This article refers to the problem of the Roman Catholic Church’s liability for the damages caused by sexual abuse of children by priests. The author points to the base of liability – the respondeat superior principle and analyses the problem of the ‘scope of entrusted duties’. The major problem arises from the fact that sexual abuse can never be the subject of any legally effective contract or the activities entrusted by the superior, but it happens only ‘when the opportunity arises’ – during the performance of actual activities covered by scope of the contract, for example, caring for minors, their education, treatment or spiritual formation. However, the problem is wider because sexual crimes can also occur in non-Catholic churches and other religious institutions, as well as all those places and institutions whose employees enter into special trust relationships with minors or adult people with special needs (for sick or disabled). This article refers to the experiences from various countries and presents two methods of its possible interpretation of the concept of the ‘scope of entrusted duties’ – strict and liberal, as well as the ‘enhanced risk theory’. The author also proposes her own method of solving the problem.

This article discusses the effectiveness of Transgender persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 and tests the legislation against Dr. Maria Mousmouti’s Effectiveness Test. The author first attempts to trace the real purpose of the Act in terms of specific and broad purposes, and the micro, meso and macro goals. Secondly, the author examines the content of the Act in terms of the legislative techniques used, compliance and enforcement mechanism, and legislative communication. Thirdly, the author studies the context of the Act in terms of its coherence, accessibility and the choice of superstructure.
Finally, the author checks the Act against the element of result where she examines the monitoring, review and evaluation clauses of the legislation, and the mechanism to collect and assess the legislative results.

This analysis examines the relationship between legal tradition and constitutional human rights. It experiments with a quantitative comparative methodology to compare economic rights, social and family rights, and civil and political rights between countries with common law, civil law and mixed law legal traditions. The results show that developing countries with a civil law legal tradition provide more constitutional human rights than their counterparts with a common law legal tradition. Although preliminary and imperfect, the results challenge the notion of superiority of the common law legal tradition and human rights. The quantitative comparative framework used offers a new methodological frontier for comparative constitutional law researchers to examine relationships between legal traditions.

In this article, the authors assert that the United Nations Convention for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) can contribute to tackling gaps in statutory legislation and defective business conduct that have been associated with unsustainable trade in Global Supply Chains (GSCs). The authors provide evidence that the CISG contains rules enabling a general legal framework for establishing uniform sustainable standards for goods concerning suppliers, sellers and buyers located in different countries. For instance, the CISG provisions on contract formation ease the incorporation of joint codes of conduct for sustainable trade in GSCs. In addition, the contracting parties’ circumstances and current trade usages are now more relevant to determine what constitutes conformity of the goods under the contract and the default warranties in Article 35 CISG. On the level of remedies, the authors show that best-efforts provisions, possibly included in a code of conduct or inferred from standards applicable to the goods, may redefine the notion of impediment in Article 79 CISG, which could lead to exoneration of liability for the seller. They also demonstrate why fundamental breach and the calculation of damages are at the centre of the discussion regarding the remedies for breach of an obligation to deliver sustainable goods.

In response to the complex and potentially devastating threat posed by COVID-19, parliaments around the world have transferred unprecedented powers to executive governments and their agencies (Edgar, ‘Law-making in a Crisis’, 2020), often with the full support of the communities they represent. These laws were passed within days, sometimes hours, with limited safeguards and a heavy reliance on sunsetting provisions, some of which are dependent on the pandemic being officially called to an end. While parliaments themselves have suspended or reduced sitting days (Twomey, ‘A Virtual Australian Parliament is Possible’, 2020), parliamentary committees have emerged as the forum of choice when it comes to providing some form of parliamentary oversight of executive action.
This article aims to evaluate the capacity of parliamentary committees established within the Australian, New Zealand (NZ) and United Kingdom (UK) parliaments to effectively scrutinize and review governments’ responses to COVID-19. It does this by comparing the legal framework underpinning the relevant committees in each jurisdiction and examining the work of these committees with a view to offering some preliminary views as to their impact on the shape of the laws made in response to COVID-19 in those jurisdictions. The article concludes by offering some preliminary observations about the scrutiny capacity of the parliamentary committee systems in Australia, NZ and the UK in the context of emergency lawmaking and flags areas for further research, evaluation and reform.

This article provides a critical analysis of the compensation awarded for victims of disasters. First, general guiding principles of compensation are discussed. Next, various ways of government provided victim compensation, both during the disaster and ex post are critically reviewed. Then the article focuses on ex ante insurance mechanisms for victim compensation, arguing that insurance can play a role in disaster risk reduction. Finally, the article explains how the government can cooperate with insurers in a public-private partnership for victim compensation, thus facilitating the availability of disaster insurance.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders across the globe scrambled to adopt emergency legislation. Amongst other things, these measures gave significant powers to governments in order to curb the spreading of a virus, which has shown itself to be both indiscriminate and deadly. Nevertheless, exceptional measures, however necessary in the short term, can have adverse consequences both on the enjoyment of human rights specifically and democracy more generally. Not only are liberties severely restricted and normal processes of democratic deliberation and accountability constrained but the duration of exceptional powers is also often unclear. One potentially ameliorating measure is the use of sunset clauses: dispositions that determine the expiry of a law or regulation within a predetermined period unless a review determines that there are reasons for extension. The article argues that without effective review processes, far from safeguarding rights and limiting state power, sunset clauses can be utilized to facilitate the transferring of emergency powers whilst failing to guarantee the very problems of normalized emergency they are included to prevent. Thus, sunset clauses and the review processes that attach to them should be approached with caution.

This article was written with the intention of figuring out why the Seychelles has been unable to douse the drug epidemic despite apparent vigorous efforts on the part of the government and of finding a new way of curtailing drug abuse without relying entirely on legislation, which although in some ways are necessary, has on its own, been incapable serving efficacy.
The article introduces a four step pyramid giving effect to a responsive approach which Braithwaite suggests lays ‘emphasis on the pyramidal regulatory structure, on regulation through engagement and dialogue rather than by dictat, on bringing third parties into what had been previously characterized as a binary regulator/regulatee interaction, and on the concept of the benign big gun.’
Thus, by building a drug user’s capacity and providing the apt restorative treatment before labelling him as an offender and subjecting him to incapacitation, the drug user is offered an opportunity at restoration.
The criteria featuring in the pyramid must work in conjunction with the law as this combination and the use of various actors at each tier is a significant way to effectively execute government policies without that strict and direct regulator/regulatee relationship whereby the former would otherwise lord it over the latter.

This research study is an attempt to test the comparative criteria developed by Stefanou in his work where he discusses the characteristics that defines the drafting process in the two most dominant legal systems, common and civil law. It examines the legislative drafting process in common law countries with the aim to establish if the comparative criteria identify with the process that defines the drafting of legislation in those jurisdictions. Two common law jurisdictions were selected and an in-depth comparative analysis of steps undertaken in their drafting process was done. The scope of the study is only confined to the drafting process in the common law system and the criteria that is tested are those which define the drafting process in the common law jurisdictions only.

As the scale of administrative agencies expands and their functions become more specialized in the complex and variable administrative reality, delegated legislation has increased explosively. This article examines the need for the introduction of appropriate parliamentary controls to prevent harm caused by the flood of delegated legislation. Through comparison with the UK Parliament, this article identifies the relative position of the Korean National Assembly and presents measures to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny on delegated legislation.

This article discusses using constitutional reform to reduce ethnic conflict in Guyana. I start by exploring the determinants of ethnic conflict. I next examine Guyana’s ethnopolitical history to determine what factors led to political alignment on ethnic lines and then evaluate the effect of the existing political institutions on ethnic conflict. I close with a discussion on constitutional reform in which I consider a mix of consociationalist, integrative, and power-constraining mechanisms that may be effective in reducing ethnic conflict in Guyana’s ethnopolitical circumstances.