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The article discusses issues of sexual harassment in the workplace with an emphasis on educational institutions. As the regulatory instruments are usually institution-specific, the regulatory instruments in two educational institutions in South Africa were chosen for illustrative purposes. Through critical and analytical methods, the paper explores the reporting requirements, the impact of power dynamics on speedy reporting, and the motive for sexual harassment complaints. The extant relevant judicial decisions were judiciously deployed to lend credence to the position adopted by the authors. The paper concludes that the decision-makers should exercise caution so that the innocent are not vilified on a hoax complaint on account of society’s justified disdain for the seeming prevalence of sexual harassment incidents in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fall injury and fatality claims and legal cases involving ordinary pedestrians as well as employees/contractors at work sites have increased dramatically over the course of the author's 43-year engineering career. As a result, forensic engineers are frequently being contacted by insurers and attorneys to analyze these incidents. The need is to determine probable cause(s) and ascertain as to whether location features were designed, constructed, installed, manufactured, and/or maintained in accordance with the standard of care, including requirements specified in applicable codes and standards. The proper contemporary analysis techniques for these incidents are addressed in this paper as well as what constitutes proper basis for establishing a standard of care for involved installations and/or equipment. It will also expand on and update information provided in approximately two dozen past NAFE papers on various aspects of fall incident analysis, most of which are more than 10 to 30 years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1865 British Imperial governments had accepted that colonial courts had the authority to invalidate colonial statutes which contravened the relevant colony's constitution. This situation arose notwithstanding the lack of any express grant of such jurisdiction to colonial courts in Imperial or colonial legislation. This paper evaluates the first instance of a colonial court asserting that jurisdiction, during the Dog Act crisis in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in the 1840s. Part one of the paper charts the background to, conduct of and judgment in the relevant litigation. The second part, which will appear in a future issue of this journal, explores the consequential attempts of the colony's Governor to remove the judges from office and to re-enact the invalidated colonial law. The suggestion made is that the Dog Act controversy provides considerable insight into how, despite the absence of any explicit statutory grant of such jurisdiction, the power of judicial review of colonial legislation by colonial courts became established as an orthodox element of British colonial constitutional law in the latter nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treaties are concluded by States but often impose rights and obligations directly upon private parties. Can private parties contract out of a treaty including States' oppositions without explicit permissions granted by the treaty? The complexity between party autonomy and State sovereignty is reflected in recent cases and unsettled debates regarding the Hague Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extra Judicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters of November 15, 1965 ("HSC"). The HSC contains a large number of oppositions made by 65 Contracting States including China, Germany, India, and Singapore. Combining public and private international law, this paper aims to explore the correlative relationship between party autonomy and State sovereignty in applying the HSC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It did not take long for Oatly to falter beneath the unblinking eye of investors. Within two months of going public, the global oat milk company faced multiple allegations of securities fraud. Oatly had merely intended to reassure investors: "sustainability is at the core of our business." Instead, those eight words became kindling for litigation. Without pause, investors filed a class-action lawsuit in a New York federal district court alleging the company misled investors about its environmental practices and artificially inflated its stock price. For Oatly, it was an unexpected welcome to a new era of climate litigation. The story of Oatly's slip-up is an increasingly common narrative in climate-related litigation. As investor interest in sustainability grows, so does the risk of liability for public companies and directors. Attempts to mitigate the litigation risks are costly, but ignoring the risk carries even greater, perhaps even crippling, costs. True, companies have long been willing to volunteer climate information to investors in their sustainability reports, recognizing the reduction in risk premiums associated with such disclosures. But investors have challenged those disclosures as avalanches of information lacking meaningful, actionable data. Indeed, investors and directors alike are often left "drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. This paper addresses a new era of climate litigation, exploring the well-traveled private causes of action for securities fraud against the backdrop of the SEC's proposed climate disclosure rules. As written, the rules greatly expand the disclosure requirements for public companies. In doing so, the proposed rules also extend the footholds for private plaintiffs seeking to mount a securities class-action lawsuit. This paper analyzes these increased disclosure demands in the context of a historic reallocation of investment capital and the nascent ESG movement. Recognizing these climate-change efforts punch forward with considerable momentum, this paper provides solutions for public and private companies alike to prepare for and succeed in an expanding and uncertain climate litigation arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the realm of autonomous driving tort, a significant disparity exists in the parties' access to autonomous driving data and essential technical information, resulting in challenges in unilateral proof. The traditional burden of proof framework in driving litigation is inadequate for direct application in the autonomous driving sphere. As we approach the era of widespread autonomous driving operations, there is an urgent need to clarify and redefine the allocation of the burden of proof in specific litigations. Utilizing comparative legal analysis and case studies, this paper delves into the disparities in the legislative provisions concerning the burden of proof for autonomous driving in Germany and China. China can learn from Germany's legislative precedence in shifting the burden of proof for "product defect" and "fault" onto the manufacturer, thereby requiring the infringed party to merely furnish preliminary evidence indicating a "causal relationship between the defect and the damage". This approach mitigates the evidentiary burden on the aggrieved party, clarifies the litigation procedures, incentivizes manufacturers to enhance the technology, reinforces risk management, and ultimately facilitates the progression of autonomous driving technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a defendant submitting a false guilty plea due to the penal incentive offered is not an uncommon phenomenon. While the practice has been legitimised based on the defendant's voluntary informed consent, it has often been argued that the structure of the plea-bargaining practice is coercive. Such can be the case whenever the plea offer entails a significant sentence differential, discrepancy in the form of punishment (a non-custodial sentence relative to a custodial one), or when the alternative of pleading guilty includes the risk of capital punishment. Having said that, plea-bargains have often been classified as a "non-coercive offer", whether due to their advantageous mutual character according to a baseline conception of coercion or being an offer that one can overcome according to an irresistible psychological account. While many scholars have struggled with the ambiguous notion of "coercive offers," the paper offers an alternative approach, arguing that it is the type of reasons to be considered within the offer that renders the bargain less than fully autonomous. It will be argued that the plea-bargain proposition infuses irrelevant (guilt-uncorrelated) penal considerations unrelated to the question of guilt. Such considerations are the wrong kind of reason for the guilty-plea decision, and due to the defendant's dependency on the plea offer, they distort the defendant's intentional character of her autonomous decision. It is part of the conception of the guilty plea. Though a defendant may autonomously intend to consider irrelevant penal considerations, such a decision cannot be genuinely considered a decision regarding the admission of guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I address the theory of excuse, or more precisely, exculpatory excuse, and the question of what it is that justifies the category of excuse. I address different potential grounds for the law of excuse, which are often run together in ways that confound rather than clarify, focusing on the role of blamelessness and unfairness of expectations in the theory of excuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will first review the debate over the definition and recognition of Indigenous peoples with regard to the people of Ryukyu/ Okinawa, focusing on the colonial history, specifically regarding the case of the lawsuit calling for the return of the Ryukyuan ancestral remains. Then, after an overview of the history of the lawsuit calling for the return of the Ryukyuan ancestors, which was instigated in 2018, I will present what has been achieved so far, the challenges that remain, and the prospects for the future. There, the 'colonialism by academic knowledge' nurtured since the colonial period will be exposed, and the recognition by the state of the people of Ryukyu and Okinawa as Indigenous peoples, and the possibility of solidarity among civil society and domestic and international Indigenous and minority peoples will be analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Bioéthica is the property of Universidad de Chile, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios en Bioetica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Terrorism research has gained much traction since the 9/11 attacks, but some sub genres of terrorism, such as right-wing terrorism, have remained under-studied areas. Unsurprisingly data sources to study these phenomena are scarce and frequently face unique data collection obstacles. This paper explores five major, social-scientific terrorism databases in regards to data on right-wing terrorist events. The paper also provides an in-depth examination of the utilization of criminal legal proceedings to research right-wing terrorist acts. Lastly, legal case databases are introduced and discussed to show the lack of available court information and case proceedings in regards to right-wing terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a method to identify manipulation of custodial suspects who attempt to invoke the Miranda right to legal counsel during a custodial interrogation. The method, developed from a combination of framing theory and hypergame theory, first documents the point where custodial suspects' preferences shift and second identifies the proximate cause of that shift using excerpts from legal cases. The method applies linguistic analysis within a hypergame framework to reveal rational behavior of custodial suspects who, despite owning an initial preference to invoke, waive their right to counsel without explicit pressure from police. The paper terms this shift in preferences "manipulation" adding the concept to hypergames and to the literature on noncooperative discursive exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the changes in Székely society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The topic is presented from a legal historical perspective because the scholarly literature has either paid no substantial attention to the legal framework of the early modern era or failed to utilize the sources relevant for Székely society. By re-examining already known sources and analyzing new ones, i.e., judicial proceedings, testimonies, contract and personal letters, it appears that the main turning points of the history of Székely society have been misinterpreted in some aspects, and a series of new questions have emerged that are yet to be answered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the organization of the independent Transylvanian central court of law, the so-called Royal/Voivodal/Princely Table (Tabula) and its court of appeal, the court of personal presence (personalis presentia), in the light of the modest secondary literature, dietary decisions, and archival sources. Manuscript and published sources of law referred to in the course of litigation in the Transylvanian Royal/Voivodal/Princely Table (Tabula, Curia) in the second half of the sixteenth century are also presented. Based on the analysed archival sources-mainly the various allegationes lawyers made-it may be concluded that different sources provided the grounds that were frequently given for the court decisions. The analysis of available sources shows that, besides the Tripartitum, which was mostly referred to, during the litigations lawyers generally used the laws of the Hungarian Kingdom, and that the Decreta of the Transylvanian diets and the Table judged some cases according to their own custom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standing is generally framed as a doctrine about plaintiffs. The basic question, the Supreme Court has said, is "whether the plaintiff is the proper party" to invoke the federal judicial power. Asking that question tends to obscure a natural corollary: Against whom? This Article attends to the other side of the "v." It argues that suits against private parties should be treated differently from suits against government officials for standing purposes because these two types of suits raise different structural concerns. Notwithstanding its focus on plaintiffs, the Supreme Court has said repeatedly that standing is "built" on the "single basic idea" of "the separation of powers. " When a government official is sued, a particular structural problem arises: If a court entertains the suit, it will be put in the position of supervising another branch of the government. And without some sort of injury requirement, the political branches might be subjected to continuous judicial oversight. As a historical matter, Article III standing doctrine developed primarily in this context. But the structural concern prompted by that context is absent when one private party sues another private party. There is no prospect that such a suit will yield a remedy against a government official. The suit may, of course, raise other constitutional problems, but those other problems should not be shoehorned into standing--an avowedly transsubstantive jurisdictional doctrine that derives from Article III. This theoretical claim is bolstered by a striking fact: Until 2020, the Supreme Court had never dismissed a case for lack of Article III standing when the defendant was a private party on the ground that the injury alleged was insufficient. And, as it followed this pattern, the Court was notably more generous in recognizing standing in cases against private parties than in cases against governmental parties. But the Court recently broke this pattern. In two closely divided opinions, the Court held--for the first time--that private parties could not sue other private parties because the injuries alleged were inadequate. Congress's attempt to authorize those suits thus violated Article III. This paper critiques those decisions, situates them in the broader arc of the development of standing law, and surveys the prospects for doctrinal reconstruction. To do so, it proposes a novel framework to return the law of standing to its historical and conceptual moorings. Under that framework, standing doctrine should not limit Congress's (or the states') power to authorize lawsuits between private parties in federal court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After more than a decade of extensive reform of administrative litigation, which, despite clearly defined goals, did not yield the expected results, and after numerous requests and criticisms from practice and legal theory, a new Law on Administrative Disputes has been prepared. It contains numerous innovations primarily aimed at increasing the efficiency of administrative litigation. The paper presents and analyzes the basic novelties introduced by the new legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document evidence that firms systematically increase specialized, locally targeted advertising following the firm being taken to trial in that given location, precisely following initiation of the suit. In particular, we use legal actions brought against publicly traded firms over the 20-year sample period that progress to trial between 1995 and 2014. In terms of magnitude, the increase is sizable: targeted local advertising increases by 23% (t = 4.37) following the suit. They focus their advertisement spikes specifically toward jury trials, and in fact specifically toward the most likely jury pool. Last, we document that these advertising spikes are associated with verdicts, increasing the probability of a favorable outcome. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance. Funding: We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation [Grant SciSIP-1535813]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4896. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuroimaging and other neurobiological evidences are increasingly introduced in criminal litigation, especially when a neuropsychiatric disorder is suspected. Evaluations of criminal competencies are the most common type of criminal forensic assessment in forensic psychiatry and psychology. Given this, it is critical for forensic evaluators to understand how neuropsychiatric disorders may affect a defendant's criminal competencies and how neurobiological data may be used in competency determinations. This paper reviews the use of neurobiological data, particularly neuroimaging, while considering the limitations and potential misuse of such data in criminal competency evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the impacts of decreased shareholder litigation risk on firm productivity. Shareholder litigation provides shareholders a mechanism to enforce rights and mitigate agency conflicts. We use a staggered state‐level adoption of universal demand (UD) laws as an exogenous shock that suppressed the number of shareholder derivative lawsuits. We show that the resulting deterioration in corporate governance, coupled with increased managerial attention, had mixed effects on productivity. Adverse effects resulting from lower litigation risk are primarily observed in firms facing low takeover threats. Conversely, firms with incentivised management achieved a higher productivity growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper poses a puzzle for contemporary Kantian political philosophy. Kantian political philosophers hold that the state's purpose is to secure the conditions for people's innate right to equal freedom, while at the same time claiming that innate right does not give a determinate set of conditions that the state is to bring about. Officials, then, have to make decisions in cases where the considerations of innate right provide no further guidance. I argue that, intuitively, in such cases there are (i) some further considerations that officials may appeal to and (ii) some further considerations that officials may not appeal to in order to decide among the options consistent with people's innate right and then raise difficulties for the ability of current Kantian accounts to explain how they can accept both (i) and (ii). I conclude by suggesting one potential path forward for Kantians to address this puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patent litigation is an important component of a strong appropriability regime, critical for ensuring that firms can effectively protect their patented inventions. An issue that has mostly gone unnoticed in the innovation literature is the role of the rules and procedures of patent litigation in helping to create unintended knowledge spillovers. Using an inductive approach, we examine where, what, and how spillovers occur in the litigation process. Our findings demonstrate that knowledge spillovers can happen throughout the litigation process, and benefit not only the defendant but also the plaintiff. Furthermore, we show that the knowledge spilled over is often about proprietary methods and procedures utilized by a litigant to bring about an innovation, above and beyond the knowledge already in the patent. Based on these findings, we develop a framework for how knowledge spillovers happen during litigation, offering a more nuanced perspective on how strong appropriability regimes work. Finally, we suggest a number of directions for future policy development in this arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Paper is a reaction to AWE v. Goldsmith (Warhol), which found that Warhol's adaptation of a photograph of Prince, taken by photographer Lynn Goldsmith, is not protected from copyright liability by the fair use defense. The Warhol dissent accuses the majority of being overly concerned with the commercial character of Warhol's use, while the dissent emphasizes the artistically transformative quality of Warhol's adaptation. These different approaches provide strong evidence that the theory of fair use remains unclear to the Court. There is a need for a simple positive theory of thefair use doctrine. That need was largely met by Gordon's article in 1982. I aim to develop the economic theory of fair use further. especially in light of case law since 1982. A theory of fair use is at the same time a theory of the scope of copyright. I clarify the economic basis for jair use, taking advantage of basic concepts in welfare economics. As a general matter, the optimal scope of copyright minimizes the sum of dynamic (having to do with incentives over time) and static (having to do with allocation at a given time) welfare costs. One proposition advanced is that the concepts of economic complementarity, substitutability, and preference correlation provide crucial analytical tools in resolving fair use disputes. This proposition may seem narrow, but it stands the approach taken in the cases on its head. I explain how the approach urged here works ** by applying it to several cases, including Warhol and Google v. Oracle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the literature on the Nkonya-Alavanyo conflict references litigation and its apparent ineffectiveness in resolving the conflict, there is a paucity of detail about this litigation. This paper contributes to a more holistic comprehension of the discourses structuring resolution attempts in this conflict, with lessons for the resolution of communal conflicts generally. Drawing on archival data, media reports, and field interviews, we examine the trajectory of the Nkonya-Alavanyo conflict in the Ghanaian judicial system as an example of an intractable communal conflict that has defied legal attempts at resolution. We argue that judicial attempts at resolving the conflict have been ineffective because the resultant juridical discourse is polysemic and – to the extent that the non-negotiable value of justice is a factor in the conflict – is subject to divergent articulations. Second, we submit that the juridical discourse competes with State, civil society, and partisan articulations that do not privilege judicial decisions, with State discourse increasingly being one of militarisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contemporary Accounting Research is the property of Canadian Academic Accounting Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Contemporary Accounting Research is the property of Canadian Academic Accounting Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Limited research has focused on the influence of judge independence on firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR), despite extensive literature examining the impact of the legal environment on CSR. To address this gap, we analyze the staggered adoption of judicial delocalization reform in China. This reform aimed to enhance local judges' independence and our analysis shows that firms have exhibited higher CSR scores since its implementation. Our channel analysis reveals an increase in lawsuits and monetary claims against firms due to the reform, indicating that firms engage in CSR activities to mitigate the negative effects of legal proceedings. The impact of the reform on CSR is stronger for high-litigation-risk firms and weaker for politically connected firms. Moreover, the positive relationship between the reform and CSR is more pronounced in regions with higher levels of government interference with judges before the reform. In summary, our findings highlight the important role of a supportive legal environment in fostering CSR, emphasizing the influence of judge independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Environmental & Social Management Journal / Revista de Gestão Social e Ambiental is the property of Environmental & Social Management Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Delays in legal proceedings significantly impact both corporate finances and individual livelihoods. Traditional methods for managing these delays typically rely on subjective assessments of what constitutes a reasonable process duration. This study explores a more precise approach by integrating machine learning and process mining techniques to enhance prediction of legal proceedings' overall time. Diverging from previous works that either utilized machine learning analysis or process mining in isolation, this research synergizes these approaches. We applied process mining clustering techniques to over 60,000 cases from Brazilian labor courts to segment cases based on their procedural movements, creating clusters. These clusters, along with other procedural characteristics, such as case subject, class, and digital status, were then incorporated into a feature set for regression modelling. We employed linear regression, support vector regressor, and gradient boosting based methods to develop models that predicted case duration. The gradient boosting model demonstrated the best performance with an R 2 -score of 0.87. Furthermore, our analysis identifies time bands where the model performs better and employs explainable AI techniques to elucidate key features influencing case durations. The clustering features emerged among the most significant for the task. The proposed combined approach offers a comprehensive method for analyzing and forecasting legal case timelines and also shows the potential of process mining clustering techniques to improve the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarly discourse on fanfic and other fan works emerged over a decade ago as a niche topic mostly of interest to fans. It has since generated dozens of articles and a small but steadily increasing amount of litigation. When the subject was new, each article had to begin with an explanation of what fan works are, why fictional characters are or are not protected by copyright, and how parody and fair use are related. This Article seeks to place a capstone on the author's work during that early era of fanfic scholarship and to move the discourse forward by providing a brief review of foundational issues and previous work in the field before looking to new developments and making hopeful predictions for the future of the law governing fan works. The Article first discusses the fundamental challenge of delineating the border between derivative and transformative uses and then addresses the rights that must be balanced by the law regulating fan works: those of authors and those of consumers/fandom. Copyright law primarily protects the economic rights of authors, but this protection is essentially static; the Article argues that fan works can act dynamically to save the underlying originals from becoming dated or being dragged down by the original author, and copyright law, as it evolves, should acknowledge the cultural interest thus protected. Future developments in copyright law must consider the need for a system of shared and limited copyright, address past cultural appropriation by authors and related harms, and look beyond the flaws of individual authors and toward the fandom as a whole. The Article ultimately suggests that the recognition of a shared common area for creativity between authors and fans can not only benefit fans but also authors, both economically and in non-quantifiable ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a court case in which the federal district court for the Northern District of Alabama affirmed the granting of summary judgments for plaintiffs claiming that the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is unconstitutional. In National Small Business United, et. al. v. Yellen, the court supported the Department of the Treasury and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in their enforcement of the CTA.

The article investigates whether holdout litigation during the debt workout of defaulting sovereigns is a plain vileness or a necessary evil for an efficient sovereign debt market. Typically, litigation is one of the rare options available to creditors to contest adverse terms of the debt restructuring. Critics have nonetheless linked holdout litigation to higher borrowing costs and the inability to access global financial markets. They contend that litigation disrupts sovereign debt workouts and is the primary cause of slow and ineffective debt restructuring. Conversely, protagonists of holdout litigation have argued that litigation is crucial to having an efficient sovereign debt market and, hence, an essential part of the market. The authors argue that although litigations can create holdout problems, they are beneficial and necessary for a functional or effective market for sovereign debt as they guarantee an efficient market and streams of private credit for capital creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most-favored-nation (MFN) provisions have formed the center of a jurisdictional dispute that has plagued international arbitration for the past two decades. Since the Maffezini decision in 2000, holding that MFN clauses can be used to import jurisdictional provisions, the international arbitral system has seen a long succession of inconsistent and irreconcilable arbitral decisions, some following Maffezini's approach and others rejecting it. The result is a jurisdictional crisis in international arbitration that has consumed opposing parties' time and money, undermined the international arbitral system's legitimacy, and called into question the very reasons for the system's existence. However, a glimmer of hope has emerged: A new variety of MFN clauses has begun to appear that explicitly specify that they do not apply to procedural issues. Despite their potential to solve one of international arbitration's most intractable problems, these jurisdiction-limiting MFN clauses have largely escaped serious analysis. This Note fills this gap in scholarship by providing the first academic analysis focused exclusively on these new jurisdiction-limiting provisions, analyzing the trend towards the increased use of these provisions, the form the provisions take, their reception in arbitrated cases, and the implications that these provisions carry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a subset of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers’ bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits as contests over reparations. By exploring this unappreciated history, this article argues that enslavers themselves believed reparations were due and were willing to pay them, that there was a general agreement between enslaved and enslaver about the form reparations should take, and that there was a similar understanding that reparations should be generational. The article further suggests the promise of additional inquiry into historical testamentary records. Such a novel archive would add to contemporary arguments in favor of reparations by identifying an unacknowledged effort to provide compensation to formerly enslaved people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the challenges faced by employees in the Czech Republic when seeking legal redress in cases of discrimination and unfair dismissal. It emphasizes the importance of accessible legal recourse as a means to rectify individual grievances and reinforce equitable employment practices. In the context of discrimination, the article discusses challenges such as low awareness of anti-discrimination rights and the ancillary nature of sanctions. Recommendations include aligning the Anti-Discrimination Act with the Civil Code, empowering NGOs or the Ombudsman to initiate lawsuits in the public interest, and raising awareness among potential victims. In the section on unfair dismissal, the article outlines the complex process involved in disputing terminations from an employee's perspective. It discusses obstacles such as complex, costly, and lengthy legal procedures and the requirement for reinstatement. These challenges contribute to the low number of employment lawsuits in the Czech Republic. Recommendations for improvement include enhancing the visibility of court actions, providing free or subsidized legal advice, shifting the focus of lawsuits towards monetary compensation, promoting mediation, and expediting proceedings. The article identifies common challenges in discrimination and unfair dismissal cases in the Czech Republic, highlighting the need for reforms to improve access to justice, reduce financial barriers, expedite legal proceedings, and enhance the dissuasive impact of remedies. These reforms are seen as essential for creating a fair and equitable workplace environment for all employees in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintaining balance is critical to minimizing astronauts' risk of falling and reducing injury or suit damage. Previous studies involving spacesuits have not examined the effects of the superior shift of the center of gravity (CoG) on astronauts' ability to balance. Here, the purpose of our study was to investigate the effects of CoG shift due to a simulated Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) on balance. Seventeen participants' standing balance was examined for three test configurations: unsuited, weighted with an Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) vest, and xEMU hard upper body torso (HUT). Using a Tekscan forceplate walkway, the CoG locations were determined. Balance assessments were performed to determine the limits of stability and standing balance performance during wide or tandem stances with eyes open/closed. The center of pressure (CoP) time series was examined in terms of displacement, velocity, and frequency measures. During the eyes-open wide stance, the xEMU vest significantly increased the mediolateral balance parameters, while the HUT significantly increased the total displacement (TOTEX), mean velocity (MVELO), and mean frequency (MFREQ) of the CoP. In the eyes-closed wide stance, the HUT significantly increased these parameters. In the eyes-closed tandem stance, the xEMU vest significantly decreased the parameters. The xEMU vest significantly reduced the TOTEX, MVELO, and MFREQ (improved standing balance), while the HUT decreased standing balance ability, seen with significant increases in said parameters. By quantifying CoG's effect on balance, our results form the basis for future balance and posture studies of xEMU spacesuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airports represent a crucial a sector of the US infrastructure, but they were documented to have scored a D+. To mitigate this, governmental authorities have issued initiatives to update the airport infrastructure. With an expected critical junction for a major transformation in the airport sector, it is anticipated that airport projects will increase. This shall result in an escalation in the number of disputes. Previous research analyzed dispute concerns within the construction sector, but none tackled the perspective of airport projects. Accordingly, the goal of this study is to investigate the leading causes of disputes in litigation within US airport projects through data-driven techniques. To achieve this goal, a three-step methodology is adopted, including (1) collecting a comprehensive list of federal and state litigation cases to map the data and identify the causes of disputes; (2) clustering and visualizing the data using k -means and network analysis (NA), respectively; and (3) determining the key associations emanating from the dispute clusters through association rule analysis (ARA). The outcomes of this research revealed a total of 23 dispute causes clustered across four groups. Results of the NA indicated that the most common dispute causes are those involved with ambiguity in contractual interpretation, incurred damages, safety issues, and negligence or lack to duty of care. ARA identified several key associations and risk themes related to (1) financial assurance and operational performance: (2) contractual compliance and execution; (3) business affiliation, methods, and inclusion; (4) integrity and misconduct; (5) regulatory hurdles and area effects; and (6) collaboration and teamwork challenges. By identifying these associations and causes of disputes, airport stakeholders can implement early proactive measures that aim to mitigate dispute risks experienced. Ultimately, this study is of value to stakeholders concerned with the overall support and success of dispute management procedures in US airport projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research, an innovative state space-based Transformer model is proposed to address the challenges of complex system prediction tasks. By integrating state space theory, the model aims to enhance the capability to capture dynamic changes in complex data, thereby improving the accuracy and robustness of prediction tasks. Extensive experimental validations were conducted on three representative tasks, including legal case judgment, legal case translation, and financial data analysis to assess the performance and application potential of the model. The experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements of the proposed model over traditional Transformer models and other advanced variants such as Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) and Finsformer across all evaluated tasks. Specifically, in the task of legal case judgment, the proposed model exhibited a precision of 0.93, a recall of 0.90, and an accuracy of 0.91, significantly surpassing the traditional Transformer model (with precision of 0.78, recall of 0.73, accuracy of 0.76) and performances of other comparative models. In the task of legal case translation, the precision of the proposed model reached 0.95, with a recall of 0.91 and an accuracy of 0.93, also outperforming other models. Likewise, in the task of financial data analysis, the proposed model also demonstrated excellent performance, with a precision of 0.94, recall of 0.90, and accuracy of 0.92. The state space-based Transformer model proposed not only theoretically expands the research boundaries of deep learning models in complex system prediction but also validates its efficiency and broad application prospects through experiments. These achievements provide new insights and directions for future research and development of deep learning models, especially in tasks requiring the understanding and prediction of complex system dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article generalizes the analysis of settlement under joint and several liability from lawsuits involving one plaintiff and two defendants to those involving n ≥ 2 defendants. We demonstrate that, depending upon the correlation of outcomes among the defendants, but regardless of the distribution of liability shares, joint and several liability may encourage plaintiffs to select some defendants for litigation while settling with those remaining. In particular, under joint and several liability, when each defendant is grouped with others sharing correlated outcomes, and the plaintiff's probability of success against any defendant is sufficiently high, we show that, in all Nash equilibrium, the plaintiff litigates against the defendant from each group with the smallest share and settles with all other defendants. There are a continuum of equilibria but they are all payoff-equivalent up to permutation. Plaintiff's payoff is identical in all equilibria; only the payoffs of the members with the smallest share within a group are permuted. We also show that, for sufficiently high plaintiff's probability of success, this result holds even when the defendants are allowed to form coalitions, and derive the set of offers in the behaviorally unique coalition proof Nash equilibrium; as before, these offers induce litigation against the defendant with the smallest share in each group and settlement with all other defendants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research indicates that auditors have an impoverished understanding of trial preparation factors that, independent of audit quality, can significantly elevate audit litigation risk. As the scholarly literature sheds little insight about the nature and implications of these factors, we identify what factors audit litigators consider in trial preparation, how they expect these factors to affect litigation outcomes, and how they attempt to leverage these factors. To do so, we interview 39 audit litigators, who identify factors germane to trial venues, jury pools, and case arguments. Guided by the elaboration likelihood model, we construct a framework that predicts these factors influence litigation outcomes by changing jurors' motivation and/or capability to elaborate. Importantly, we find that litigators who defend (sue) auditors strategically maneuver these factors to increase (decrease) the likelihood of higher juror elaboration, because higher elaboration is favorable to auditors. We discuss implications of our results for practice and research. JEL Classifications: K22; K40; K41; M4; M41; M42. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]