The purpose of this research is to investigate into the client perceptions and expectations of quality legal service offered by local service providers i.e. the law firms. The study is to determine how effective Singapore law firms have been providing legal services from the client perspective, and to reconcile the law firms' perception of quality services with that of the consumers of legal services. The first study is targeted at the commercial business corporations, the main end-users and recipients of legal services provided by the law firms. The supplementary study involves obtaining a simple feedback from local law practices in Singapore on the implementation of formal quality service management or client care programmes in the legal organisations covered in the survey. / The research is based on the concepts of quality management theory, theoretical contributions from the service quality and legal service literature. The literature review suggests that consumers make satisfaction evaluations based on service provider's delivery performance. Despite increasing importance of the services sector of the economy, very little independent research has been published regarding the service delivery performance of legal professional services providers within the context of Singapore to determine the satisfaction level as perceived by their corporate clients. / From the literature review five service dimensions are identified that appear to be common to legal service firms: understanding the organisation's needs, technical legal skills, quality of service, overall value for money and general satisfaction. The descriptive study is conducted in a non-contrived environment and consists of three phases, namely, pre-tests, mail questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews with business consumers of the legal services. The wide-spectrum of industries covered in the research includes: professional services (management, IT and HR consultants), manufacturing, communication, transportation, wholesale and retail organizations. The data from the 84 business entities, representing some of the top 1,000 companies and top 500 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), were collected through return mail and online surveys, secondary sources, and semi-structured interviews with the corporate executives who are responsible for the selection and the working relationships with external legal service professionals. The essential aspects of the service quality dynamics explored in the study relate to client expectations and perceptions of the legal services provided. The findings provide application opportunities particularly in the management of quality in legal services, client relationships, and professional practice in business-to-business contexts. / An evaluation model emerged from the extensive literature review, responses from the mail and online surveys, and interviews. It integrates the Eight Stages in the service quality-profit chain. The conceptual framework is dynamic in that it is evolutional, integrative and flexible. The model is subject to influencing factors such as the nature of the service, the nature of the contract as well as the personal characteristics of the professionals and the respondents. Expanding from the existing literature on satisfaction in the service industry, this research offers legal service providers a generic framework to better manage their business relationships and thus preserve their existing clients and possibly attract new ones, which in turn sustain long-term profitability. / Key words: Service Quality; Quality Management; Quality Gaps; Legal Service Delivery; Client Perceptions; Client Expectations; Client Satisfaction; Technical Legal Skills; Client Care; Client Management; Total Quality Management; Quality Service-Profit Chain; Service Encounters; Professional Services; Legal Profession; Legal Marketplace. / Thesis (PhDBusinessandManagement)--University of South Australia, 2004.

The aim of this thesis is to formulate a better definition of religion for legal purposes than the formulation arrived at by the High Court of Australia in the 1983 decision of Church of the New Faith v Commissioner of Pay-roll Tax (Vic). In that case, known in Australia as the Scientology (or Church of the New Faith) case, two of five justices of the High Court of Australia considered belief in a supernatural Being, Thing or Principle to be an essential prerequisite for a belief system being a religion. Two other justices stated that if such belief were absent it was unlikely that one had a religion. There are major problems with the High Court’s formulation in the Scientology case. First, it does not accommodate a number of important belief systems that are generally regarded as being religious belief systems, even though they do not involve any notion of the supernatural in the sense in which that word is ordinarily understood. Secondly, the Court provided little or no guidance as to how one determines whether a particular belief system involves a supernatural view of reality. The guidance that was given is ill-conceived in any event. Thirdly, it is philosophically impossible to postulate a meaningful distinction between the “natural” and the supposedly “supernatural” in a way that would enable the courts and other decision makers to meaningfully apply the “test” enunciated by the Court. The thesis combines a phenomenological approach and the philosophical realism of the late Professor John Anderson with a view to eliciting those things that permit appreciation or recognition of a thing being “religious”. Ultimately, religion is seen to comprise an amalgam of faith-based ideas, beliefs, practices and activities (which include doctrine, dogma, teachings or principles to be accepted on faith and on authority, a set of sanctioned ideals and values in terms of expected ethical standards and behavior and moral obligations, and various experientially based forms, ceremonies, usages and techniques perceived to be of spiritual or transformative power) based upon faith in a Power, Presence, Being or Principle and which are directed towards a celebration of that which is perceived to be not only ultimate but also divine, holy or sacred, manifest in and supported by a body of persons (consisting of one or more faithxvii based communities) established to give practical expression to those ideas, beliefs, practices and activities. The new definition is tested against 3 very different belief systems, Taoism (Daoism), Marxism and Freemasonry.

No description available.

In 1984 the State Parliament of Victoria began the process of legalising sectors of the Victorian sex industry. Reforming legislation was enacted in 1984, 1986 and 1994. To date there has been no research assessing the changes to the industry that have occurred as a result of the legalisation process, and in particular, the effect it has had on the lives of the women working in the industry. / This research has examined the impact of sex industry law reform on the working and private lives of women in the Victorian sex industry. Interviews were conducted with twenty women, nine of whom had worked in the industry prior to legalisation. All but four of the interviewees had experienced work in the industry before and after reforms. / A number of significant findings were made. Since legalisation brothels have become cleaner and physical surroundings have been improved. However, the owners and managers of industry businesses have increased their level of control over workers by determining services to be offered, fees to be charged and clothes to be worn.

[Abstract]: Singapore schools had encountered little involvement with legal issues in the past, and there had been a general feeling of complacency amongst educators that the situation was unlikely to change. Yet many English-speaking countries across the world had been experiencing increasing exposure to legal issues in their schools, and the question was whether Singapore was likely to share the same experience over time. Strong indications were beginning to appear that the situation was indeed changing, including a number of reported incidents in schools and evidence of changing attitudesamongst parents and educators.The study set out, therefore, to examine the types of legal issues that were emerging on the international scene, and particularly in the major jurisdictions withrelevance to Singapore, and to understand what the implications might be for Singapore. Thus, it was intended to identify the legal issues that seemed likely tobecome more prominent in the Singapore education system, to draw comparisons with events in other countries, and to examine the strategies that school leaders might adoptin order to manage legal risk effectively.This exploratory study used a mixed-method design, including document analysis and legal research, exploratory pilot interviews, in-depth interviews with verbatim transcription, and Q Methodology, which combined quantitative and qualitative techniques in order to interrogate and understand opinion. The study was conducted in four phases, moving from a broad survey of developments internationally, through a detailed analysis of issues in Singapore schools, to a deep understanding of the strategy preferences for coping with legal risk amongst senior educators. This then gave rise to aset of recommendations that could be used by policy makers and implementers, and by senior personnel in schools, to avert and manage legal risk and incidence in schools.

PhD / Access to justice is an important human right that ensures adequate redress for harm, and which consequently helps deter future wrongdoing. Without access to justice citizens are precluded from the full enjoyment of their economic and social entitlements. The cost of litigation is a significant impediment to access to justice. Although the courts have attempted to increase access to justice by broadening the range of available dispute resolution options and by improving productivity through the implementation of case flow management systems, the cost of prosecuting claims remains disproportionately high and unaffordable for most small to medium sized claimholders. Legal claim assignment to parties able to aggregate claims and to apply their expertise as litigation entrepreneurs to deal with claim prosecution efficiently is one means of redressing the imbalance between the cost of claim prosecution to individual claimholders compared to the value of their claims. However, the well-entrenched doctrines of maintenance and champerty prohibit legal claim assignment. The continued resort to the doctrines of maintenance and champerty despite a strong and independent modern judiciary reflects distaste for claim commodification. However, the advent of litigation funding and its acceptance by the High Court of Australia in Campbell’s Cash and Carry v Fostif Pty Ltd (and to some extent United Kingdom and United States courts) on access to justice grounds has challenged conventional maintenance and champerty dogma. Together with other measures such as the introduction of conditional fee agreements that shift the cost of funding access to justice from the public to the private purse, the resistance to full claim alienability has been significantly weakened. The thesis argues that full claim alienability is favoured on normative and efficiency grounds and examines developments in Australia, England and the United States, which portend toward claim commodification. In addition, the thesis examines regulatory instruments required to ensure that the present partial claim market and the potential full claim market operates fairly and efficiently. It also considers how claim commodification may affect the relationship between legal practitioners and claim holders. [Please note: For any information on access to the full text please conact the author.]

Drug courts are a recent, but apparently compelling, addition to the criminal justice system, designed to positively influence the drug-crime nexus. They operate as a specialised criminal court, involving cooperation between the courts and drug treatment professionals, by streamlining drug-related cases away from traditional processing and punishment into an intensive drug treatment program. The very proliferation of drug courts renders them deserving of study. While there are surveys of individual Australian courts, there has, to date, been no comparative study across the various Australian jurisdictions. This thesis fulfils this need. Although there is increasing debate in the United States about the theoretical basis of drug courts, this debate is largely taking place after their creation. Australian drug courts have largely been implemented without reference to any philosophical underpinnings. This thesis places the drug court phenomenon within its political, social, and philosophical environment, and provides an explanation of the legal contexts within which the drug court process operates. There are many untested assumptions about drug courts, most importantly claims that they are successful. If drug courts are going to continue to operate and become more widely accepted, it is necessary to recognise their underlying rationale and to identify the link between the social, political, and theoretical bases and the actual outcomes. The indicia for success within the drug court context have never been definitively articulated, and by identifying key elements of success, and then categorising the relationships of those elements to contexts and processes, this thesis will go some of the way towards defining drug court success. In other words this thesis attempts to provide answers to the questions – do drug courts work? And if so, what makes them workable?

Legal positivism insists upon a distinction between the inside and outside of law. The common law and statutory rules of interpretation assist in maintaining this distinction, establishing the myth that legal decision-making is a purely objective and rational process, giving rise to internal truths. While critical theorists have illustrated the ways in which the lines between the inside and outside are always blurred, there remains a perceived distinction, in law, between the interpretation of concepts that occurs in the law and that which occurs outside the law. Only the former have legal legitimacy. The idea of the legal family is a case in point, where the law defines family according to its own prescriptions irrespective of how family is constituted by non-legal communities. In this thesis, I consider the meanings of family in different spheres to show how the lines between the social, the political and the legal consistently overlap. I then develop a mechanism by which the law can acknowledge and affirm that which is ‘outside’. This requires, firstly, a conception of law as communication and of legal interpretation as a constructive process. Secondly, the task demands that jurists engage with the semiotic processes of the everyday and that legal concepts, at least those that exist independently of the law (family for example) be framed with an open indexicality. This might enable such concepts to be interpreted according to a range of contexts, other than (or in addition to) the legal one. Finally, using the family as an example, I illustrate how a semiotic approach can assist legal interpretation, reform and analysis.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Kiel, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. xv-xix).

Thesis (D.Phil.(Information Science))-University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 228-254).