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This paper looks at how the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Great Britain use their tax systems to provide benefits to low-income workers and their families. Among other things, this paper considers the participation rates of tax versus traditional welfare programs and whether tax expenditures like the U.S. earned income tax credit and child tax credit are and should be scored as tax breaks or as expenditures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I focus on the outcomes of hybrid forms of governance. Such hybrids are characterized by an arrangement of tasks and responsibilities, regarding regulatory governance, between public and private sector actors. Empirically the paper is based on regulatory reforms in Australian and Canadian built environment policy. Within these countries building regulations are drawn up on Federal level, whilst the implementation and enforcement of these regulations comes to State, Territorial and Provincial governments. In order to speed up process times and lower administrative burden private sector involvement was introduced in the 1980/1990s with differences amongst States, Territories and Provinces.Based on a series of elite interviews and secondary accounts I discuss the outcomes of these new hybrid forms of governance. It is found that a certain relationship appears to exist between the amount of private sector involvement in a hybrid form of governance and its outcomes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the recent constitution of 'sex trafficking' as an urgent problem in three first-world ('recieving') countries - the United States, Australia and Canada. These countries are all signatories to the United Nations Protocol to Prevent Trafficking and have all developed extensive legal and policy mechanisms over the last decade to address and prevent sex trafficking. This paper explores the nature of these legal and policy mechanisms, exploring similarities and differences between the three countires. It examines the positioning of trafficking as a gendered crime associated with prostitution and the impact of this positioning on women migating for sex work. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand and Canada have concepts and paradigms relating to the family and care of children that give rise to specific customary laws which differ from State law relating to the family. This paper examines the practice of "customary adoption" amongst indigenous groups in these three countries. Using case studies, it compares the legal status of customary adoption in three former colonial countries: New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. The extent to which the adoption and guardianship law of these three countries acknowledges and provides for an indigenous view of the family that differs from the predominant European view is explored. Case law, statutory provisions and relevant literature are analysed to shed light on the role of "customary adoptions" in contemporary society. In particular the similarities and differences between "customary adoptions" and State adoptions are canvassed to elucidate why customary adoption has persisted in all three countries regardless of the differing degrees of formal legal recognition provided. Given the persistence of customary adoption it is difficult to support an argument that customary adoptions are merely an anachronism that will eventually be discarded, rather the persistence of this form of structuring indigenous families suggests its relevance as a contemporary expression of a dynamic culture. Drawing on this insight the paper considers whether the legal systems of these three countries should provide formal legal recognition of these practices, informal acceptance, or legislate to expressly exclude customary adoption. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The private governance of sustainable design features, such as rain gardens and swales, is becoming increasingly common as a practice in multi-owned residential developments in a number of countries. The phenomenon is seen as a means of enhancing local sustainability while reducing environmental and infrastructure costs for local governments and communities. However, some critical issues are emerging in respect of their day-to-day management, particularly in relation to maintenance, liability and performance, and longer-term prospects as a tool for improving sustainability of the local environment.The paper provides a brief overview of experience in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. It compares the models of private governance in place and identifies some common issues. It then presents some New Zealand examples of different types of legal entities that have responsibilities for managing sustainable design features. The several layers of local government requirements, rules of the particular entity that has been created to manage the development, and subsequent contractual arrangements established to maintain and manage these features are examined in turn to reveal the rights and powers of local government, developers, owners and managing agents. The paper explores issues of public and private rights and responsibilities and considers whether contractual arrangements that are created both to implement local government requirements and enable owners to manage these features on-site require more active oversight by regulators and policy-makers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the nature of the specialist industry of marketing law schools in the United States, Canada and Australia, which has significantly grown over the past decade, along with the growth in a range of influential ranking systems, often with dubious and unreliable methodologies underpinning. It explores the manner in which marketing strategies may influence core activities of law schools as part of their overall -positioning', and in what ways competition amongst law schools for students has led to substantive changes in pedagogy, research profiles, infrastructure in a number of law schools. The paper also critically examines the manner in which various -core constituencies' of law schools, such as prospective students, current students, alumni, prospective donors, the professoriate, central University administration, the legal profession, government, etc -are targeted by marketers and how these constituencies perceive and respond to these marketing strategies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries offer debtors an option of a repayment plan instead of a "straight" bankruptcy (which in some countries also includes a surplus income obligation). This paper surveys the literature on Chapter 13 in the USA, consumer proposals in Canada, Australia, and the UK, and repayment plans in continental Europe. The points of comparison will include: who is using this type of option and why, what differences are there in the repayment expectations, what is the success rate for debtors in completing a plan, and whether repayment to creditors exceeds administrative costs. The paper will discuss whether any country is doing a notably better job of offering a viable repayment plan alternative for over-indebted individuals. It also will reflect on why this approach to addressing debt problems seems to be so attractive to policymakers and even debtors in so many places despite high noncompletion rates and other problems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various scholars of the settler states of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US have discussed the paradoxical situation in which indigenous people now laying claims against those states find themselves. Although these claims are addressed to a modern legal system, in order to demonstrate the authenticity of their claim and the truth of their grievance, indigenous people must display a kind of traditionalism that is out of time with national history. In these moments, "indigenous modernity" itself appears as a contradiction: the better an indigenous claimant group can manifest their traditionalism, the more likely they are to establish their rights in law; and yet the more firmly a traditional image of indigeneity is entrenched the more difficult it is for indigenous people to assert modern political and economic agency, that is, a history, without seeming inauthentic. Most accounts of this predicament have considered it as a contemporary form of governmentality. In this paper, however, I examine the historical conditions for the appearance of this paradox in the present. I suggest that the problem of history that is now being wrestled with in courts and commissions (do indigenous people have history? If so, is it a kind of history that courts can recognize?) has a much longer genealogy in the legal administration of indigenous people in settler states. By uncovering some of this genealogy, we might begin to see how the contradiction of being a "people without history" asserting political agency and demanding a full legal identity in the present is a constitutive one that is deeply embedded in the making of the settler state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tracks the development of refugee policy in Canada, Australia and the United States over the past twenty years. Historically, nations made strategic choices about how many refugees to accept from which regions. Increasingly however, asylum seekers arrive at borders without U.N. refugee status, and require processing by national level immigration officials to determine their eligibility for protection. I discuss how national governments in the United States, Canada and Australia have attempted to stem the flow of asylum seekers who seek protection by limiting access to their refugee status determination systems. Examples of these attempts include Safe Third Country treaties, interdiction at sea, visa checks at foreign airports, mandatory detention, excision of territory and expedited removal. I argue that in all three countries, refugee policy has undergone a transformation as a public policy area, and has begun to merge conceptually and practically with domestic immigration policy. As asylum seekers come to be viewed as illegal immigrants, often referred to in the media as security threats or "queue jumpers," refugee policy is losing its separate identity, and thus its insulation from the politics of illegal immigration control. The data are drawn from interviews with key refugee policy makers and advocates in each of the three nations, as well as content analysis of the policy frames used in legislative hearings and newspaper coverage. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a shift has occurred in the criminal justice response to infant death. Mothers in Australia and Canada are increasingly likely to be charged with murder after a suspicious death - a trend that seems in contradiction with developments in this field in England. Newspaper accounts form a primary source of the knowledge that most people possess about the criminal justice system and especially about specific criminal cases. In this paper, I compare the newspaper reports about the murder trials of mothers with the transcripts of those trials. These newspaper accounts provide some insight into the ways in which infant death and maternal responsibility are being (re)constructed within Canadian and Australian public discourse as moral issues that fit legitimately within the purview of the criminal justice system. I consider the extent to which feminist critiques of the neo-liberal tendency to over-criminalisation and of the increasingly punitive normative conceptions of mothering in contemporary western society have the potential to counter this reconstruction of moral responsibility. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past several years in Canada have seen renewed pressure to re-visit Canada's laws on sex work. The recent murders of scores of sex workers in various parts of the country, new concerns over migrant sex-work or "trafficking" and continued frustration by municipal governments and residents over the "unworkability" of current laws pushed the government to once again review the legal framework surrounding sex-work. However, this review (the fourth since the 1980s) once again failed to produce any tangible results as the committee found itself mired in the moral and political divisions over the acceptability of sex work. Sex-workers themselves have continued to resist the contradictory and problematic laws and the dangerous conditions that result. In this paper we examine the major issues for Canadian sex work policy (violence, residential concerns over the use of urban space, control over the conditions of sex work, the particular issues faced by migrant workers) and look to Australia and New Zealand's experiments with various forms of decriminalization and/or regulation to see what lessons Canada can learn from there. In particular, we examine the Australian and New Zealand experiments for how they help or hinder sex workers' own attempts to increase their control over their working conditions and resist outside intervention and control. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among industrialized nations, the United States is an extreme outlier with regard to the efforts undertaken by the national government to equalize the taxing capacity of subnational governments. Australia, Canada and several European countries have in place a complex system of "equalization grants" whereby the central government makes fiscal transfers to ensure that taxable resources available to state/provincial governments do not exhibit significant variation. The United States has no such system. As a consequence, some U.S. states have very low fiscal capacity (e.g., Mississippi) while other states have high fiscal capacity (e.g., Connecticut). These differences have significance for the level and quality of public goods provision by state and local governments. This paper will provide an overview of (i) the theoretical justifications for national-subnational equalization grants, (ii) the political-historical context of the current ("no equalization") U.S. system of fiscal federalism and its policy implications, (iii) the experience with fiscal equalization in Australia, Canada and Europe, and (iv) the prospects for federal-state equalization grants in the United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, over 90 empirical studies have been conducted in the United States, Canada, England and Wales, Scotland, and Australia on the handling of sexual assault cases by police and courts. Research has centred on two areas: rates of attrition at different stages of the legal process and the set of factors associated with prosecution and conviction. We have conducted a systematic meta-review of this research, addressing these questions. What is the overall conviction rate of cases reported to the police, and the rate at which cases proceed through each node of the legal process? Does the rate of conviction vary over time, by country, by age of victim, or victim-offender relation? What are the key factors associated with case prosecution and conviction, and do these vary by decision node (that is, by police or court decisions)? We find differences by country and time in rates of conviction. Over a 30-year period, the overall rate of conviction has stayed the same in the United States, but it has decreased in the UK, Canada, and Australia. Implications are drawn for the variable impact of 30 years of legal reform across four countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]