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This article discusses the unique challenges which face LGBTQ+ individuals and couples in estate planning. It covers the history of marriage equality, including recent legislation; issues couples should consider when preparing for marriage; the various types of estate planning documents and special considerations for LGBTQ+ clients regarding these documents; issues related to LGBTQ+ couples who are parents; and including respectful language in legal documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is indicated in a legal state, regulation of interaction between members of society, coordination of their interests and smoothing of conflicts arising between them and their associations is unthinkable without law. With the help of the influence of law on social relations, it is possible to order and regulate them in a civilized manner. In the sphere of achieving a state of security, the law allows you to set the limits of what is permitted, to determine the obligations and prohibitions in the behavior of the relevant subjects. Due to regulatory legal regulation, security receives a unique meaning that determines the final goal of its provision, connects it with national priorities and interests of each legal entity, preventing blurring of the understanding of the essential characteristics of the basic category «national security» and its derivatives. The conducted scientific analysis of the legal regulation of the economic security system of Ukraine made it possible to conclude that it has a complex and multifaceted nature, that is, it involves the creation of a complex of legal, economic and administrative-organizational mechanisms aimed at ensuring the rights of citizens and other subjects of economic activity to protect private property, economic freedom and unimpeded implementation of economic and other economic activities. It is pointed out that the state should implement the appropriate organizational and legal provision of economic security of Ukraine, aimed at increasing the investment attractiveness of the country, eliminating offenses in the economic sphere. The analysis of regulatory legal acts made it possible to single out the following shortcomings of the legal provision of economic security of Ukraine: complexity, vagueness and inconsistency of individual legislative norms, ambiguous interpretation in their application; inconsistency between developers and lack of system of legal acts regulating economic security. It was concluded that the presence of such shortcomings indicates the need to modify approaches to the formation of legal support for the economic security of the state, to make changes to the current legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the participation and engagement of ethnic groups and minorities in Kosovo’s political and institutional life during the post-war period (after 1999) and the post-independence phase (after 2008). The involvement of minorities in Kosovo’s institutional framework is grounded in the concept of a multiethnic state, with constitutional and legal provisions ensuring their rights. These provisions enable minorities to participate in all areas of state activity within the Republic of Kosovo. The paper addresses how circumstances and opportunities for participation have evolved, the challenges, threats, and risks faced, and what legislative measures have been enacted to ensure the political and institutional representation of ethnic groups and minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the current status of China's legislation on safeguarding sovereignty and security, resource security, navigation security, ecological security, and regulating law enforcement and judicial activities, and summarizes the characteristics of existing marine security legislation. This paper utilizes literature analysis and comparative analysis methods, under China's Overall National Security Outlook, this paper proposes a path of improvement by consolidating marine-related norms, promoting the formulation of a basic law on the seas, refining the legal provisions on marine security, improving the marine data classification and grading system and safeguarding marine data security, and pushing forward the reform of the adjudication mechanism of the maritime courts to enhance the ability to actively safeguard the rights and interests of the oceans and seas through the use of the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is a personal essay written by Dana Lloyd, reflecting on her experiences and struggles as an academic writer. She explores the concept of positionality and the challenges of finding her own voice in her academic work. Lloyd also discusses the controversial figure of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and his treatment of Indigenous peoples. She contemplates the importance of imagination and the need to transcend boundaries in academic writing. Ultimately, Lloyd reflects on her own journey to find her voice and the impact of her father's absence on her identity. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the author's personal journey from studying the TMT dispute on Mauna Kea to becoming an advocate for the Native Hawaiian community. It highlights the value of engaged scholarship, which involves building relationships with communities and participating in advocacy efforts. The author emphasizes the importance of community-led decision-making and the need for scholars to navigate the complexities of advocacy while maintaining scholarly integrity. The text also discusses the author's involvement in a project to create toolkits based on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for Indigenous communities, and reflects on the lessons learned from their experiences. [Extracted from the article]

The surge in visibility of human rights abuses within the seafood supply chain has propelled scrutiny into the sustainability of global fisheries, leading to heightened interest in the social performance of seafood companies and questioning the obligations of States in upholding human rights under international law. This review aims to bring clarity on where responsibility for ensuring compliance with human rights law lies within the context of the fishing industry. It provides a comprehensive analysis of international legal provisions related to the human rights of fishers, derived from both treaty law and State practice. To effectively address human rights and labor abuses, a transformative approach that prioritizes the wellbeing of workers over profit is needed, involving the implementation of participatory strategies, empowering workers and the cultivation of shared responsibility. Despite the proactive role played by the private sector in developing global standards, the review uncovers inherent limitations in relying solely on certifications for comprehensive human rights protection. The study concludes that international human right law unequivocally applies to fishers, with States primarily responsible for enforcement. As enforcement remains a challenge in the maritime context, particularly on the high seas, the burden for solutions should rest on a collaborative effort within the international arena to ensure a sustainable and ethical future for global seafood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the conventional dating of Shakespeare's plays and presents evidence to support earlier dates for The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Tempest. It discusses the difficulties of determining dates based on publication and performance records and suggests that the plays may have been written for court performances. The text explores various allusions and potential influences on Shakespeare's plays, including references to other works and the possibility of Oxford being the true author. It also examines the presence and influence of Hamlet in Elizabethan literature and discusses connections between different plays. Additionally, the article explores the potential influence of other playwrights on Shakespeare's works, such as George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston's play "Eastward Ho!" The author argues for a reevaluation of the chronology of Shakespeare's plays based on these allusions and influences. [Extracted from the article]

[Purpose] The threat of cyber-attacks is very acute. The purpose of this paper is to examine the need of the amendment of rules of international law required for the cyber resilient enterprise. [Methodology] This paper proposes a novel approach investigating whether the amendment of rules of international law is required for the cyber resilient enterprise. The methodology of international legal research and analysis of data is applied. [Findings] The analyses in this paper show the impact of the cyber security on the shipping industry. The proposals of documents on cyber security and recommendations for maritime cyber risk management are discussed. [Practical Implications] This study is useful for practitioners to consider and evaluate the cyber security. This study is useful for graduate students as well. [Originality] Although some research is being conducted in this area, maritime cybersecurity has not been deeply investigated. This paper presents a detailed analysis of legal documents and research published in international studies on the law of cyber security for maritime industry highlighting security problems and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, the rule of law was largely overlooked by sociologists and other social scientists. However, recent years have seen an increasing number of empirical studies of the rule of law. I survey that diverse literature and identify three generations of empirical research, each based on a different approach: (a) the rule of law in action, (b) the rule of law index, and (c) the living rule of law. These studies give us a detailed, but often sobering, view of the rule of law in the real world. I critically review the emerging field and discuss challenges for future research. Developing a more coherent social science of the rule of law is important because it helps us to understand that the rule of law is defined not only by formal institutions and legal documents but also by the place of law in people's everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the evolution of legal writing in the context of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), which is revolutionizing how legal professionals craft persuasive arguments. Topics include the significance of Aristotle's principles of persuasion in legal writing, the importance of adopting a growth mindset and learning from established legal writers, and the practical application of AI tools to enhance clarity and effectiveness in legal documents.

Nodaways, diverse artificial intelligence techniques have been applied to analyse datasets in the legal domain. Precisely, several studies aim at predicting the decision to help the competent authority resolve a specific legal process. However, AI-based prediction algorithms are usually black-box, and explaining why the algorithm predicted a label remains challenging. Therefore, this paper proposes a 5-step methodology for analysing legal documents from the agency responsible for resolving administrative sanction procedures related to consumer protection. Our methodology starts with corpus collection, pre-processing, and TF vectorisation. Later, fifteen machine and deep learning algorithms were tested, and the best-performing one was selected based on quality metrics. Interpretability is emphasised, with the SHAP scores used to explain predictions. The results show that our methodology contributes to the understanding the decisive influence of legal terms and their connection to the decision made by the competent authority. By providing tools for legal professionals to make more informed decisions, develop effective legal strategies, and ensure fairness and transparency in the legal decision-making process, this methodology has broad implications for various legal areas beyond disputes, including administrative procedures like bankruptcies and unfair competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The large volume of court decision documents in Indonesia poses a challenge for researchers to assist legal practitioners in extracting useful information from the documents. This information can also benefit the general public by improving legal transparency, law enforcement, and people's understanding of the law implementation in Indonesia. A natural language processing task that extracts important information from a document is called named entity recognition (NER). In this study, the NER task is applied to legal domains, which is then referred to as legal entity recognition (LER) task. In this task, some important legal entities, such as judges, prosecutors, and advocates, are extracted from the decision documents. A new Indonesian LER dataset is built, called IndoLER data, consisting of approximately 1K decision documents with 20 types of finegrained legal entities. Then, the transformer-based models, such as multilingual bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) or M-BERT, Indonesian BERT or IndoBERT, Indonesian robustly optimized BERT pretraining approach (RoBERTa) or IndoRoBERTa, XLM (cross lingual language model)-RoBERTa or XLMR, are proposed to solve the Indonesian LER task using this dataset. Our experimental results show that the RoBERTa-based models, such as XLM-R and IndoRoBERTa, can outperform the state-of-the-art deep-learning baselines using BiLSTM (bidirectional long short-term memory) and BiLSTM-conditional random field (BiLSTM-CRF) approaches by 7.2% to 7.9% and 2.1% to 2.6%, respectively. XLM-RoBERTa is shown to be the best-performing model, achieving the F1-score of 0.9295. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Methods Results Conclusion In Japan, amidst insufficient legal provisions and governmental support, in 2010, the first rape crisis center, the Sexual Assault Crisis Healing Intervention Center Osaka (SACHICO) was established. We compared SACHICO visitor data from 2010 to 2021 with National Police Agency statistics to clarify the current situation of sexual assault victims in Japan and considered future issues for Japan to address.This study was a cross‐sectional study that analyzed the data described below. All visitations to SACHICO between April 2010 and December 2021 were considered targets for data totaling. Data on crime statistics were gathered from the official governmental statistics portal site.A total of 12 036 visitations occurred, of which 3189 were first‐time consultations; 3100 initial medical examinations were conducted, and no medical examination was conducted in the remaining 89 cases (2.7%). The number of initial medical examinations increased 3.7 times from 2010 to 2021. Victims under the age of 19 comprised 60% of the total number of initial medical examinations (1863/3100). The reporting rate for all 3100 initial medical examinations was only 31.3% (969/3100) of the cases. The proportion of forcible sexual intercourse versus forcible indecency were the converse of those observed among acknowledged cases nationwide and in Osaka Prefecture. For several years, the number of initial medical consultations at SACHICO has exceeded that of acknowledged cases in Osaka Prefecture.Support for victims of sexual assault in Japan is still insufficient. It is necessary to strengthen the system of rape crisis centers system to realize an unbroken chain of support for victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the legal challenges of Cambodia's intellectual property rights in the context of Southeast Asia. Despite significant progress in adopting legal frameworks in line with international standards, Cambodia's IP system still needs to develop compared to that of other ASEAN countries. This study focuses on Cambodia's commitment to the implementation of the WTO and ASEAN obligations and details the legal provisions for trademarks, copyrights and patents. This section highlights issues such as the complexity of trademark registration procedures, restrictions on the application of IP rights and the absence of comprehensive legislation in emerging IP categories. Furthermore, it examines the effectiveness of dispute settlement mechanisms and the role of national institutions such as the National Commercial Arbitration Center (NCAC). The findings highlight the need for continuous legal reforms to promote a strong intellectual property environment, attract foreign investment and support Cambodia's economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to speed up the purchases of essential products and services required by the public administration to tackle the sanitary crisis caused by COVID-19, the Brazilian federal government enacted laws No. 13,979 and No. 14,035 in 2020, exempting such items from the procurement process. This research aimed to investigate the impact of the flexibility in Brazilian law on government bids. For this purpose, a database composed of items acquired between January 2019 and December 2020 was built, and the empirical strategy was based on Difference-in-Differences models. The results indicate that the effect of this legal provision on the price of potentially affected items was an increase of approximately 5%. Some explanations for this price increase are due to the pressure of demand, changes in the strategic planning of companies and in the way they allocate their workers, which affect the costs of these companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article applies the method of historical research, using a temporal perspective dating back to 1985, to trace the evolution of market valuation principles for real estate in Poland. These principles evolved similarly to those in many other post-socialist countries, influenced by political and socio-economic transformations and the resulting list of objectives for which these values became essential. The changing legal regulations allowing for the emergence and development of a free real estate market played a decisive role in this process. It was also a period of preparing real estate valuation professionals to meet these requirements. Today, the methodology of valuation, under increasing pressure from various real estate market entities and the rapid advancement of intelligent data collection and processing technologies, is undergoing further evolution. In many countries, including Poland, lively discussions and disputes are ongoing regarding the legal authorization of statistical tools and automated valuation models in valuation practice. These possibilities are being considered particularly in the context of mass property valuations for tax purposes. The methodology involves the analysis of Polish legal provisions, foreign literature, and documents proving the gradual marketization of valuation principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extrajudicial use of legal norms by activists. It aims to show how law serves as a useful symbolic resource for activists to strengthen their strategies for political pressure outside the courts. It does this through a qualitative investigation of six citizen debt audit groups from three European countries (France, Belgium, and Spain). Based on an analysis of legal provisions mobilised by activists in public documents, when addressing decision-makers, and in interviews, we identify several common uses of the law: the 'legal call to order'; the 'contradiction game between norms of the same legal order'; the 'call to derogation of certain norms'; and, the 'call to produce new norms'. This work is a valuable contribution to legal consciousness studies. We assert that activists have a complex legal consciousness, being neither completely enchanted ('before the law'), nor completely withdrawn ('against the law'). In their political interventions, the citizen audit groups under study rely on certain legal norms that they consider legitimate to make claims, while they seek to disqualify others of the same legal order. One can thus contest positive law without being against the law per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the seventeenth century, missionaries in China translated a vast array of Chinese works, including classics, official histories, and legal documents. Their translations have been analysed through several perspectives, yet their use of Chinese dictionaries has been largely overlooked. In the context of the Rites Controversy, between the Jesuits on one side and the Dominican and Franciscan friars on the other, precise references to authoritative Chinese dictionaries were made to corroborate their interpretation of Chinese rituals as either religious or secular. This article first describes why and how missionaries started from the early beginning of the mission in the 1580s to write their own bilingual dictionaries based on existing Western and Chinese dictionaries. Then, it considers how the same dictionaries became an important reference when the Rites Controversy erupted in the 1630s. Based on manuscript and printed documents written until 1670, three Chinese characters which became the focus of competing interpretations are discussed: miao as temple versus hall, ji as sacrifice versus offering, and sheng as prophet versus wise man. Besides the problem of biased translations on both sides, we shall show that there was a more fundamental reason which prevented the missionaries from settling their controversy using dictionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of AI in various sectors most especially robotic lawyers in the legal system by some developed countries, has made tasks seamlessly achievable. Uganda has also had its fair share and benefits from the use of AI in various sectors, including the legal sector as it concerns virtual proceedings and virtual meetings. Although, the trending concept of robotic lawyers seems to enhance legal practice, however, the Uganda legal and socio-economic nomenclature, seem to pose restrictions. Concerning this, the study examines the legal and socio-economic issues concerning robotic lawyers practicing in Uganda. The study adopts a doctrinal method, data obtained from primary and secondary sources of material were analyse through a descriptive and analytical approach. The study found that the incorporating of robotic lawyers in Uganda, will provides several prospects. However, there are legal and socio-economic challenges, such as non-legal recognition, and challenges of maintaining and updating robotic lawyers, and it may result in a high level of unemployment. The study concludes and recommends that the concept of robotic lawyers is a welcome development. However, could incorporate robotic lawyers as a means of consultation for legal advice, storage of information, drafting of legal documents, and predicting and analysing legal outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mining industry is indispensable for development, and in developing countries like Ghana, it drives economic growth by generating revenue and creating job opportunities for millions of people. Nonetheless, irresponsible mining results in the deprivation of people's right to surface land, predominantly held under customary land tenure, with agriculture as the mainstay of livelihood. Mining activities have extensive repercussions for the land tenure system, resulting in the displacement of people, the loss of land rights, and reduced control and access to land. All these impact the economic, environmental, and social conditions of the people in the community. This systematic literature review thoroughly analyzes the impact of mining on land rights in Ghana, revealing complex dynamics, challenges, and possible remedies. To achieve this, 183 of an initial pool of 495 academic journals, research papers, books, reports, policies, and legal documents were critically reviewed. This research reveals the challenges faced by mining-induced communities because of the displacement which has resulted in the loss of ancestral lands and disruption to community life. The displacement is also coupled with economic disparities and social tension. Furthermore, the ripple effects of environmental degradation, such as deforestation, water pollution, noise, and air pollution, have dire consequences on land use and ownership, particularly for communities dependent on natural resources. This review brings to light various responses and effective strategies to mitigate the negative impacts of mining on land tenure in Ghana. These include community engagement strategies, corporate social responsibility initiatives, and legal reforms. This study reveals that mining compensation depends on the duration of the mining lease, therefore implying that the expropriated parties have reversionary interests in their lands. The procedure for giving the land back to the owner is not explicitly outlined in the law. This underscores the need for a review of the law governing mining, sustainable mining practices, and environmental management to safeguard the land tenure system. This review enlightens policymakers, researchers, mining enterprises, and local communities regarding the intricacies of this convergence, offering a foundation for well-informed decision making. It underscores the crucial importance of upholding sustainable development, social fairness, and responsible resource management within the framework of Ghana's diverse land tenure traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal documents, like contracts or laws, are subject to interpretation. Different people can have different interpretations of the very same document. Large parts of judicial branches all over the world are concerned with settling disagreements that arise, in part, from these different interpretations. In this context, it only seems natural that during the annotation of legal machine learning data sets, disagreement, how to report it, and how to handle it should play an important role. This article presents an analysis of the current state-of-the-art in the annotation of legal machine learning data sets. The results of the analysis show that all of the analysed data sets remove all traces of disagreement, instead of trying to utilise the information that might be contained in conflicting annotations. Additionally, the publications introducing the data sets often do provide little information about the process that derives the "gold standard" from the initial annotations, often making it difficult to judge the reliability of the annotation process. Based on the state-of-the-art, the article provides easily implementable suggestions on how to improve the handling and reporting of disagreement in the annotation of legal machine learning data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to legal information is fundamental to access to justice. Yet accessibility refers not only to making legal documents available to the public, but also rendering legal information comprehensible to them. A vexing problem in bringing legal information to the public is how to turn formal legal documents such as legislation and judgments, which are often highly technical, to easily navigable and comprehensible knowledge to those without legal education. In this study, we formulate a three-step approach for bringing legal knowledge to laypersons, tackling the issues of navigability and comprehensibility. First, we translate selected sections of the law into snippets (called CLIC-pages), each being a small piece of article that focuses on explaining certain technical legal concept in layperson's terms. Second, we construct a Legal Question Bank, which is a collection of legal questions whose answers can be found in the CLIC-pages. Third, we design an interactive CLIC Recommender. Given a user's verbal description of a legal situation that requires a legal solution, CRec interprets the user's input and shortlists questions from the question bank that are most likely relevant to the given legal situation and recommends their corresponding CLIC pages where relevant legal knowledge can be found. In this paper we focus on the technical aspects of creating an LQB. We show how large-scale pre-trained language models, such as GPT-3, can be used to generate legal questions. We compare machine-generated questions against human-composed questions and find that MGQs are more scalable, cost-effective, and more diversified, while HCQs are more precise. We also show a prototype of CRec and illustrate through an example how our 3-step approach effectively brings relevant legal knowledge to the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the public availability of legal documents, there is a need for finding specific information contained in them, such as paragraphs, clauses, items and so on. With such support, users could find more specific information than only finding whole legal documents. Some research efforts have been made in this area, but there is still a lot to be done to have legal information available more easily to be found. Thus, due to the large number of published legal documents and the high degree of connectivity, simple access to the document is not enough. It is necessary to recover the related legal framework for a specific need. In other words, the retrieval of the set of legal documents and their parts related to a specific subject is necessary. Therefore, in this work, we present a proposal of a RDF-based graph to represent and search parts of legal documents, as the output of a set of terms that represents the pursued legal information. Such a proposal is well-grounded on an ontological view, which makes possible to describe the general structure of a legal system and the structure of legal documents, providing this way the grounds for the implementation of the proposed RDF graph in terms of the meaning of their parts and relationships. We posed several queries to retrieve parts of legal documents related to sets of words and the results were significant. [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.)

The article discusses a ruling by the Austrian Supreme Court on the liability for copyright infringement by university lecturers acting in their official capacity. Topics include the official nature of educational activities, the non-liability of universities and professors for such infringements, and the federal government's role in addressing these issues.

Transformer-based language models (TLMs) have widely been recognized to be a cutting-edge technology for the successful development of deep-learning-based solutions to problems and applications that require natural language processing and understanding. Like for other textual domains, TLMs have indeed pushed the state-of-the-art of AI approaches for many tasks of interest in the legal domain. Despite the first Transformer model being proposed about six years ago, there has been a rapid progress of this technology at an unprecedented rate, whereby BERT and related models represent a major reference, also in the legal domain. This article provides the first systematic overview of TLM-based methods for AI-driven problems and tasks in the legal sphere. A major goal is to highlight research advances in this field so as to understand, on the one hand, how the Transformers have contributed to the success of AI in supporting legal processes, and on the other hand, what are the current limitations and opportunities for further research development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing and evaluating legal case reports are labor-intensive tasks for judges and lawyers, who usually base their decisions on report abstracts, legal principles, and commonsense reasoning. Thus, summarizing legal documents is time-consuming and requires excellent human expertise. Moreover, public legal corpora of specific languages are almost unavailable. This paper proposes a transfer learning approach with extractive and abstractive techniques to cope with the lack of labeled legal summarization datasets, namely a low-resource scenario. In particular, we conducted extensive multi- and cross-language experiments. The proposed work outperforms the state-of-the-art results of extractive summarization on the Australian Legal Case Reports dataset and sets a new baseline for abstractive summarization. Finally, syntactic and semantic metrics assessments have been carried out to evaluate the accuracy and the factual consistency of the machine-generated legal summaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis (n = 59 million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English. Next, two preregistered text generation experiments (n = 286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In line with the magic spell hypothesis, we found people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. Contrary to the copy-and-edit hypothesis, we did not find evidence that people editing a legal document wrote in a more convoluted manner than when writing the same document from scratch. From a cognitive perspective, these results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicative efficiency. In particular, these findings indicate law's complexity to be derived from its performativity, whereby low-frequency structures may be inserted to signal law's authoritative, world-state-altering nature, at the cost of increased processing demands on readers. From a law and policy perspective, these results suggest that the tension between the ubiquity and impenetrability of the law is not an inherent one, and that laws can be simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous scholarship on Josh 15:16–19 and Judg 1:12–15 has drawn on ancient Near Eastern and Jewish laws pertaining to dowries as an aid for interpreting Achsah’s acquisition of property from her father. This article further elucidates the Achsah narrative by bringing it into conversation with legal documents pertaining to dowries from Mesopotamia that highlight their strategic use for purposes such as economic and social advancement. Drawing on insights from law and literature scholarship that highlight how narrative may offer a perspective on law, this article interrogates the ways that Achsah operates within the framework of legal norms pertaining to daughters, while also challenging them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased usage of generative artificial intelligence (AI) within the legal profession has prompted responses from the judiciary, resulting in the issuance of various practice directives. The spectrum of these directives ranges from conservative recommendations to more radical measures demanding lawyers to disclose their use of generative AI in the preparation of legal documents or certify the absence of such software in their creation. This article explores the development of a comprehensive framework for judicial guidance on generative AI use in legal proceedings in Canada, highlighting key elements of such guidance. The author contemplates a ‘training’ approach to regulating generative AI use in legal proceedings, focusing more on the user than the technology itself. This approach emphasises the need for judicial guidance to balance constructive engagement with generative AI with lawyers’ ethical responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we propose self‐retrieval learning, a self‐supervised learning method that does not require an annotated dataset. In self‐retrieval learning, keywords extracted from documents are used as queries to construct training data that imitate the relationship between query and corpus, such that the documents themselves are retrieved. In the usual supervised learning for information retrieval, a pair of query and corpus document is required as training data, but self‐retrieval learning does not require such data. In addition, it does not use information such as reference lists or other documents connected to the query, but only the text of the documents in the target domain. In our experiments, self‐retrieval learning was performed on the EU and UK legal document retrieval task using a retrieval model called DRMM. We found that self‐retrieval learning not only does not require supervised datasets, but also outperforms supervised learning with the same model in terms of retrieval accuracy. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [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.)

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which TQM has influenced the legal system in Australia, an area seldom investigated in the quality or legal literature. Design/methodology/approach: Documentary and policy analysis of legislation, rules and rulemaking documentation based on a partial application of historical-policy analysis (HPA). Textual analysis was based on Dean and Bowen's (1994) definition of TQM and Vinni's (2007) review of new public management and Swiss (1992) "reformed TQM" concepts. Findings: Australia's Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act of 2011 and supporting legal documents such as Guidance Notes include language reflective of TQM principles, providing evidence that present-day administrative law schemes include TQM practices and tools to undergird procedures of regulatory expectations (sometimes in the form of standards), monitoring and general operations. Oftentimes, it is the supporting legal documentation where TQM practices are found and operationalized. Research limitations/implications: This is a proof-of-concept research study to determine the feasibility to identify TQM concepts within the existing language of legal statutes and supporting regulatory documentation. As such this study worked out the preliminary research challenges in performing this type of analysis. Practical implications: Understanding TQM's impact on legal systems expands the system's perspective of organizations that do not always factor in the influence government policy has on organizational behaviours and outlooks. More specifically, understanding TQM's influence sheds insight on regulatory requirements imposed on a sector and the normative aspects of regulatory compliance that impact the operations and strategic planning of organizations. Social implications: The article provides an example of how legal administrative rulemaking influences organizational operational and strategic activities to remain viable in the organization's business or industrial sector. Originality/value: There are few research papers or literature reviews pertaining to the subject of TQM concepts embedded in laws and regulations, most of which date from the 1980s through early 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the recent disability legislation in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Maldives after signing the CRPD in 2006. Through a systematic comparative approach, this study identifies and examines the commonalities and differences in the provisions, participation of persons with disabilities (PWD), educational considerations, and rights of women with disabilities within their disability Acts. Qualitative content analysis has been used for thematic analysis of the content of these legal documents. The analysis revealed that a shared philosophical assumption existed across the Acts influenced by the social model of disability, while variations exist in the definition of disabilities across these Acts. It was found that due emphasis was placed on the involvement of PWD in regulatory committees in all Acts taken in the study. However, the level and extent of participation in these committees vary among countries. The nature of the educational provision is more inclined towards inclusive education across these Acts. However, not all of these four practices fully include PWD. Less emphasis has been put on including the rights of women with disabilities in the Acts. This article accentuates the importance of comparative studies for cross-country learning and the potential for adapting ideas to suit respective countries' national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]