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Although presidential vetoes are central to the legislative process, the role of total versus line item vetoes (LIV) is largely unclear. While total vetoes are a sign of conflict between the branches, as the literature has emphasized, we argue that LIV function as a negative agenda setting mechanism that enables presidents to coordinate within their coalition. To test our argument, we use an original dataset on all statutes and executive decrees approved and vetoed in Brazil for the period 1988–2010. In both, statutes and decrees, we show that while total vetoes occur when conflict between branches is stronger, LIV happen when such conflict is minimal and presidents have tight control over their coalition. The results are robust across dependent variables, model specifications, and estimation strategies. Our findings highlight that while the total veto is a blunt bargaining mechanism, the LIV provides a scalpel, a much finer tool that helps presidents manage and sustain their congressional coalition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death penalty debate intensifies when condemned women are considered, at least in part because of the associations society holds between womanhood and motherhood. Consequently, the concept of motherhood inherently permeates every condemned woman's sentence. Using qualitative document analysis, we examine how pregnancy is accounted for in the death penalty statutes and execution protocols. In half of U.S. states, exceptions exist in the statutes preventing executions of pregnant people, but pregnancy is rarely mentioned in execution protocols. The findings highlight aspects of reproductive injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statutes that create or codify causes of action sometimes contain jurisdiction provisions. The wording of these provisions can differ widely. Some of them purport to give exclusive jurisdiction to a specific court. In the private international law context, this raises the question of whether such a provision precludes the courts of any other jurisdiction from hearing a claim under the statute. This article analyses how these provisions have been interpreted. It focuses on Canadian law but draws on American, Australian and New Zealand jurisprudence. The article contends that the Canadian jurisprudence is uneven and insufficiently rigorous. Several of the decisions cannot be reconciled with each other, such that some must be regarded as incorrect. Several of the decisions fail to identify the important questions that are posed by alleged assertions of exclusive jurisdiction and also fail to answer them. Moving forward, courts should treat the claim that such a provision deprives a court of jurisdiction with caution and even scepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite apparent agreement on the approach to the interpretation of statutes in Canada, a system of limited parliamentary sovereignty, judges differ on a fundamental point: how purpose is used in interpretation. Some judges craft arguments that view the text as the medium through which the legislature expresses its intention, using purpose to shed light on the meaning of the text in defined ways ('text-as-medium' interpretation). Others see the background purposes or values of the statutory context as binding constraints in a coherent legal order, with text as merely a signal to meaning ('purpose-as-medium' interpretation). This paper argues that text-as-medium interpretation offers the most persuasive account of the use of purpose in interpretation, especially in a system of legislative sovereignty, which constrains interpretive choice. By bringing to light the commitments of these two interpretive arguments in the Canadian context for the first time, the paper also raises deeper normative questions about how to view legislation in a Westminster parliamentary democracy. These questions are fundamental to the relationship between sovereign legislatures and courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an evaluative review of the supervision and prudential regime of the banking sector of Mauritius. It assesses the normative framework that provides for the basis of bank supervision in Mauritius using relevant international standards as applicable. It can be observed that the banking sector of Mauritius is quite advanced and compliant with international standards though there is room for improvement. The Bank of Mauritius has been proactive in ensuring that the supervision and prudential regime meets the exigencies of the standards of an international financial centre which Mauritius aspires to be. The aim of this evaluative review is to provide an overview of bank supervision and the prudential regime of Mauritius to the academic and research community since there is a dearth of literature on this aspect coming from Mauritius. Additionally, there are certain lessons that can be learnt from the Mauritian experience regarding bank supervision especially for African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 50 years have passed since the first proposal of a crime of ecocide under international criminal law. What seemed to be slow progress at first reached a peak of proliferation in public-legal discussion over the recent years. This paper is an effort to recapitulate the development of ecocide as a crime, analysing the different proposals from a critical point of view that will attempt to crystallise the challenges that they present. This analysis will be based on four main criteria: (a) the punishable conduct described, which will necessarily raise the discussion of the anthropocentric vis-à-vis an ecocentric vision; (b) the subjective element proposed and its compatibility with the Rome Statute; (c) the possible perpetrator; and (d) the legal instrument through which it is sought to be enshrined. Finally, we present certain guidelines regarding an International Criminal Court for the Environment and its compatibility with the International Criminal Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses updates in the statutes in Florida covering the construction industry in a bid to bolster building safety, ensure prompt payment of construction services, and reduce insurance claims. Also cited are some fatal accidents that inspired said statutes like the Fidenae ampitheater collapse in A.D. 27, and the exemptions in areas like licensing, coding, and permitting.

Peacekeeping has been used as a significanttool for the past six decades in solving crises that are dangerous to peace and security at the international level. Over the years the missions regarding peacekeeping have not only grown in size but have also seen an increase in complexity. A lot of personnel including police, military, civilians, and others deployed in United Nations peacekeeping operations around the world have reached unprecedented levels since the commencement of the latest millennium. When the peacekeeping missions began, they were largely governed by the body of principles that was unwritten and were more affected by the events people went through while working for decades rather than any specific statute. The conservation of global safety and tranquility was the main objective behind the formationof the United Nations. The main tool to achieve thisobjective is the process of peacekeeping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the legal issues related to pay-to-stay statues of U.S. states, particularly the provisions allowing the seizure of inherited property to recompense for a person's incarceration costs. Also cited are the claim that property seizure is an interference by states on a decedents' freedom to choose their beneficiaries, and the alleged disadvantages of said statutes like perpetuating a cycle of poverty and reducing the urgency of decarceration.

Today, the idea that the President possesses at least some constitutional authority to direct administrative action is accepted by the courts, Congress, and the legal academy. But it was not always so. For most of American history — indeed until relatively recently — Presidents derived their authority over the administrative state largely from statute. Any role for the White House in agency rulemaking or adjudication had to be legally specified. Scholars mostly agree about when this change occurred. But the dominant shared narrative — exemplified by then-Professor Elena Kagan’s seminal article Presidential Administration — is Whig history. It offers a depoliticized interpretation that presents White House primacy as the product of steady progress toward greater administrative rationality. This Article offers a historical corrective. It explains how “administration under law” was lost and replaced with a new constitutional baseline, “presidential administration.” It is both an account of constitutional change — how one understanding of constitutional text and structure gave way to a different one — as well as a history of the regulatory state and how, beginning in the 1980s, federal officials reworked the relationship between the President, Congress, and administrative agencies in order to expand the role of market actors in governing economic activity. The Article draws attention to the intense political conflict that accompanied the advent of presidential administration. What is today bipartisan was originally nothing of the sort. It also reveals how a new interpretation of Article II took hold without any fundamental doctrinal or statutory change or shift in formal law. It highlights the emergence of a neoliberal consensus around aspects of economic regulation that incentivized and buttressed presidential administration as an approach to administrative governance. And it reveals the relative novelty of originalist arguments about the “Unitary Executive.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A federal statute restricts the habeas corpus remedy, but do federal judges also have equitable discretion to deny relief to unlawfully detained prisoners? Over the last several terms, the Supreme Court has begun to embrace this novel, ambitious view of habeas law. Although the Court has long cited what I call “negative” equity as a source of authority to devise its own limits on habeas relief, it had never — until recently — suggested that lower courts have free-floating discretion to deny relief to which prisoners are otherwise entitled. This Article, which consists of three parts, considers and refutes the “new negative equity.” In Part I, I set forth the older version of negative equity and then describe the recent departure therefrom. In Part II, I explain why the new negative equity doesn’t follow from any text-centered approach to statutory interpretation — relying substantially on context and drawing heavily from a statutory history that decisional law and academic discourse have thus far neglected. In Part III, I focus on the most troubling register of the new negative habeas equity, which involves a rule against habeas relief for those who are not “factually innocent.” Equitable power to refuse relief might be consistent with “comity, finality, and federalism,” as it were, but orphaned policy preferences are not law. Under the text-centered approach to law endorsed by most who favor habeas restrictions, such a practice is impossible to justify. Although no interpreter can be perfectly certain of statutory meaning, the new negative equity is both inconsistent with habeas history and a least-plausible reading of the modern statute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We like to think that courts are, and have always been, the primary and final interpreters of statutes. As the conventional separation-of-powers wisdom goes, legislatures "make" statutes while judges "interpret" them. In fact, however, legislatures across centuries of American history have thought of themselves as the primary interpreters. They blurred the line between "making" and "interpreting" by embracing a type of legislation that remains overlooked and little understood: "expository" legislation--enactments that specifically interpreted or construed previous enactments. In the most exhaustive historical study of the subject to date, this Article--the first in a series of Articles--unearths and explains that lost tradition of legislative statutory interpretation from an institutional perspective. To do so, it draws on an original dataset of 2,497 pieces of expository legislation passed from 1665 to 2020 at the colonial, territorial, state, and federal levels--the first effort of its kind. It shows how expository legislation originated as a colonial-era British import that Americans came to rely on beyond the creation of new constitutions. Lawmakers used expository statutes to supervise administrative statutory interpretation and to negotiate interpretation in the shadows of courts. Judges accepted and even encouraged legislative statutory interpretation. In the mid-nineteenth century, judges increasingly fought back, emboldened by growing calls for judicial independence. Yet even as the backlash entered into treatises, and even as some lawmakers began to balk, legislatures and judges continued to accept and use legislative interpretations of statutes well into the nineteenth century. The early history of expository legislation offers an alternative constitutional vision to the oft-repeated notion that statutory interpretation is necessarily and has always been an intrinsically and exclusively "judicial" power. As the Article ultimately argues, strict and formalist conceptions of separation of powers in statutory interpretation are misguided, for the extent to which statutory interpretation was considered a judicial power has fluctuated in ways that were intertwined with broader transformations in American society. This history teaches us to think of statutory interpretation as a shared task among branches but exercised in different contexts and domains. It also illuminates the historically contingent nature of legislation, revealing new ways that statutes can contain an inherent interpretive openness. These particular forms of openness raise new questions about the validity of subsequent legislative history. They also reveal how legislatures have embraced a paradoxical concept of original intent and meaning--one that legislatures recognized was rarely a "pure" kind but more often a fictional, dynamic kind intertwined with the changing views of post-enactment interpreters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the development and evolution of the income tax nexus rules in New Zealand statutes, and at how these developments are related to the main economic events and other factors that have together shaped New Zealand's income tax base. The primary aim is to identify the sources of the most common income tax nexuses in New Zealand statutes, and the reasons behind substantive changes to them over time. This largely historical research project provides the important contextual background necessary to understanding the inconsistencies in the existing statutory income tax nexus rules and to develop proposals for reform. It also helps advance a scholarly discussion about convergence and divergence of tax systems and tax rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how state authorities in New York struggled to control and influence local government in the state during America's early republic era, and it mentions various aspects of the powers and responsibilities of justices of the peace (JPs) during that time period. The judicial and administrative roles of JPs are addressed, as well as local magistracy, statutes, and party politics in the state of New York.

This article examines Australia's arbitrator bias test to reveal its underlying contradictions and ambiguity and suggests that the legislation is amended to remedy these flaws and ensure Australia stays in line with international best practice. In 2010, section 18A of the International Arbitration Act 1974 (Cth) introduced the arbitrator bias test into Australian statute. The provision failed to specify both limbs of the test and relied on Gough, an outdated English case. This produced two opposing decisions from Australia's federal judiciary: Sino Dragon and Hui. The uncertainty of Australia's arbitrator bias test strikes at the heart of the process as the independence and impartiality of arbitrators is a fundamental pillar of international commercial arbitration. After critically analysing the progression of England's approach to the arbitrator bias test over the past century to date, I conclude that the inherent unclearness of Australia's approach needs to be remedied by the real possibility test being codified in Australian statute. This test reflects the Australian federal judiciary's most recent approach. My analysis also reveals it is the most appropriate test. By clarifying Australia's arbitrator bias test those associating with Australia's international commercial arbitration system have the requisite certainty and clarity to engage with ease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2023 marks the 50th anniversary of legal regulation of acupuncture in the United States, as the first acupuncture law was enacted in Nevada. Acupuncture, like any other medical modality, is regulated at the state level, with each state formulating and enforcing its own laws and statutes over time. This article narrates the legislative process and major developments of the acupuncture profession in Minnesota, in the context of legislative developments across the country. It tells how this midsize, Midwest state's acupuncture profession became regulated, and examines the challenges faced by the profession before and after state statutes were enacted. Minnesota stands as a representative example of the legislative process in other states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bayesian approaches to legal reasoning propose causal models of the relation between evidence, the credibility of evidence, and ultimate hypotheses, or verdicts. They assume that legal reasoning is the process whereby one infers the posterior probability of a verdict based on observed evidence, or facts. In practice, legal reasoning does not operate quite that way. Legal reasoning is also an attempt at inferring applicable rules derived from legal precedents or statutes based on the facts at hand. To make such an inference, legal reasoning follows syllogistic logic and first order transitivity. This paper proposes a Bayesian model of legal syllogistic reasoning that complements existing Bayesian models of legal reasoning using a Bayesian network whose variables correspond to legal precedents, statutes, and facts. We suggest that legal reasoning should be modelled as a process of finding the posterior probability of precedents and statutes based on available facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over time, inclusive education has evolved in the search for more appropriate designations for its target audience, aiming to promote inclusive language and combat prejudiced and discriminatory behavior. More current paradigms, such as the Universal Design for Learning and the Multilevel Approach, propose completely abandoning the use of designations for students (1). This qualitative study uses a documentary analysis to examine how the statutes of 26 Portuguese public higher education institutions (HEIs) designate students who need academic support and to understand the educational concepts associated with these designations (2). The results revealed that Portuguese HEIs still adopt various student designations, often based on a medical model of classification and diagnosis. Furthermore, these designations do not fully encompass academic diversity, nor do they consider the diverse needs that students may present throughout their academic journey, which consequently limits access for all to inclusive practices in higher education (3). Considering these findings, there is an urgent need to abandon student designations in Portuguese HEIs and promote inclusive practices that cater to everyone, ensuring that students remain in and succeed in higher education, regardless of medical validation (4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on 1868 abortion statutes, the 2022 Supreme Court held in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that no federal constitutional right to abortion exists. Mere months later, a petition for certiorari asked the Court to determine that “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment includes prenatal existence, which would require criminalization of abortion in all states. The petitioners cited Dobbs and claimed the authority of legal history in 1868 and before. These arguments will be heard again, and they are increasingly framed in terms of the “original public meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. This Article refutes these arguments on their own terms. It looks at 1868, but it doesn’t stop at statutes, treatises, or dictionaries. Instead, it looks at the reality of pregnancy in 1868, as experienced by the public—in particular, by women and their doctors. This was a reality full of ambiguities. Pregnancy was not medically diagnosable until quickening; ideas of prenatal development were fluid and women let doctors take their miscarried fetal tissue and stillborn babies away for scientific study; and pregnancy loss was common, expected, and impossible to distinguish from abortion. Women and their doctors lived these ambiguities. Nothing in the laws in 1868 changed them. These ambiguities similarly negate any possibility that the original public meaning of “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment included prenatal existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chevron deference is an integral part of administrative law. However, the Supreme Court has not applied Chevron consistently throughout Chevron's nearly forty-year history. While trying to apply what facially appears to be a simple test, the Court has added more steps to the test, contradicted prior cases applying Chevron, and undermined Chevron itself. The Court has been especially unclear in four areas: deciding when a statute is ambiguous and applying the canons of construction, determining if an agency's interpretation has the "force of law," choosing whether prior precedents or an agency's new interpretation control when they conflict, and deciding whether to defer to an agency' s interpretation of the scope of its own authority . This confusion has made Chevron unworkable and undermines its durability as a precedent. Litigants have little confidence in how the Supreme Court will apply Chevron, let alone how the lower courts will apply it. Chevron has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced with de novo review. De novo review frees courts to find the right answer, and although not easy to apply, it is much more straightforward than Chevron. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the jurisprudence of transcendentalism in Antebellum America by examining the works of transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker. Other topics include the jurisprudence's negativity regarding law and legal institutions, the transcendentalists' anger about slavery and Fugitive Slave Law, and the importance of local ordinances and state statutes during the period.

Editorial statutes are standardizing documents that organize and structure the media. They are a legal provision allowing them to define their ethical principles and conduct, establish their identity and ideology, and create a communication pact with their audiences. Editorial statutes can thus be considered mechanisms of media responsibility, accountability, and transparency. In Portugal, such statutes are legally required and are often perceived as formal, general, and bland documents. This paper presents a study of sixteen editorial statutes of the Portuguese press, designed to understand the issues and values of these documents. Thirty-eight categories were identified across three key dimensions: self-definition, normative values, and ideological elements. While these dimensions seek to address the requirements set out in the Portuguese Media Law, this analysis defies the common concepts of superficiality and homogeneity of editorial statutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article dives into the pivotal role of national regulatory authorities in applying, monitoring, and enforcing the ever-expanding body of EU rules governing railways. It particularly examines the alignment between the Dutch and European legal frameworks, flagging predicaments arising in theory and practice, employing the classic lenses of the 'law in the books' and the 'law in action'. Through document analysis, with the aid of case studies and empirical data highlighting the role of key authorities in the sector, it exposes several domestic implementation gaps. Moreover, the contribution draws attention to a series of practical dilemmas that play up in the application and enforcement stage, owing seemingly to the shift from a rule-based to a risk-based philosophy --alongside an over-zealous cleaning-up of the national statute book, attempts to accommodate specific political preferences, as well as a continuous pressure to keep up with supranational modifications. Planned amendments to the tasks of the discussed authorities, together with coping strategies that are already in the pipeline, offer viable solutions that should at least mitigate, if not resolve, the main issues this study brings to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the 74 existing Declarations of acceptance of the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, three have the characteristics of "inversed declarations". They are the Declarations of Egypt (1957), Equatorial Guinea (2017), and Iran (2023). Far from determining a general acceptance of the Court's jurisdiction (possibly subject to reservations), these three Declarations entail the recognition of the jurisdiction of the Court only in relation to specific subject matters, which are explicitly mentioned in the Declarations. The article constitutes the first analytical study of the problems posed by this kind of declarations. It considers their legal nature, the problem of their validity, and the impact that their use can have on the function of the optional clause. Finally, it outlines some possible remedies, at the disposal of States and the Court, to neutralise the abuses deriving from the practice of filing inversed declarations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Americans convicted of crimes, collateral consequences impose barriers extending long past the completion of official sentences. The present study develops a novel distinction between congruent and incongruent collateral consequences. Congruent consequence laws impose barriers that are closely linked to their triggering offenses, while incongruent measures impose barriers that are only loosely connected to triggering offenses—or are disconnected entirely. Focusing specifically on the impactful consequence of restricting legal driving privileges, this article examines how the determinants of these policies vary according to the degree of congruity between triggering offense and collateral consequence. Using novel data on driver's license restriction laws, we find that the Black composition of state felony record populations is positively associated with the extensiveness of license restrictions for nondriving safety offenses. Conversely, we do not find a statistically significant relationship between states' felony record racial composition and their volume of license restrictions for driving safety offenses. These findings reveal a major divergence in pathways leading to congruent and incongruent collateral consequence statutes at the state level. The results are further notable given driving's central role in the US socioeconomic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1790, the same year Congress limited naturalization to "free white persons," it also enacted the first Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. The Trade and Intercourse Act may have even stronger claims to "super statute" status than the Naturalization Act. Key provisions of the Trade and Intercourse Act remain in effect today, and the Act enshrined a tribal, federal, and state relationship that profoundly shapes modern law. Unlike the Naturalization Act, the Trade and Intercourse Act reflected the input of people of color: it responded to the demands of tribal nations and--to a degree--reflected tribal sovereignty. While Indigenous people could not naturalize in 1790, early laws and policies encouraged them to become citizens of the United States. Indigenous citizenship, however, was a tool of subjugation, designed to undermine tribal sovereignty and thereby increase White authority. This history is inconsistent with Chin and Finkelman's claim of a persistent vision of White citizenship, but it is consistent with allocation of citizenship as a tool of White power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the need to effectuate a non-judicial trust modification of a New York trust arises, the law in its current form provides corporate trustees with a tremendous amount of power and flexibility to amend, revoke, and establish new trusts with more favorable provisions. Depending upon the facts and circumstances of a particular situation (i.e., whether the settlor is alive, whether minor beneficiaries hold an interest in the trust, and whether there is dissension and discord among the beneficiaries, etc.) there are various statutes that will help a corporate trustee implement a sound strategy to modify a trust to attain favorable results for all interested parties. This article seeks to provide corporate trustees, trust officers, and other Trusts and Estates practitioners with an overview of several statutory mechanisms that can be implemented by a trustee to help mitigate the risk of litigation or judicial intervention. These statutes include EPTL § 7-1.13, which is commonly referred to as the "trustsplitting" statute, EPTL § 7-1.9, which allows for non-judicial trust modifications under circumstances where the settlor is still alive and where consent to reform the trust can be obtained from all interested parties under the instrument, and EPTL § 10-6.6, the so-called trust "decanting" statute, which permits the trustee of a trust to exercise a "special power of appointment" to invade the corpus of an existing trust and appoint the assets into new trusts with modified terms and provisions. This article will also provide a brief overview of general protections afforded to New York trustees under common law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two foundational statutes limit the executive branch’s important and necessary work in executing the budget against the backdrop of congressional control: the Antideficiency Act, dating back to the post-Civil War era, and the Impoundment Control Act, which emerged from the Nixon years. This Article, originally written as an invited contribution to The George Washington Law Review’s annual issue on administrative law, calls these the Power of the Purse statutes. While these statutes have been generally successful in responding to the problems that first prompted them, this Article illustrates gaps in the statutes that have become apparent in an era of expanded presidential control and proposes reforms to fix them. The reforms largely—although not entirely—map onto legislation proposed by Democrats in recent years. This Article argues that these proposals are commonsense reforms that ought to be supported by bipartisan majorities—as underscored by, among other things, their support from a remarkably bipartisan coalition of civil society organizations during both the Trump and Biden Administrations and the enactment of several of the reforms with bipartisan support through consecutive Consolidated Appropriations Acts. This Article thus reframes both the problems and the proposals as institutional rather than partisan and urges that the reforms ought to become law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that homes can double as offices. But when a teleworker opens her laptop across state lines from her employer, may she claim the statutory worker protections provided in the employer's state? Too often, courts misunderstand this recurring problem and refuse to extend an employer's state protections to an out-of-state teleworker, granting a defendant's motion to dismiss. Because each statute is analyzed in isolation, a teleworker may be relegated to lawless nowhere land, unable to recover under any state statutory scheme. This Note argues that, in the absence of legislative direction, a court should always find that the scope of an employer's state statute is broad enough to extend to an out-of-state remote teleworker. Telework is performed using entirely virtual technology and has no physical connection to the place in which it is performed. In contrast, the employer is tethered to earth and therefore should permissibly regulate the employer-teleworker relationship. This Note advocates for a judicial solution by examining existing judicial considerations. It argues that, because of the quasi-territorial nature of remote work, a teleworker should always fall within the legislative jurisdiction of an employer's state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bamboo & Silk is the property of Brill Academic Publishers 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 Bamboo & Silk is the property of Brill Academic Publishers 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 Bamboo & Silk is the property of Brill Academic Publishers 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 Constitution of Seychelles requires courts, when interpreting the Charter of Human Rights, to take judicial notice of human rights treaties. However, a similar obligation is not imposed on courts when interpreting legislation. Before the case of The Anti-Corruption Commission of Seychelles v Laura Valabhji (18 December 2023), the Court of Appeal had never held that courts are obliged to interpret statutes to conform to Seychelles' international obligations. The Court rejected a literal approach to statutory interpretation and favoured a purposive approach to justify its reliance on an international treaty when interpreting the Anti-Corruption Act. In this article, the author argues that the Court's decision in Anti-Corruption Commission of Seychelles v Laura Valabhji has three challenges: it did not explain the meaning of international obligations; its reliance on Indian and Sri-Lankan cases as a source of common law for Seychelles ignores, not only the Interpretation and General Provisions Act, but also the distinction between foreign cases as a source of common law and foreign cases from common law countries as persuasive authorities; and finally, its failure to define 'control' has the effect of expanding the powers of the Anti-Corruption Commission beyond what was envisaged by the legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Legislative intention' as the aim of statutory interpretation has attracted increased attention in the Australian High Court, reinvigorating scholarly attention on the elusive concept. A subjective approach regards it as having an empirical reality. The competing objective view denies any conceptual connection to empirical circumstances and demotes it to a metaphor for the proper application of rules of statutory interpretation. This antagonism prevails in civil law jurisdictions as well. In Germany specifically, it goes back to the 1830s. The article juxtaposes the two local debates so as to mutually provide an additional perspective on the subject matter that can inspire future cross-system discourse. It highlights how similar arguments from both theoretical camps have formed in the two countries over time. And it not only documents striking similarities in how Australia's and Germany's highest courts declared commitment to an objective approach but it also reveals contrary curial trends that have most recently emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of the study is due to the problem of establishing the accuracy of the content of legal norms. Accordingly, there is a need to define a new way to explain, apply, and understand them. The purpose of the article is to carry out a theoretical and legal analysis of textualism as a theory of interpretation of legal norms. The research used such methods as analysis, deduction, induction, comparative analysis, and others. Taking the research through the prism of the doctrine of textualism in the interpretation of legal norms, the authors demonstrated that the effectiveness of this method is capable of restoring the semantic content of the text, which helps to clarify the meaning of the norms effectively and consistently. They found that the method under study could be applicable in legal practice to disclose the construction of legal norms, which multiply chances to provide accurate disclosure of the legal content of the norm. The practical value of the results lies in the identification of a new way of interpreting the norms, which will provide a future opportunity to increase the level of effective law enforcement of the current legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proviso of section 10 of the Transfer of Property Act of 1882, is a regressive law restraining women of certain religions from alienating property received from an inter-vivos transaction. This paper highlights this aspect of the statute and calls for reform in the property rights of such women, as the proviso violates the Indian Constitutional guarantee of preventing gender and religion-based discrimination. Further, the proviso creates an anomaly in the property interest of women who fall within the ambit of both section 10 and the Indian Succession Act. This paper also argues that the mere deletion of the impugned proviso will not address the issue of patriarchy and secure the welfare of women. Dowry is one such example discussed in this paper, which persists despite statutes aimed at eradicating it. The reasons for the existence of section 10, as given by the English Judges of the colonial past, continue to plague Indian women even today. On the contrary, a woman's absolute interest in property would make her susceptible to dowry abuse, consequently perpetuating the practice of dowry demands. Therefore, in addition to legal reform, this paper advocates increasing efforts in sensitizing society to bring about real change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although research has been conducted on the risks and effects of juvenile sexual assault, there is a gap in our knowledge surrounding juvenile sexual assault and how the law discusses victims. The goal of this endeavor is to provide a systematic summary of juvenile sexual assault statutes in the United States of America. In pursuit of this objective, a content analysis of the sexual assault and consent state laws of the United States of America was performed. Four themes emerged, including laws that sought to (1) conceptualize juvenile sexual assault victimization, (2) offer evidentiary standards in juvenile sexual assault cases, (3) assess the seriousness and punishment of juvenile sexual assault, and (4) provide services for juveniles who have been sexually victimized. Within these themes, legislation was inconsistent from one state to another. From these findings, however, we encourage legislative bodies to offer greater specificity in their laws, re-assess the seriousness of this phenomenon, and express greater support for victims of child sexual assault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protection of the environment is currently of the uppermost importance and all legal fields have to contribute to this goal. This includes criminal law, both on a national and an international level. The debate in international criminal law focusses on a proposal to introduce a new core crime of "ecocide" to the Rome Statute. Much has been contributed to this debate, and often the ultima ratio approach has been mentioned in this context. However, the contents of this principle remain vague. In my article, I assess the ultima ratio principle for international criminal law and apply it to the discussion about the introduction of a new core crime of ecocide to the Rome Statute. My assessment reveals that under the current circumstances, this cannot be considered a good fit. Rather, alternatives exist that are to be expected to serve the urgent interest of protecting the natural environment better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act ("PLCAA") put a stop to most civil litigation against the firearms industry. In the nineteen years since, victims of gun violence have attempted to bring claims against members of the firearms industry, with varying degrees of success, using an exception to PLCAA known as the predicate exception. Recently, states have begun to pass legislation creating a right of action for plaintiffs to take advantage of the predicate exception. Whether the new legislation will be successful, however, remains to be seen. This Note examines all of the available cases considering the predicate exception, revealing areas where the current regulatory framework fails plaintiffs and the distinguishing characteristics of successful cases. In light of this analysis, Part III discusses recent state legislation, identifies gaps in the legislation, identifies areas for improvement, and forecasts challenges to the legislation. The Appendix contains a chart organizing the cases that consider the predicate exception by whether they were successful and the predicate statute considered by the court in each case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a theory of vagueness avoidance as a tool for constraining penal statutes in the U.S. It explains the goals of the Supreme Court in engaging in vagueness avoidance, including promoting the legality principle in criminal law by preventing retroactive crime definition through judicial innovation. It explores the canons of constitutional avoidance, the domain and limits of vagueness avoidance, as well as cases of explicit vagueness avoidance.

Legal text retrieval serves as a key component in a wide range of legal text processing tasks such as legal question answering, legal case entailment, and statute law retrieval. The performance of legal text retrieval depends, to a large extent, on the representation of text, both query and legal documents. Based on good representations, a legal text retrieval model can effectively match the query to its relevant documents. Because legal documents often contain long articles and only some parts are relevant to queries, it is quite a challenge for existing models to represent such documents. In this paper, we study the use of attentive neural network-based text representation for statute law document retrieval. We propose a general approach using deep neural networks with attention mechanisms. Based on it, we develop two hierarchical architectures with sparse attention to represent long sentences and articles, and we name them Attentive CNN and Paraformer. The methods are evaluated on datasets of different sizes and characteristics in English, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Experimental results show that: (i) Attentive neural methods substantially outperform non-neural methods in terms of retrieval performance across datasets and languages; (ii) Pretrained transformer-based models achieve better accuracy on small datasets at the cost of high computational complexity while lighter weight Attentive CNN achieves better accuracy on large datasets; and (iii) Our proposed Paraformer outperforms state-of-the-art methods on COLIEE dataset, achieving the highest recall and F2 scores in the top-N retrieval task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the feasibility of using the federal Indian law as a method to analyze the constitutionality of the acts of the U.S. Congress establishing the favorable or unfavorable treatment toward the Indian people. Also cited are the case Morton v. Mancari to determine whether federal statutes applied solely to Indians do not compromise the anti-discrimination principles of the Constitution and the core principles of federal Indian law.

Reducing building energy use, a linchpin of climate change mitigation, is a daunting challenge across the world. Gaining increasing attention, retro-commissioning (RCx) is a systematic process that can improve building energy performance. Using a techno-legal lens to review statutes and guides on RCx, this study reveals that in China, a national standard on building commissioning has taken effect yet RCx statutes are hitherto not found. The United States has RCx statutes enacted over 14 states; scrutinizing the statutes of five cities unveils similarities and differences in their scope of control and compliance requirements. In the absence of a specific RCx statute, the guide of Hong Kong, China provides detailed guidance for energy saving practices. While these findings can serve as reference for other places planning to formulate laws or guidance on RCx, the need to further study the effectiveness of mandating RCx for reducing building energy use is highlighted. A conceptual analysis of cost variation with statutory control, which could help policymakers consider from an economic perspective whether or to what extent statutory RCx requirements should be imposed, is also illustrated. This not only contributes insights to the pursuit of an optimal balance between statutory control and voluntary action for energy reduction but also adds to the debate on building energy policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]