Vigilantism is an underdeveloped concept in scholarly discourse, particularly within the field of philosophy. My definition of vigilantism is: private citizens who engage in illegal coercive activity, against alleged transgressors of some normative code. Vigilantes seek to fulfill some conception of justice, and in doing so, they presume upon the state's authority. This definition excludes similar activities, like police brutality or terrorism. It also improves upon earlier definitions from other scholars. There are many potential objections to the practice of vigilantism as a whole, and there are many examples of unjustified, immoral vigilantism. However, vigilantism can be morally justified under the following circumstances: a breakdown of the legal system, protection of vulnerable individuals, proportional punishments, fair treatment, attempts to mend the larger social issues, and the advancement of justice. Depending on the particular circumstances, vigilantism can be morally justified, morally optimal, or unjustified. Since I can only provide a cursory examination of vigilantism, these ideas need more rigorous investigation and development. Further discussion on this subject is very important, given our volatile political climate. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / Vigilantism requires more careful discussion in scholarly discourse, particularly given recent political developments in Canada and the United States. Although there is some earlier material on the subject, it is inconsistent and scattered across academic fields. Within this thesis, I develop a philosophical definition of vigilantism, and discuss how it differs things like terrorism or police brutality. I also develop a preliminary account of the morality of vigilantism, exploring several reasonable concerns with the practice as a whole. In spite of these issues, vigilantism can be morally justified under a particular set of circumstances, which are difficult but not impossible to fulfill. However, there is much more work to be done on the subject, in order to develop a robust understanding of vigilantism.

Yes / The report entitled “Legal capacity and decision making: The ethical implications of lack of legal capacity on the lives of people with dementia” received funding under an operating grant from the European Union’s Health Programme (2014–2020).

In the legal domain, depositions help lawyers and paralegals to record details and recall relevant information relating to a case. Depositions are conversations between a lawyer and a deponent and are generally in Question-Answer (QA) format. These documents can be lengthy, which raises the need for applying summarization methods to the documents. Though many automatic summarization methods are available, not all of them give good results, especially in the legal domain. This creates a need to process the QA pairs and develop methods to help summarize the deposition. For further downstream tasks like summarization and insight generation, converting QA pairs to canonical or declarative form can be helpful. Since the transformed canonical sentences are not perfectly readable, we explore methods based on heuristics, language modeling, and deep learning, to improve the quality of sentences in terms of grammaticality, sentence correctness, and relevance. Further, extracting important entities and keywords from a deposition will help rank the candidate summary sentences and assist with extractive summarization. This work investigates techniques for enhanced generation of canonical sentences and extracting relevant entities and keywords to improve deposition summarization. / Master of Science / In the legal domain, depositions help lawyers and paralegals to record details and recall relevant information relating to a case. Depositions are conversations between a lawyer and a deponent and are generally in Question-Answer format. These documents can be lengthy, which raises the need for applying summarization methods to the documents. Typical automatic summarization techniques perform poorly on depositions since the data format is very different from standard text documents such as news articles, blogs. To standardize the process of summary generation, we convert the Question-Answer pairs from the deposition document to their canonical or declarative form. We apply techniques to improve the readability of these transformed sentences. Further, we extract entities such as person names, locations, organization and keywords from the deposition to retrieve important sentences and help in summarization. This work describes the techniques used to correct transformed sentences and extract important entities and keywords to improve the summarization of depositions.

Yes

No / Cyberbullying is the act of bullying or causing harassment or intimidation on another person by using technological means, such as devices, social media or networks. Despite the numerous efforts being carried out by both government and non-government organizations, cyberbullying continues to be on the rise and has become a national concern. This study highlights the motivating factors of cyberbullying in Malaysia. First, the study aims to investigate the factors motivating persons becoming cyberbullying perpetrators. Second, the study aims to examine the factors enhancing the susceptibility of persons becoming victims of cyberbullying. Engaging in both qualitative and quantitative approaches, this study adopts socio-legal approach in understanding and enquiring 19 interview experts and 120 survey respondents. The study found various factors that motivates perpetrators of cyberbullying, which could be divided into internal and external factors. Similarly, the factors that enhance the susceptibility of victims of cyberbullying could also be internal and external. The implication of the study is deeper understanding of the various factors motivating cyberbullying in Malaysia. Inherently, risk management strategies could be proposed could be developed to minimize the factors hence reducing the likelihood of cyberbullying occurrences in Malaysia. Hopefully, the findings of the study would contribute to the body of knowledge on the area of cybercrimes in general, and cyberbullying in particular. It is also hoped that this study would assist the general public to better manage the risk of cyberbullying, within the wider agenda of safe nation in Malaysia. / This study is funded by the Digital Society Research Grant Fund (DSRG) by Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), Malaysia.

No

The purpose of this study is to make a survey of the relation between the legal provisions for education in Texas and the public school administration, to determine, if possible, whether these provisions provide for an adequate program meeting the educational needs of the children of the state. Legal provisions, in this instance, comprise both the constitutional provisions for education and the school laws passed to carry out these provisions.

Within the past few years, the question of the constitutionality of affirmative action has undeniably become one of the most widely debated public issues in the United States. Accusations of "reverse discrimination" have become more and more frequent, particularly by white students who believe they have been denied admission to public universities because of their race. Consequently, this question has been addressed in courts of all levels across the nation. However, due to the differing circumstances and legal issues of each case, the courts have not been able to agree on one acceptable standard and have consistently produced conflicting results and contradictory reasoning. On Monday, June 23, 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States released a historical opinion to the public in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger. From the information reviewed, a critique of the decision has been developed and an analytic approach has been taken to understand the effects of such a powerful decision.

The primary goal of the courts in deciding which parent (if any) should be awarded custody of the child is complicated by the presence of domestic violence. Children are direct and indirect victims of domestic violence. As well as the possibility of being physically injured, they are psychologically impacted by the trauma of witnessing violence in the household and may continue a cycle of violence into adulthood. States vary on the weight that is given to domestic violence as a factor in custody decisions. Judges have discretion in the options available to them in making custody determinations. Judges need to be educated on the dynamics of domestic violence to create a more informed judiciary. This paper examines the current law in Florida and gives recommendations for improvements in the way Florida handles custody of children

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