This book offers a general framework for understanding the main concepts, rules, and institutions of the Thai legal system. It details the history of the civil and commercial code and provides readers with valuable information about the main principles that regulate relations between private individuals. Written in a clear and easy-to-understand style, it first presents the general principles of law and then addresses more specific aspects. It not only defines private law, but also explores how it works, and why it works the way it does. Topics covered include general rules of law, the law of obligations and contracts, the management of affairs without mandate and unjustified benefits, the law of property, family law and the law of inheritance.

Internationally, there is now an acceptance of the need to develop new strategies in criminal justice which reflect restorative justice principles. At the same time, theory, research and practice in restorative justice is making rapid advances. This book provides an up-to-date and critical account of recent developments. It describes the practice of restorative justice with respect to young offenders in a number of jurisdictions - Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States and various continental European countries. Research findings on the three most common formats - conferencing, victims offender mediation and circles - are presented. Critical issues for the future development of restorative justice are identified. Two main themes run through the collection - the potential of restorative processes to transform criminal justice processes and the potential for aboriginal or indigenous communities to impact on conventional processes. Contributors include active researchers and leading theorists from around the world.

Global finance is in the middle of a radical transformation fueled by innovative financial technologies. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the digitization of retail financial services in Europe. Institutional interest and digital asset markets are also growing blurring the boundaries between the token economy and traditional finance. Blockchain, AI, quantum computing and decentralised finance (DeFI) are setting the stage for a global battle of business models and philosophies. The post-Brexit EU cannot afford to ignore the promise of digital finance. But the Union is struggling to keep pace with global innovation hubs, particularly when it comes to experimenting with new digital forms of capital raising. Calibrating the EU digital finance strategy is a balancing act that requires a deep understanding of the factors driving the transformation, be they legal, cultural, political or economic, as well as their many implications. The same FinTech inventions that use AI, machine learning and big data to facilitate access to credit may also establish invisible barriers that further social, racial and religious exclusion. The way digital finance actors source, use, and record information presents countless consumer protection concerns. The EU's strategic response has been years in the making and, finally, in September 2020 the Commission released a Digital Finance Package. This special issue collects contributions from leading scholars who scrutinize the challenges digital finance presents for the EU internal market and financial market regulation from multiple public policy perspectives. Author contributions adopt a critical yet constructive and solutions-oriented approach. They aim to provide policy-relevant research and ideas shedding light on the complexities of the digital finance promise. They also offer solid proposals for reform of EU financial services law.

Connected to the jurisprudence surrounding the copyrightability of a factual compilation, this book locates the footprints of the standard envisaged in a US Supreme court decision (Feist) in Europe. In particular, it observes the extent of similarity of such jurisprudence to the standard adopted and deliberated in the European Union. Many a times the reasons behind law making goes unnoticed. The compelling situations and the history existing prior to an enactment helps in understanding the balance that exists in a particular legislation. While looking at the process of enacting the Database Directive (96/9/EC), this book reflects upon the concern that was expressed with the outcome of Feist decision in Europe.

This book discusses affirmative action or positive discrimination, defined as measures awarding privileges to certain groups that have historically suffered discrimination or have been underrepresented in specific social sectors. The book's underlying rationale is that one cannot place at the same starting point people who have been treated differently in the past because in this way one merely perpetuates a state of difference and, in turn, social gaps are exaggerated and social cohesion is endangered. Starting out with an introduction on the meaning and typology of affirmative action policies, the book goes on to emphasise the interaction of affirmative action with traditional values of liberal state, such as equality, meritocracy, democracy, justice, liberalism and socialism. It reveals the affirmative action goals from a legal and sociological point of view, examining the remedial, cultural, societal, pedagogical and economy purposes of such action. After applying an institutional narrative of the implementation of affirmative action worldwide, the book explains the jurisprudence on the issue through syntheses and antitheses of structural and material variables, such as the institutional recognition of the policies, the domains of their implementation and their beneficiaries. The book eventually makes an analytical impact assessment following the implementation of affirmative action plans and the judicial response, especially in relation to the conventional human rights doctrine, by establishing a liaison between affirmative action and social and group rights.. The book applies a multi-disciplinary and comparative methodology in order to assess the ethical standing of affirmative action policies, the public interests involved and their effectiveness towards actual equality. In the light of the above analysis, the monograph explains the arguments considering affirmative action as a theology for substantive equality and the arguments treating this policy as anathema for liberalism. A universal discussion currently at its peak.

The issue of prisoners in war is a highly timely topic that has received much attention from both scholars and practitioners since the start of the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ensuing legal and political problems concerning detainees in those conflicts. This book analyzes these contemporary problems and challenges against the background of their historical development. It provides a multidisciplinary yet highly coherent perspective on the historical trajectory of legal and ethical norms in this field by integrating the historical analysis of war with a study of the emergence of the modern legal regime of prisoners in war. In doing so, it provides the first comprehensive study of prisoners, detainees and internees in war, covering a broad range of both regular and irregular wars from the crusades to contemporary counterinsurgency campaigns.
The book revolves around two major developments: First, there has been a continuous increase in the political relevance of prisoners in war, in particular since the emergence of POW camps in the nineteenth century. Secondly, and related, the growth in the legal regime pertaining to prisoners had contradictory consequences. Whilst it enhanced the protection of prisoners in regular conflicts, its state-centric bias tends to exclude combatants who do not fit the template of regular inter-state war. Detainees in the 'war on terror' embody both tendencies, the development of which, however, is by no means a novel phenomenon.
This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

A Basic Guide to International Business Law is an introduction to those parts of European and international law that are relevant to business. Having read this book, students will come away with a broad understanding of the international rules of law within the EEC, institutional rules of the European Union, international contract law, rules of competition and the four freedoms within the EEC. The edition includes student friendly features, such as summaries of statements and references to relevant case law, making the book an ideal introduction for those on law and/or business programmes.

This edited volume focuses on specific, crucially important structural measures that foster corporate change, namely cross-border mergers. Such cross-border transactions play a key role in business reality, economic theory and corporate, financial and capital markets law. Since the adoption of the Cross-border Mergers Directive, these mergers have been regulated by specific legal provisions in EU member states. This book analyzes various aspects of the directive, closely examining this harmonized area of EU company law and critically evaluating cross-border mergers as a method of corporate restructuring in order to gain insights into their fundamental mechanisms. It comprehensively discusses the practicalities of EU harmonization of cross-border mergers, linking it to corporate restructuring in general, while also taking the transposition of the directive into account. Exploring specific angles of the Cross-border Mergers Directive in the light of European and national company law, the book is divided into three sections: the first section focuses on EU and comparative aspects of the Cross-border Mergers Directive, while the second examines the interaction of the directive with other areas of law (capital markets law, competition law, employment law, tax law, civil procedure). Lastly, the third section describes the various member states' experiences of implementing the Cross-border Mergers Directive.

This book examines EU Eastern Partnership taking into account geopolitical challenges of EU integration. It highlights reasons for limited success, such as systematic conflict of EU External Action. In addition, the book analyses country-specific issues and discusses EaP influence on them, investigating political, economic and social factors, while seeking for potential solutions to existing problems. The reluctance of the Eastern countries to the European reforms should not reduce political pro-activeness of the EU. The authors suggest that EaP strategies should be reviewed to be more reciprocal and not based solely on the EU-laden agenda. This book is one of the good examples of cooperation between scholars not only from EaP and EU countries, but also from different disciplines, bringing diversity to the discussion process.

This book addresses one central question: if justice is to be done in the name of the community, how far do the decision-makers need to reflect the community, either in their profile or in the opinions they espouse? Each contributor provides an answer on the basis of a careful analysis of the rules, assumptions and practices relating to their own national judicial system and legal culture. Written by national experts, the essays illustrate a variety of institutional designs towards a better reflection of the community. The involvement of lay people is often most visible in judicial appointments at senior court level, with political representatives sometimes appointing judges. They consider the lay involvement in the judicial system more widely, from the role of juries to the role of specialist lay judges and lay assessors in lower courts and tribunals. This lay input into judicial appointments is explored in light of the principle of judicial independence. The contributors also critically discuss the extent to which judicial action is legitimised by any 'democratic pedigree' of the judges or their decisions. The book thus offers a range of perspectives, all shaped by distinctive constitutional and legal cultures, on the thorny relationship between the principle of judicial independence and the idea of democratic accountability of the judiciary.

International lawyers have often been interested in the link between their discipline and the foundational issues of jurisprudential method, but little that is systematic has been written on this subject. This book fills the gap by focusing on issues of concept-formation in legal science in general, as well as looking at their application to the specific concerns of international law. In responding to these issues, the author argues that public international law seeks to establish and institutionalize a system of authoritative judgment whereby the conditions by which a community of states can co-exist and co-operate are ensured. A State, in turn, must be understood as ultimately deriving legitimacy from the pursuit of the human dignity of the community it governs, as well as the dignity of those human beings and States affected by its actions in international relations. This argument is in line with a long and now resurgent cosmopolitan tradition in legal and political philosophy. The book shows how this approach is reflected in accepted paradigm cases of international law, such as the United Nations Charter. It then explains how this approach can provide insights into the theoretical foundations of these accepted paradigms, including our understanding of the sources of international law, international legal personality, and the design of global institutions. ..".Capps' writing style is clean, measured, and written with obvious passion. He engages the reader in back and forth discussions that stimulate thought-provoking questions....It can be said with certainty that Human Dignity and the Foundations of International Law is a comprehensive, well thought out, and welcome addition to the field of philosophy and the law." Saskatchewan Law Review 2012, Vol. 75

This third volume of the comprehensive digest of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal's case-law deals with cases decided between July 1991 and April 1996. The author cites those parts of judgments which pertain to a particular issue, providing first-hand access to the Court's actual decisions on that issue. The pronouncements are arranged to give a clear picture of the contribution made to the law governing the international civil service. The author was awarded the 1989 Certificate of Merit by the American Society of International Law for his two-volume treatise on the law of the international service.

The book reviews the origin and development of the exclusionary rule in China, and systematically explains the problems and challenges faced by criminal justice reformers. The earlier version of the exclusionary rule in China pays more attention to confessions obtained by torture and other illegal methods, reflecting that the orientation of the rule aims mainly to prevent wrongful convictions. Since the important clause that human rights are respected and protected by the country was written in the Constitution in 2004, modern notions such as human rights protection and procedural justice have been widely accepted in China. The book compares various theories of the exclusionary rule in many countries and proposes that the rationale of human rights protection and procedural justice should be embraced by the exclusionary rule. At the same time, the book elaborately demonstrates the thoughts and designs of the vital judicial reform strategy--strict enforcement of the exclusionary rule, including clarifying the content of illegal evidence and improving the procedure of excluding illegal evidence. In addition, the book discusses the influence of the exclusionary rule on the pretrial procedure and trial procedure respectively and puts forward pertinent suggestions for the trial-centered procedural reform in the future. In the appendix, the book conducts case analysis of 20 selected cases concerning the application of the exclusionary rule. This is the first book to give a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the exclusionary rule of illegally obtained evidence in China. The author of the book, senior judge of the Supreme People's Court in China, with his special experience of direct participation in the design of the exclusionary rule, will provide the readers with thought-provoking explanation of the distinctive feature of judicial reform strategy and criminal justice policy in China.

This book is the result of a long-term comparative research project on intellectual property, with topics ranging from patents to copyright, examined across 16 jurisdictions. It does not aim at commenting on current policy issues. The country reports unearth the culturally, morally and historically imprinted thought patterns across Europe which underpin current discussions on the appropriation of information, and which do not change quickly. The research results question the common narratives of the distinctiveness of private and public law, of contracts and property, and of morality and the law. The point of departure is the public good character of information, with the focus being on public interests pursued when assigning information as property. The 14 selected cases, based on recent, and in some cases futuristic when the project began in 2001, scenarios, aim to identify how boundaries to information property emerge, the areas of law that are applied and the principles that are followed in order to balance the conflicting interests at stake. The issues discussed revolve around well-known interfaces such as IP and competition law, monetary interests versus personal interests in human genome data, individual freedoms-to-operate versus collective action models as found in basic research or ‘creative commons’. The book shows how some national discussions appear similar on the surface, in terms of resorting to parallel principles, but subsequent domestic policy answers vary greatly. Even legislation which aims at harmonisation may result into more diversity. Inversely, we found legal institutions applied which install contrasting legal rules which however aim at exactly the same behavioural change. The national reports in Part III are complemented by comparative analyses by the editors, whilst the chapters in Part II are dedicated to an analysis of the submissions from a theoretical point of view, departing from the editors’ own research interests. The chapter in Part I describes the overall ‘Common Core’ research method, which splits the national reports into operative, descriptive and metalegal formants. Boundaries of Information Property is aimed at researchers in IP and practitioners interested in the foundational theory of their subject. It is an inspiring read for those interested in the deeper structures of regulating information. With a foreword by Sjef van Erp (em. University of Maastricht) and contributions by Christine Godt (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg), Geertrui Van Overwalle (University of Leuven), Lucie Guibault (Dalhousie University), Deryck Beyleveld (University of Durham), Mike Adcock (University of Durham), Ramūnas Birštonas (Vilnius University), Maja Bogataj Jan�i� (Intellectual Property Institute, Ljubljana), Konstantinos Christodoulou (University of Athens), Teresa Franquet Sugrañes (University Rovira i Virgili), Pablo Garrido Pérez (University of Barcelona), Christophe Geiger (Luiss Guido Carli University), Silvia Gómez Trinidad (University of Barcelona), Mariona Gual Dalmau (University of Barcelona), Aleksei Kelli (University of Tartu), Tomaž Keresteš (University of Maribor), Maja Lubarda (Lawyer, Ljubljana), Thomas Margoni (University of Leuven), Jan Mates (Attorney-at-Law, Prague), Maureen O’Sullivan (NUI Galway), Andrea Pradi (University of Trento), Martina Repas (University of Maribor), Giorgio Resta (University of Rome 3), Ole-Andreas Rognstad (University of Oslo), Cristina Roy Pérez (University of Barcelona), Jens Schovsbo (University of Copenhagen), Agnes Schreiner (University of Amsterdam), Simone Schroff (Plymouth University), Tobias Schulte in den Bäumen (Hapag-Llyod, Hamburg), Simona Štrancar (University of Maribor), Tomasz Targosz (Jagiellonian University), Elżbieta Traple (Jagiellonian University), and Gabriele Venskaityte (European Commission, Brussels).

Following the successful publication of his first volume4 of essays intitled FOREIGN LAW AND COMPARATIVE METHODOLOGY professor Markesinis continues his quest for the best way of presenting foreign law to Common law readers. This second volume thus contains essays on methodology: the horizontal application of human rights; the tortious liability of statutory bodies; the growing impact of human rights law on our law of torts; the differing approaches to problems raised by action for wrongful life and wrongful birth; differing judicial styles and what they can tell us about a foreign system, as well as the growing use of foreign law by British judges in their judicial and extra judicial work. These essays, along with their rich bibliographical references, will provide much food for thought to practitioners in these above-mentioned areas of the law as well as teadhers and researchers in the fields of public law, foreign law and legal methodology.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is intended to provide an effective framework for responding to crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It is a response to the many conscious-shocking cases where atrocities - on the worst scale - have occurred even during the post 1945 period when the United Nations was built to save us all from the scourge of genocide. The R2P concept accords to sovereign states and international institutions a responsibility to assist peoples who are at risk - or experiencing - the worst atrocities. R2P maintains that collective action should be taken by members of the United Nations to prevent or halt such gross violations of basic human rights. This Handbook, containing contributions from leading theorists, and practitioners (including former foreign ministers and special advisors), examines the progress that has been made in the last 10 years; it also looks forward to likely developments in the next decade.

Since the 1990s, the field of transitional justice has exploded with international support for the establishment of trials, truth commissions, and other measures aimed at helping societies address massive human rights violations. The United States' role has been particularly significant, providing extensive funding, political support, and technical assistance to such measures. Surprisingly, however, scant attention has been paid to analyzing the country's approach to transitional justice. In this book, Bird offers the first systematic and cross-cutting account of US foreign policy on transitional justice. She examines the development of US foreign policy on the field from World War I to the present, with an in-depth examination of US involvement in measures in Cambodia, Liberia, and Colombia. She supports her findings with nearly 200 interviews with key US and foreign government officials, staff of transitional justice measures, and country experts. By "opening the black box" of US foreign policy, Bird shows how diverse interests and the constantly evolving priorities of presidential administrations, Congress, the State Department, and other agencies shape US involvement in transitional justice. Despite bureaucratic battles, Bird argues that US foreign policy on transitional justice is surprisingly consistent and characterized by an approach that is value-driven, strategic, and retributive. She demonstrates how this approach has influenced the field as a whole, including the type of transitional justice measures selected, their design, and how they are implemented.