster (LC) Neural Net. Geva et.al. (1998) showed that the LC network was able to learn / approximate complex functions to a high degree of accuracy. The hidden layer of the LC network is comprised of basis functions, (the local cluster units), that are composed of sigmoid based 'ridge' functions. In the General form of the LC network the ridge functions can be oriented in any direction. We describe RULEX, a technique designed to provide an explanation component for its underlying Local Cluster ANN through the extraction of symbolic rules from the weights of the local cluster units of the trained ANN. RULEX exploits a feature, ie, axis parallel ridge functions, of the Restricted Local Cluster (Geva , Andrews & Geva 2002), that allow hyper-rectangular rules of the form IF ∀ 1 ≤ i ≤ n : xi ∈ [ xi lower , xi upper ] THEN pattern belongs to the target class to be easily extracted from local functions that comprise the hidden layer of the LC network. RULEX is tested on 14 applications available in the public domain. RULEX results are compared with a leading machine learning technique, See5, with RULEX generally performing as well as See5 and in some cases outperforming See5 in predictive accuracy. We describe RULEIN, a rule refinement technique that allows symbolic rules to be converted into the parameters that define local cluster functions. RULEIN allows existing domain knowledge to be captured in the architecture of a LC ANN thus facilitating the first phase of the rule refinement paradigm. RULEIN is tested on a variety of artificial and real world problems. Experimental results indicate that RULEIN is able to satisfy the first requirement of a rule refinement technique by correctly translating a set of symbolic rules into a LC ANN that has the same predictive bahaviour as the set of rules from which it was constructed. Experimental results also show that in the cases where a strong domain theory exists, initializing an LC network using RULEIN generally speeds up network training, produces smaller, more accurate trained networks, with the trained network properly representing the underlying domain theory. In cases where a weak domain theory exists the same results are not always apparent. Experiments with the RULEIN / LC / RULEX rule refinement method show that the method is able to remove inaccurate rules from the initial knowledge base, modify rules in the initial knowledge base that are only partially correct, and learn new rules not present in the initial knowledge base. The combination of RULEIN / LC / RULEX thus is shown to be an effective rule refinement technique for use with a Restricted Local Cluster network.

This thesis explores arguments for Scottish Home Rule, and the place these arguments were given during elections. It also discusses the interactions between Scottish Home Rulers with other Home Rule movements within the United Kingdom as well as attempts to build international support in the colonies and United States. Finally it examines the cultural and scientific manifestations of nationalism and how they were embraced by a Home Rule movement which was eager to identify evidence for devolution. The position of Scottish Home Rule before the Great War was very complex. Although the Scottish Liberal Association adopted it as a policy as early as 1888 the most ardent of Scottish Home Rulers were continually disappointed by the failure of the Liberal Party’s leadership to commit to a time frame for introducing legislation. Despite this difficulty Scottish Home Rulers fought an uphill battle to keep the issue before the public through a significant body of pamphlets, journals, letters, and even in motions in the House of Commons. Between the second 1910 election and the Great War, the issue was kept in front of the Scottish Electorate and featured in almost all of the Liberal and Labour candidates’ campaigns during the fourteen by-elections which occurred during the period. Culturally new expressions of ‘Scottishness’ can be seen in the establishment of bodies such as the Royal Scottish Geographic Society, the Scottish Historical Review and the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition. When these Scottish institutions ran into conflict with larger bodies based in England, usually associated with funding, the question of Scotland’s relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom came into question. At these times nationalists within and without of these institutions could co-opt these concerns in order to further their appeals for greater Home Rule. Although Scottish Home Rule was never a dominant movement within Scottish politics before the war it did manage to find acceptance among a wide body of individuals and groups such as the Scottish Liberal Association, Young Scots’ Society, Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland, Highland Land League, Scottish Labour League and Scottish Liberal Women’s Association . This thesis will attempt to place Scottish Home Rule within the context of a time which saw the development of so many other great reforms and argue that although those who supported Scottish Home Rule did so for a variety of pragmatic reasons, the nationalistic ideology that Scotland should be governed by Scots, still found expression.

This study researches the Islamic Penal System within a penological perspective. The philosophy underlying this Penal System is that every person is responsible and thus punishable for his criminal actions. Punishment could also await the offender in the Hereafter. A system of penalties and rewards is the cornerstone of the Islamic Penal System. The types of punishment that are allowed by the Shari'ah are, inter alia: the death penalty, lashes, banishment, imprisonment, crucifixion, lapidation and public exposure. There are three categories of punishment: Hadd punishment is reserved for serious offences and cannot be altered in any way whatsoever, Qisas punishment is reserved for homicide and assault, whilst Ta'zeer penalties cover the balance. Since this Penal System can only operate within a true Islamic State, it currently only operates fully in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Numerous other Muslim countries apply this system to a lesser degree, for example, Sudan and Afghanistan. / Penology / M.A. (Penology)

Current rule-utilization research indicated that subjects successively tested multiple conceptual rules, available from natural preexperimental experience, to solve a sorting task. Prior results suggested that older subjects were more efficient in utilizing rules and shifting to unused rules, possibly due to the availability of more conceptual rules at higher age levels. The experimental groups consisted of third, fourth, sixth, ninth graders, and college students. Each of the five groups contained 16 subjects. The rule-utilization procedure was applied to each group. The procedure contained a multitrial, card sorting task. The feedback given at the end of each trial was limited to the correctness of the entire card sort and did not provide information on the correctness of the sorting for any individual card. All subjects in each group were run until they used both bidimensional rules (the conjunctive and the inclusive-disjunctive rule), or until a limit of 30 trials was reached.

The Rule of Law is one of the European Union’s founding values and is not only a Treaty obligation under Article 2 Treaty on European Union but also a part of the accession criteria for potential Member States of the Union. Therefore, the Rule of Law is part of the foundation of the European Union’s institutional order, and fundamental to European integration. During the past several years concerns have been raised regarding the Rule of Law in the Union and especially regarding Poland and Hungary. The European Union has established a comprehensive response function to breaches of the Rule of Law which both Member States have been subject to. However, there are differences in the procedure and different mechanisms have been used in relation to the two Member States, and while neither the Rule of Law nor the response mechanisms available are unstudied subjects neither for social sciences nor the legal community there is a lack of research combining the two fields and comparing the Member States. This study has been conducted with the goal to fill this gap by conducting a comparative study on the Rule of Law responses at the European Union’s disposal and using Poland and Hungary as the cases addressed. The study attempts to find a correlation between the breaches within the Rule of Law committed by the Member States and the responses used by the European Union to find motivations for why it is justified to approach the Member States differently. To accomplish this the study compares first the breaches found by the European Commission in the respective Member States and then the response mechanisms used to address the concerns. By conducting this comparative analysis, the study has found significant motivations behind the different approaches used by the European Union which shows a correlation between the concerns raised and the European Union’s approach to address the concerns. The result of the study shows that it is motivated to use different approaches despite the two Member States breaching the same value.