This thought-provoking book explores the functions of charitable foundations in the People's Republic of China. Using both empirical fieldwork and extensive textual analysis, it examines the role of foundations in Chinese society and their relationship with the Chinese government. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Katja Levy and Knut Benjamin Pissler offer a comprehensive overview of the contemporary legal and political frameworks within which Chinese charitable foundations operate, as well as an assessment of their historical and traditional contexts. They re-evaluate the existing literature on China's civil society, and provide a new, functional perspective on the role of foundations, complementing mainstream civil society and corporatist perspectives. This incisive book will be invaluable reading for scholars researching the third sector in China, as well as practitioners working in this sector. Scholars and students of contemporary Chinese law, politics and society will also find its insights useful.

South African law remains relatively silent on the legal aspects of pregnancy, and legal commentary is rather scarce too. While there have been attempts to address the gaps in the law in relation to specific issues in pregnancy, these attempts have usually favoured the individual protection of the unborn at the expense of pregnant women's agency and rights, which has given rise to a tension between female reproductive autonomy and foetal interests. In Pregnancy Law in South Africa, the author explores the question of whether it is possible to regard pregnancy in law as embodying both women and the unborn and whether the pregnancy can be construed in a way that it does not come to be framed as an adversarial relationship. Pregnancy Law in South Africa focuses on the issues of prenatal substance abuse, termination of pregnancy, violence that terminates a pregnancy, and the extension of legal personhood to the unborn. The author argues that pregnancy-related issues will never be adequately resolved unless the potential for an adversarial pregnancy relationship is removed and proposes a relational approach to pregnancy, centred on fostering relationships, in order to eliminate the potential for tension. The author contends further that a relational approach encourages imaginative and constructive possibilities for law reform efforts without sacrificing women's reproductive autonomy and rights or the recognition of the unborn. Pregnancy Law in South Africa provides a sound theoretical approach to pregnancy in law and its recommendations seek to promote healthy, rights-affirming pregnancies.

Sektion A.- 1 Qualitatssicherung und Risikomanagement.- Qualitatsmanagement.- "Risikomanagement".- Verhalten bei und nach Zwischenfallen.- Resumee.- 2 Risikovermeidung - Simulatoren in der Anasthesie.- Training am Simulator.- Konzepte des Krisenmanagements.- Chancen und Perspektiven durch Simulatortraining.- 3 Monitoringstandards.- Bedeutung von Standards.- Monitoringparameter.- Empfehlungen deutschsprachiger Fachgesellschaften.- Europaische Norm EN 740.- Zusammenfassung.- Sektion B.- 4 Herz-Kreislauf-System.- Intraoperativer Herz-Kreislauf-Stillstand.- Akuter Myokardinfarkt, akute Myokardischamie.- Arrhythmien.- Herzschrittmacherpatienten.- 5 Respirationstrakt.- Monitoring zur Erkennung respiratorischer Komplikationen.- Respiratorische Insuffizienz.- Veranderung der respiratorischen Funktion unter der Anasthesie.- Dekompensation der respiratorischen Funktion (bei vorbestehenden pulmonalen Funktionseinschrankungen).- Atemwegsobstruktion.- Akut auftretende pulmonale Funktionseinschrankungen.- Fehlerhaftes oder fehlerhaft verwendetes Anasthesiegerat.- 6 Neurologie.- Erhoehter intrakranieller Druck.- Postoperative emotionale Stoerungen.- Nichterwachen nach Anasthesie.- Postoperative Verwirrtheitszustande.- Das zentral-anticholinergische Syndrom.- 7 Renales System.- Beurteilung der Nierenfunktion.- Veranderung der Nierenfunktion unter Anasthesie.- Oligurie.- Polyurie.- Anasthesie bei Patienten mit eingeschrankter oder fehlender Nierenfunktion.- Harnretention.- 8 Perioperativ relevante Stoerungen des Flussigkeitsund Elektrolythaushaltes.- Physiologie.- Stoerungen des Flussigkeitshaushalts.- Stoerungen des Elektrolythaushalts.- 9 Stoerungen der Synthese oder der Funktion des Hamoglobins.- Sichelzellerkrankung.- Porphyrien.- Methamoglobinamie.- 10 Gerinnungsstoerungen - Thrombose - Lungenembolie.- Physiologie - Pharmakologie.- Diagnostik.- Therapie.- Haufige perioperative Gerinnungsstoerungen.- Thrombose.- Lungenembolie.- Heparininduzierte Thrombozytopenie.- 11 Endokrines System.- Diabetes mellitus.- Schilddrusenfunktionsstoerungen.- Funktionsstoerungen der Nebenschilddruse.- Funktionsstoerungen der Nebenniere.- Stoerungen der Hypophyse.- Adipositas.- 12 Lebererkrankungen und Anasthesie.- Anatomie und Physiologie.- Pathologie und Pathophysiologie.- Medikamentenclearance.- Anasthesievorbereitung bei Lebererkrankungen.- Anasthesie.- Volatile Anasthestika.- Sektion C.- 13 Unmittelbare Reaktionen auf Lokalanasthetika.- Systemische Reaktionen.- Methamoglobinamie.- Allergie.- Lokale Intoxikation des Gewebes.- Systemische Reaktionen aufVasokonstriktoren.- Wertung.- 14 Ruckenmarknahe Leitungsanasthesien (RMNLA).- Kardiovaskulare Veranderungen.- Ploetzlicher Herzstillstand.- Ateminsuffizienz.- UEbelkeit und Erbrechen.- Blasen- und Darmstoerungen.- Postspinaler Kopfschmerz.- Ruckenschmerzem.- Akzidenteile intravasale Injektion.- Massive Epiduralanasthesie.- Totale Spinalanasthesie.- Katheterkomplikationen.- Bronchospasmus.- Neurologische Komplikationen.- Gerinnungshemmende Medikamente und RMLNA.- Aseptische Meningitis.- Pneumozephalus.- Praexistente Erkrankungen des Zentralnervensystems.- Diabetes und periphere Neuropathie.- Wertung.- 15 Brachiale Plexusblockade.- 16 Intravenoese Regionalanasthesie.- 17 Epidurale Opioide.- 18 Neurolytische Blockaden.- Neurolytische Substanzen.- Allgemeine Komplikationen.- Spezielle neurolytische Blockaden.- Sektion D.- 19 Kombinierte Anasthesieverfahren.- Neurologische Komplikationen.- Hamodynamische Komplikationen.- Weitere potentielle Komplikationen.- 20 Atemwegssicherung.- Erschwerte bzw. unmoegliche Intubation.- Larynxmaske.- 21 Aspiration und praoperative Nahrungskarenz.- Inzidenz perioperativer Aspiration.- Lagerung.- Ursachen und Risikofaktoren der perioperativen Aspiration.- Praoperative Nahrungskarenz.- 22 Kritische Stoerungen der Beatmung.- Pathophysiologie.- Ursachen fur Stoerungen der Ventilation, ihre Behandlung bzw. Vermeidung.- Verlegte Atemwege

Million of people around the Asia Pacific region are suffering from the twin effects of globalization and exclusionary nationality laws. Some are migrant workers without rights in host countries; some are indigenous peoples who are not accorded their full rights in their own countries. Yet others are refugees escaping from regimes that have no respect for human rights. This collection of essays discusses the ways in which citizenship laws in the region might be made consistent with human dignity. It considers the connectedness of national belonging and citizenship in East and Southeast Asian and Pacific states including Australia the impact of mass migration, cultural homogenization and other effects of globalization on notions of citizenship and possibilities of commitment to a transnational democratic citizenship that respects cultural difference.;This work is intended for use by departments of politics, international relations, economics (courses in international trade, globalization, labour economics), Asian studies, sociology (courses in legal and citizenship studies), and law.

Many European Union Directives seek to minimize the potential for harm to humans and the environment arising from the use of chemicals. This book takes an interdisciplinary, selective look at the effector mechanisms employed in such directives. It covers the pre-marketing use of toxicology to identify the hazardous properties of chemicals, acknowledging its shortcomings, while contrasting the scientific method with the precautionary principle in developing risk-management practices. The book then goes on to describe the use of bio-indicators, chemical analyses and mathematical modelling for prediction, or to determine the adequacy of chemical safety legislation. The environmental risk assessment of priority chemicals is described and the impact of pesticides on sustainability in agriculture is discussed from the differing standpoints of agronomy and economics. Audience: All professionals concerned with the safe management of chemicals and their use, including teachers, practitioners, policy makers or legislators.

How can we all work together to eliminate the avoidable injustices that plague our health care system and society? Health is determined by far more than a person's choices and behaviors. Social and political conditions, economic forces, physical environments, institutional policies, health care system features, social relationships, risk behaviors, and genetic predispositions all contribute to physical and mental well-being. In America and around the world, many of these factors are derived from a lingering history of unequal opportunities and unjust treatment for people of color and other vulnerable communities. But they aren't the only ones who suffer because of these disparities-everyone is impacted by the factors that degrade health for the least advantaged among us. In Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem? Dr. Lisa Cooper shows how we can work together to eliminate the injustices that plague our health care system and society. The book follows Cooper's journey from her childhood in Liberia, West Africa, to her thirty-year career working first as a clinician and then as a health equity researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Drawing on her experiences, it explores how differences in communication and the quality of relationships affect health outcomes. Through her work as the founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, it details the actions and policies needed to reduce and eliminate the conditions that are harming us all. Cooper reveals with compelling detail how health disparities are crippling our health care system and society, driving up health care costs, leading to adverse health outcomes and ultimately an enormous burden of human suffering. Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem? demonstrates the ways in which everyone's health is interconnected, both within communities and across the globe. Cooper calls for a new kind of herd immunity, when a sufficiently high proportion of people, across race and social class, become immune to harmful social conditions through "vaccination" with solidarity among groups and opportunities created by institutional and societal practices and policies. By acknowledging and acting upon that interconnectedness, she believes everyone can help to create a healthier world. Features * Raises readers' health care inequities literacy through an approachable narrative with specific examples * Introduces the concept of "herd immunity" as it applies to building communal awareness of systemic injustices * Features sections that underscore key takeaways * Includes contributions from the world's leading minds through their research findings and quotations * Guides readers on what can be done at an individual level as a patient, public health professional, and community member * Includes inspiring stories of effective health equity studies and practices around the world, from Ghana's ADHINCRA Project addressing hypertension control to Baltimore's BRIDGE Study for depression in African Americans and the Maryland and Pennsylvania-based RICH LIFE Project for hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditions Johns Hopkins Wavelengths In classrooms, field stations, and laboratories in Baltimore and around the world, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors of Johns Hopkins University are opening the boundaries of our understanding of many of the world's most complex challenges. The Johns Hopkins Wavelengths book series brings readers inside their stories, illustrating how their pioneering discoveries benefit people in their neighborhoods and across the globe in artificial intelligence, cancer research, food systems' environmental impacts, health equity, science diplomacy, and other critical arenas of study. Through these compelling narratives, their insights will spark conversations from dorm rooms to dining rooms to boardrooms.

This book presents an interdisciplinary collection of expert analyses and views of existing verification systems. It provides guidelines and advice for the improvement of those systems as well as for new challenges in the field.

Can private law assume an ecological meaning? Can property and contract defend nature? Is tort law an adequate tool for paying environmental damages to future generations? This book explores potential resolutions to these questions, analyzing the evolution of legal thinking in relation to the topics of legal personality, property, contract and tort. In this forward thinking book, Mattei and Quarta suggest a list of basic principles upon which a new, ecological legal system could be based. Taking private law to represent an ally in the defence of our future, they offer a clear characterization of the fundamental legal institutions of common law and civil law, considering the challenges of the Anthropogenic era, technological tools of the Internet era, and the global rise of the commons. Summarizing the fundamental institutions of private law: property rights, legal personality, contract, and tort, the authors reveal the limits of these legal institutions in relation to historical international evolution and their regulation in the contexts of catastrophic ecological issues and technological developments. Engaging and thoughtful, this book will be interesting reading for legal scholars and academics of private law and, in particular, those wishing to understand the role of law when facing technological and ecological challenges.

This book examines several aspects of the equality and non-discrimination norms in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). In the first instance, the book provides an interpretation and critical analysis of the legal meaning of the principles of equality and non-discrimination in the context of the CRPD. It analyses the extent to which the concepts of equality and non-discrimination contained in the Convention fit within the various theoretical models of disability and conceptions of equality that have been elaborated to date by scholars. It also compares the theoreotical framework of equality in the CRPD to that contained in other international human rights treaties which preceded the Convention.In addition, States' obligations under the Convention are teased out. A particular focus throughout this book is on the manner in which the equality and non-discrimination norms in the CRPD can increase participation and inclusion in society of persons with disabilities. This book also examines in detail an integral component of the equality norm, namely the duty to reasonably accommodate persons with disabilities and, in particular, its outer limits.In that regard, the book analyses whether the balancing and sharing of burdens inherent in the accommodation duty can teach us lessons about the overall balancing of burdens and interests implicit in many Convention rights subject to progressive realisation.Following on from that, this book devises a framework for review of measures adopted by States in the overall context of the progressive realisation of disability rights, with a particular emphasis on how the CRPD's equality norm might strengthen the realisation of socio-economic rights for disabled people. That framework of review criteria is then applied to the right to education and the accessibility obligation incumbent on States under the CRPD.Finally, this book investigates how the equality and non-discrimination norms in the Convention have already influenced, and can potentially influence, the crucial shape of disability equality case law and policy. In that connection, a case study is carried out on the Council of Europe mechanisms, in order to assess whether the CRPD is having an influence on disability law and policy at the regional level.This book demonstrates the fact that the CRPD holds enormous promise for the future application of the equality and non-discrimination norms in relation to the rights of persons with disabilities. Notwithstanding this, significant challenges lie ahead in the realisation of de facto equality for persons with disabilities.

Major League Baseball, alone among industries of its size in the United States, operates as an unregulated monopoly. This 20th-century regulatory anomaly has become known as the baseball anomaly. Major League Baseball developed into a major commercial enterprise without being subject to antitrust liability. Long after the interstate commercial character of baseball had been established and even recognized by the Supreme Court, baseball's monopoly remained free from federal regulation. Duquette explains the baseball anomaly by connecting baseball's regulatory status to the larger political environment, tracing the game's fate through four different regulatory regimes. The constellation of institutional, ideological, and political factors within each regulatory regime provides the context for the survival of the baseball anomaly.

Duquette shows baseball's unregulated monopoly persists because of the confluence of institutional, ideological, and political factors which have prevented the repeal of baseball's antitrust exemption to date. However, both the institutional and ideological factors are fading fast. Baseball's owners can no longer claim special cultural significance in defense of their exemption. Nor can they credibly claim that the commissioner system approximates government regulation effectively. Both of these strategies have been discredited by the labor unrest of the 1980s and 1990s. Duquette provides a unique perspective on American regulatory politics, and by explaining a complicated story in comprehensive prose, he has given researchers, policy makers, and fans a fascinating look at the business of baseball.

Exploring key aspects in the history of law's engagement with healthcare in England, this book unearths fascinating stories of the fractious relationship between the two highlighting lessons for medical law and bioethics that a focus on their history can offer. The popular view that the courts and legislators have from time immemorial consistently deferred to medical practitioners is shown to be wrong. Regulation of healers and the doctor/patient relationship and law's response to battles for dominance between different sorts of healers are examined. Healthcare in a broader sense than simply medical treatment is addressed. Considering historical perceptions of the human body at all life stages from the womb to the grave, the work identifies themes running through the history of how law responds to the problems generated by understanding of bodies and how science changes popular perceptions and law. -- .

Critically assessing recent developments in environmental and tax legislation, and in particular low-carbon strategies, this timely book analyses the implementation of market-based instruments for achieving climate stabilisation objectives around the world. Through case studies and broader analysis, international experts examine taxes and subsidies in energy intensive sectors including stationary energy and transport in Europe and South America, and low-carbon strategies in Australia and East Asia. They also address cross-cutting policy issues involving water pollution and biodiversity protection. This work illustrates how economic instruments for a low-carbon transition need to align with other governmental policies and together influence behaviour in multiple domains such as energy, mobility, trade, land use and innovation. Providing a rich economic modelling of environmental fiscal policies, this topical book will be an engaging read for environmental tax scholars and professionals, as well as academics across energy and environmental economics, law and policy. Policy makers and practitioners in energy and climate policy will also benefit from its problem-solving approach. Contributors include: M.S. Andersen, E. Aydos, E. Belletti, M. Bisogno, C. Camara Barroso, Q. Changbo, G. Chazhong, J. Dellatte, B. Fenfen, L. Feng, S. Geringer, E. Guglyuvatyy, T. Iliopoulos, T. Kawakatsu, D. Kortschak, K. Kratena, V. Kulmer, A. Lerch, I. Meyer, M. Molinos-Senante, M. Pizzol, S. Rudolph, K. Schlegelmilch, S. Seebauer, M. Sommer, C. Sotiriou, N.P. Stoianoff, H. Thodsen, A. Tomo, J. Tumpel, M. Villar Ezcurra, Z. Zachariadis, J.M.M. Zanocchi

This collection presents a summary of current knowledge regarding autistic suspects, defendants and offenders in the criminal justice system of England and Wales. The volume examines the interaction between each stage of the criminal justice process and autistic individuals accused or convicted of crime, considering the problems, strengths, and possibilities for improving the system to better accommodate the needs of this vulnerable category of neurodiverse individuals. By explicating the core issues in this important but disparate area of study in a single place, the collection facilitates understanding of and engagement with knowledge for a wider audience of relevant stakeholders, including criminal justice practitioners, policy makers, academics and clinicians. It also incorporates key recommendations for improvement, thereby clarifying the urgent need for substantive change in policies and practices. The ultimate goal is to both improve the treatment and experience of autistic people subjected to criminal justice processes; and produce fairer, more appropriate systemic outcomes. While focused on the criminal justice system of England and Wales, the work will be valuable for researchers and policy-makers working in similar systems, as well as those interested in neurodiversity more generally.

This book calls for the conditions of transition to sustainability: How to take into consideration new global phenomena such as and of the dimension of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, financial crises, demographic dynamics, global urbanization, migrations and mobility, while bearing in mind short-term or local place-based issues, such as social justice or quality of life? Meeting this challenge requires an inclusive approach of sustainability. It is a matter of designing a new social contract: Sustainability requires more than developing the right markets, institutions and metrics, it requires social momentum. To do so, many issues need a clear and complete answer: How to link social justice with sustainability policies? What governance tools to do so? What linkage between one decision-making level and the other? These are major issues to design sound transitions to sustainability.

This book addresses the different forms of austerity, contestation and resistance, in order to understand how they relate to one another and the impact they have on the democratic quality of public debates, the trust in public institutions and the legitimacy of law. Contestation of austerity includes not only traditional activism strategies such as human rights litigation and direct democracy instruments, but also new forms of collective action and collaborative resistance. Most importantly, many of the new anti-austerity initiatives also aim to renovate existing modes of democratic decision-making on the European, national, regional and local levels. The book focuses on different types of contesting austerity measures and the interaction between institutional and civil society actors. It will enhance understanding of how the various actors frame not only their goal but also the underlying social conflict to contest austerity and through which means they try to achieve political and legal changes. With 16 chapters written by contributors from Spain, Germany, Greece, Portugal and the UK, the book approaches 3 crucial areas of austerity policies: cuts in payment and pensions, labour law reform, and old and new poverty. In each field, the contributors analyse the processes of decision-making and contestation from 3 perspectives: institutions, democratic theory and societal responses.

There are few more sensitive or important policy areas in the world today, and that means this book is a hugely relevant and timely one. Written by practice-oriented political scientists from various universities in Europe and the rest of the world, this book is a testimony to both policy and the evolution of policy analyses over the last 25 years. On the basis of empirical observations all contributions have attempted to develop new conceptual perspectives for environmental policy analyses which furthermore can be generalized and applied to other policy fields.

This new 12th edition of Dale and Appelbe's Pharmacy and Medicines Law is your guide to law and ethics for pharmacy practice in the UK. It covers law and professional regulation and is firmly established as the definitive student textbook and reference work on this subject in the UK. This edition has been extensively restructured and revised to include all the most recent changes to pharmacy laws and regulation.

This book focuses on new and emerging data mining solutions that offer a greater level of transparency than existing solutions. Transparent data mining solutions with desirable properties (e.g. effective, fully automatic, scalable) are covered in the book. Experimental findings of transparent solutions are tailored to different domain experts, and experimental metrics for evaluating algorithmic transparency are presented. The book also discusses societal effects of black box vs. transparent approaches to data mining, as well as real-world use cases for these approaches.As algorithms increasingly support different aspects of modern life, a greater level of transparency is sorely needed, not least because discrimination and biases have to be avoided. With contributions from domain experts, this book provides an overview of an emerging area of data mining that has profound societal consequences, and provides the technical background to for readers to contribute to the field or to put existing approaches to practical use.

This may be the book to guide advocates and citizens through our complex environmental laws. . . . Not a critique of the pollution laws, this is a detailed summary of their provisions, such as who is responsible for administration; criteria and schedules to be met; citizens' right to bring suit; and the like. Not easy reading, it beats hacking through the language of the laws themselves. "Library Journal"

"Pollution Law Handbook" is a comprehensive yet accessible guide to eight major federal statutes concerned with controlling pollution. Written for attorneys and their corporate clients concerned with environmental matters, the handbook is designed to help the reader fully comprehend both the general intent and the essential provisions of each statute--many of which seem convoluted, confusing, and unduly complex in their original statutory text. The eight statutes selected for inclusion are those which provide the principal authority for regulating air, water, and land pollution, and toxic waste.

Worldwide, children face significant health risks. The right to health of the child offers insight into the ways in which these risks should be mitigated. However, the concept of 'the highest attainable standard of health of the child' as laid down in article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child remains unclear. Therefore, this book seeks to clarify the international normative framework on the right to health of the child. It does so by looking at the international children's rights framework, international health and human rights law and by taking a particular look at relevant legislation in the European region, covering both European Union legislation and human rights law of the Council of Europe, including the Guidelines on Child-Friendly Healthcare. Also, the interpretation of the right to health by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is analyzed for 35 countries of different levels of development. On the basis of these sources, priorities are identified that should be realized to achieve the highest attainable standard of health of the child. This book addresses the question how the implementation process influences the interpretation of the highest attainable standard of health of the child. This results in a definition of the highest attainable standard of health of the child that takes into account the varying capabilities of individual children and which considers children as active rights-holders, notwithstanding their age or level of development.

Monitoring and enforcement issues must be analysed when determining the effectiveness of pollution control regulation, and clearly influence choices about how to regulate. This book demonstrates how an economic analysis of law enforcement can generate important insights into how best to enforce pollution control regulation. It seeks to provide a clear and accessible way into the law and economics literature on enforcement. More specifically, it uses Gary Becker's deterrence model which, by differentiating between two enforcement variables (namely the probability of apprehension and conviction and the severity of sanction), facilitates a comparison of the effectiveness of different enforcement tools in inducing desirable behaviour. As such, it provides a valuable analytical tool in considering how best to pursue cost-effective enforcement. Major themes to be addressed include Becker's deterrence model and expansions thereof, reasons for compliance, environmental enforcement strategies and the importance of a deterrence threat and formal pollution control law enforcement mechanisms such as prosecution and criminal sanctions, administrative mechanisms and civil liability. The book argues that in pursuing cost-effective enforcement much can be learned from examining enforcement practices in different jurisdictions, and to this end the author examines pollution control laws, enforcement strategies and sanctions in Australia, Canada and England and Wales. The book makes an important contribution to existing literature on environmental law enforcement, but its value extends beyond this. The theoretical framework adopted and the range of issues discussed make it of interest to regulatory and public law scholars more generally.

The countries of central and eastern Europe face considerable challenges in their quest to protect both the health and amenity of their populations and their natural resource base; they are facing the need to clean up the legacy of pollution which they have inherited from former regimes, and ensure that the environmental consequences of present day decisions are well understood. Environmental impact assessment is a process which provides decision makers with an indication of the likely environmental consequences of their actions and can play a more proactive role in encouraging the consideration of less damaging alternatives or modifications. With legislation on EIA recently enacted or planned in all the countries addressed here, this volume presents work commissioned by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to assist investors and regulators in the countries of central and eastern Europe and has been fully updated and reviewed for publication. Each chapter describes the EIA process in one country, and includes translations of the relevant legislation. This text constitutes the second volume in the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's own Environmental Library.

With a Foreword by Roger Blanpain, Professor in Labour Law, Universities of Leuven (Belgium) and Tilburg (The Netherlands) and co-founder and first President of FIFPro. Publicly, at least, there appears to be a strong collective will within football to clean up the game, to make the work of players' agents more transparent and to allow a greater share of the game's profits to stay within the game. Privately, there seems to be unease that current agent regulation is out of step with football industry norms and that if the sector is to operate effectively, practices which are prohibited by the rules should in fact be tolerated. Here lies the problem. Stringent agent regulation may well look impressive but over-regulation will merely compound the problem of non-compliance and a lack of transparency. Finding the balance which not only addresses the problems facing football and satisfies the supporters and other interested stakeholders but which also satisfies the requirements of national, EU and international law is just one of the many challenges facing football's governing bodies. What are players' agents? Why should they be regulated? How should they be regulated? These three apparently simple questions have been tackled throughout this book. The first question appears straightforward as agents perform similar functions throughout the world. However, as the contributions in the book reveal, the manner in which agents operate varies. The questions of why and how to regulate again reveals common themes but also considerable variations in patterns of regulation. In this connection, there are, in effect, three tiers of agent regulation: international law, national law and the law of the sports associations. This book covers the legal regulations governing players' agents in forty countries around the world, representing the major footballing constituencies including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Russia as well as the "Big Five" in Europe. Written by acknowledged experts, it provides a very useful and informative comparative survey. Indeed, this is a book, which all those involved in the administration of football clubs, particularly, coaches and managers, as well as players' agents themselves, and commercial, financial and legal advisers, can do hardly do without, as it will provide them with a constant and useful source of reference.