With unfaltering determination, China continues to expand its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article focuses on the preference that is given to mediation for the resolution of BRI-related disputes. China, Hong Kong and Singapore proclaim that this approach better fits with ‘Asian’ cultural values than adversarial processes like arbitration and litigation. The BRI can be seen as an innovative field lab where mechanisms for international commercial conflict management and resolution are being developed and put to action - and where legitimacy is tested. |
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Journal | Corporate Mediation Journal, Issue 2 2021 |
Keywords | international commercial mediation, Belt and Road Initiative, Singapore Convention, China, international dispute resolution |
Authors | Henneke Brink |
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Article |
The Use of Technology (and Other Measures) to Increase Court CapacityA View from Australia |
Journal | International Journal of Online Dispute Resolution, Issue 2 2021 |
Keywords | court capacity, COVID-19, Australia, online dispute resolution, open justice, procedural fairness, access to justice, online courts, justice technology, judicial function |
Authors | Felicity Bell, Michael Legg, Joe McIntyre e.a. |
AbstractAuthor's information |
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced courts around the world to embrace technology and other innovative measures in order to continue functioning. This article explores how Australian courts have approached this challenge. We show how adaptations in response to the pandemic have sometimes been in tension with principles of open justice, procedural fairness and access to justice, and consider how courts have attempted to resolve that tension. |
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Journal | International Journal of Online Dispute Resolution, Issue 2 2021 |
Keywords | online dispute resolution (ODR), e-commerce, international dispute resolution, international law, United States, China, European Union, Australia, alternative dispute resolution (ADR), online platforms |
Authors | Teresa Ballesteros |
AbstractAuthor's information |
This article will examine Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) from several perspectives to provide a comprehensive understanding of the global efforts to incorporate ODR in the e-commerce scope. Upon examining the nature and growth of both e-commercial activities and ODR, there will be an analysis from an international standpoint, where the article will discuss the relevant bodies and the progression of uniform standards in this regard. This is followed by an analysis of several jurisdictions, namely the United States, China, European Union and Australia. Finally, the essay will provide suggestions andrecommendations for the implementation of ODR. |
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AI in the Legal ProfessionTeaching Robot Mediators Human Empathy |
Journal | International Journal of Online Dispute Resolution, Issue 2 2021 |
Keywords | ADR, AI, ML, mediation, digital technology, value alignment |
Authors | Linda Mochon Senado |
AbstractAuthor's information |
What benefits do AI technologies introduce to the law and how can lawyers integrate AI tools into their everyday practice and dispute resolution? Can we teach robot mediators to understand human empathy and values to conduct a successful mediation? While the future of AI in the legal profession remains somewhat unknown, it is evident that it introduces valuable tools that enhance legal practice and support lawyers to better serve their clients. This paper discusses the practical ways in which AI is used in the legal profession, while exploring some of the major concerns and hesitation over value alignment, morality and legal formalism. |
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Journal | East European Yearbook on Human Rights, Issue 1 2021 |
Authors | Matthias C. Kettemann and Martin Fertmann |
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This study explores the spread of disinformation relating to the Covid-19 pandemic on the internet, dubbed by some as the pandemic’s accompanying “infodemic”, and the societal reactions to this development across different countries and platforms. The study’s focus is on the role of states and platforms in combatting online disinformation. |
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Journal | East European Yearbook on Human Rights, Issue 1 2021 |
Authors | Martin Fertmann and Matthias C. Kettemann |
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Terms-of-service based actions against political and state actors as both key subjects and objects of political opinion formation have become a focal point of the ongoing debates over who should set and enforce the rules for speech on online platforms. |
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Journal | East European Yearbook on Human Rights, Issue 1 2021 |
Keywords | judicial independence, selection of judges, appointment of judges, rule of law, mutual trust |
Authors | Vygantė Milašiūtė and Skirgailė Žalimienė |
AbstractAuthor's information |
The article examines the procedure for selection and appointment of judges in Lithuania in the light of the European standards of judicial independence. Both the Council of Europe and the European Union (EU) legal materials are relied on. The procedural role of different actors, the criteria for assessment of candidates, the question of judicial review of selection and appointment decisions as well as the problem of delays of judicial appointments are also examined. Even though the Lithuanian system for the selection and appointment of judges has been assessed favourably by European institutions, certain elements of the system are questionable. However, as long as these deficiencies are not systemic and do not raise issues of the rule of law in the sense of EU law, they would not negatively affect the operation of the EU law-based mutual trust instruments with respect to Lithuania. A suggestion is made that paying more attention to non-systemic deficiencies of judicial independence and the rule of law in EU member states could be beneficial for improving the protection of individual rights. |
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Journal | Erasmus Law Review, Issue 3 2021 |
Keywords | needs for safety, victim impact statements, legislation, Empirical Legal Studies, privacy protection |
Authors | Marijke Malsch |
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Various laws, guidelines and other types of regulation have been created that introduced new rights worldwide for victims of crime. Many of these rights focus on active victims who wish to step into the open and to orally express their views and experiences in court. Rights and wishes to remain in the background and to preserve one’s privacy received less attention. This article focuses primarily on the wishes of victims that reveal their intention to not play an active role in the criminal process, and on victims who fear an invasion of their safety and privacy. According to the literature, such wishes and needs can be considered to be fundamental. The article questions the empirical basis for the present victim legislation: are the new laws that have been created over the decades founded on empirically established victim needs, or on presumed victim needs? The article concludes with a plea for a more extensive use of empirical findings that shed light on victim wishes in the legislation and the criminal process. |
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Journal | Erasmus Law Review, Issue 3 2021 |
Keywords | enforcement practice, victim safety, street level bureaucracy, criminal justice chain, penal protection orders |
Authors | Tamar Fischer and Sanne Struijk |
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Penal protection orders (PPOs) aim to protect initial victims from repeat victimisation and in a broader sense from any danger for his or her dignity or psychological and sexual integrity and may therefore be important instruments for victim safety. However, knowledge on the actual practice of the PPOs and the successes, dilemmas and challenges involved is scarce. In this article, we describe the legal framework and actual enforcement practice of Dutch PPOs. The theoretical framework leading our explorative analyses regards Lipsky’s notion of ‘street-level bureaucracy’ and the succeeding work of Maynard & Musheno and Tummers on coping strategies and agency narratives of frontline workers. Using interview data from criminal justice professionals, victims and offenders, we describe the conditions of the enforcement practice and answer the question which coping mechanisms and types of agencies the professionals tend to apply in order to meet the legislative aims and to protect victims as effectively as possible. Results show that the five conditions described by Lipsky are clearly present. So far, in almost all situations the process of monitoring violations is reactive and because knowledge on risk indicators for violent escalation is still limited, it is difficult for frontline workers to decide how many and what type of resources should be invested in which cases. This results in a ‘moving away from clients’ strategy. However, within this context in which reactive enforcement is the default, we also found several examples of coping that represent ‘moving towards clients’ strategies. |
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Journal | Erasmus Law Review, Issue 3 2021 |
Keywords | victim needs, protection, reasons to report, contribution to safety, police information, victim-offender relationship |
Authors | Annemarie ten Boom |
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This article presents a preliminary analysis of how victims who report to the police for protection in the Netherlands judge their experiences with the police, in comparison with victims reporting crimes for other reasons. An existing dataset was used: the data was originally collected for a comprehensive survey among crime victims of 12 years and older in 2016. Female victims of violent (sexual and non-sexual) crimes constitute the major part of the victims for whom protection is the most important reporting reason. Victim perceptions of police contribution to safety as well as police information were investigated. The analyses show that overall, victim perceptions of the police’s contribution to safety are rather negative. Contribution to safety is judged somewhat better by victims for whom protection is their most important reporting reason; however, the respondents who are positive still form a minority. Police information is judged positively by more victims than contribution to safety. Of the respondents for whom protection is a reporting reason, victims of sexual crimes appear to judge police information positively more often than victims of other crime types. |
Article |
Legal Tradition and Human RightsA Quantitative Comparative Analysis of Developing Countries |
Journal | European Journal of Law Reform, Issue 3 2021 |
Keywords | comparative law, comparative constitutional analysis, human rights, legal traditions, quantitative constitutional analysis, economic rights, social and family rights, civil and political rights |
Authors | Dhanraj R. Singh |
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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. |
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Journal | Erasmus Law Review, Issue 2 2021 |
Keywords | Habeas corpus, common law, detainee, consitution, liberty |
Authors | Chuks Okpaluba and Anthony Nwafor |
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Long before the coming of the Bill of Rights in written Constitutions, the common law has had the greatest regard for the personal liberty of the individual. In order to safeguard that liberty, the remedy of habeas corpus was always available to persons deprived of their liberty unlawfully. This ancient writ has been incorporated into the modern Constitution as a fundamental right and enforceable as other rights protected by virtue of their entrenchment in those Constitutions. This article aims to bring together the various understanding of habeas corpus at common law and the principles governing the writ in common law jurisdictions. The discussion is approached through a twelve-point construct thus providing a brief conspectus of the subject matter, such that one could have a better understanding of the subject as applied in most common law jurisdictions. |
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Journal | Erasmus Law Review, Issue 2 2021 |
Keywords | European Convention on Human Rights, European Court of Human Rights, techniques of interpretation, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties |
Authors | Eszter Polgári |
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The interpretive techniques applied by the European Court of Human Rights are instrumental in filling the vaguely formulated rights-provisions with progressive content, and their use provoked widespread criticism. The article argues that despite the scarcity of explicit references to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, all the ECtHR’s methods and doctrines of interpretation have basis in the VCLT, and the ECtHR has not developed a competing framework. The Vienna rules are flexible enough to accommodate the interpretive rules developed in the ECHR jurisprudence, although effectiveness and evolutive interpretation is favoured – due to the unique nature of Convention – over the more traditional means of interpretation, such as textualism. Applying the VCLT as a normative framework offers unique ways of reconceptualising some of the much-contested means of interpretation in order to increase the legitimacy of the ECtHR. |
Case Reports |
2021/35 Supreme Court rules on constitutionality of Workplace Relations Commission (IR) |
Journal | European Employment Law Cases, Issue 3 2021 |
Keywords | Miscellaneous |
Authors | Laura Ryan |
AbstractAuthor's information |
By a majority of 4-3, the Supreme Court of Ireland has held that the Workplace Relations Commission’s power to adjudicate disputes between employers and employees was not unconstitutional. However, the majority of the Supreme Court did find that certain aspects of the Commission’s procedures were unconstitutional, namely the blanket ban on public hearings and the lack of capacity for taking evidence on oath. The Workplace Relations Act 2015 and the Workplace Relations Commission procedures have consequently been amended to address these issues. This case report is a follow-up on EELC 2020/34. |
Case Reports |
2021/32 Grand Chamber confirms no double punishment for illegal employment (SK) |
Journal | European Employment Law Cases, Issue 3 2021 |
Keywords | Other Fundamental Rights |
Authors | Dušan Nitschneider and Danica Valentová |
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The Grand Chamber of the Slovakian Supreme Court has unanimously decided that employers cannot be penalised by two different agencies for one violation of employment law rules and that the ne bis in idem principle also applies to two administrative breaches of the law. |
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Journal | Erasmus Law Review, Issue 1 2021 |
Keywords | text mining, machine learning, law, natural language processing |
Authors | Arthur Dyevre |
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Many questions facing legal scholars and practitioners can be answered only by analysing and interrogating large collections of legal documents: statutes, treaties, judicial decisions and law review articles. I survey a range of novel techniques in machine learning and natural language processing – including topic modelling, word embeddings and transfer learning – that can be applied to the large-scale investigation of legal texts |
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Journal | Erasmus Law Review, Issue 1 2021 |
Keywords | big data, big data analysis, data life cycle, ethics, AI |
Authors | Simon Vydra, Andrei Poama, Sarah Giest e.a. |
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The adoption of big data analysis in the legal domain is a recent but growing trend that highlights ethical concerns not just with big data analysis, as such, but also with its deployment in the legal domain. This article systematically analyses five big data use cases from the legal domain utilising a pluralistic and pragmatic mode of ethical reasoning. In each case we analyse what happens with data from its creation to its eventual archival or deletion, for which we utilise the concept of ‘data life cycle’. Despite the exploratory nature of this article and some limitations of our approach, the systematic summary we deliver depicts the five cases in detail, reinforces the idea that ethically significant issues exist across the entire big data life cycle, and facilitates understanding of how various ethical considerations interact with one another throughout the big data life cycle. Furthermore, owing to its pragmatic and pluralist nature, the approach is potentially useful for practitioners aiming to interrogate big data use cases. |
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Journal | Family & Law, September 2021 |
Keywords | Contact with grandchildren, Best interest of the child, Parental responsibilities |
Authors | prof. dr. J. Ribot Igualada |
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This article examines how Spanish and Catalan laws deal with claims of grandparents who seek contact with their grandchildren against the will of one or both parents, and the scope given to their rights. It starts by explaining the content and the goals of the legal reforms enacted in Spain at the beginning of the 21st century to promote grandparents’ interests. Then, it presents the case law developed in the interpretation of the relevant legal rules. The resulting state of the law is assessed, taking into account the interests of all the parties involved (parents, grandparents, and grandchildren). The experience of more than twenty years of application of the specific provisions concerning grandparents’ contact rights sheds light on the impact of giving grandparents stronger legal rights. However, it also prompts the question of whether this legislative choice might have brought about useless and potentially harmful litigation. |
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Journal | Family & Law, September 2021 |
Keywords | Grandparents, Grandchildren, Family life, Contact, Best interests of the child, Child's views |
Authors | Prof. K. Sandberg |
AbstractAuthor's information |
The article explores the extent of the right to family life under Article 8 ECHR with regard to contact between grandparents and grandchildren. An analysis of decisions from the European Court of Human Rights shows that although such a right may exist, it is not strong and depends heavily on the circumstances of the specific case. The article points to what seems to be an inconsistency in the Courts approach to these cases and questions the position of the children and their views and best interests. |
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Risk, restorative justice and the Crowna study of the prosecutor and institutionalisation in Canada |
Journal | The International Journal of Restorative Justice, Issue 2 2021 |
Keywords | restorative justice, institutionalisation, risk, prosecutor, Canada |
Authors | Brendyn Johnson |
AbstractAuthor's information |
In Canada, restorative justice programmes have long been institutionalised in the criminal justice system. In Ontario, specifically, their use in criminal prosecutions is subject to the approval of Crown attorneys (prosecutors) who are motivated in part by risk logics and risk management. Such reliance on state support has been criticised for the ways in which it might subvert the goals of restorative justice. However, neither the functioning of these programmes nor those who refer cases to them have been subject to much empirical study in Canada. Thus, this study asks whether Crown attorneys’ concerns for risk and its management impact their decision to refer cases to restorative justice programmes and with what consequences. Through in-depth interviews with prosecutors in Ontario, I demonstrate how they predicate the use of restorative justice on its ability to reduce the risk of recidivism to the detriment of victims’ needs. The findings suggest that restorative justice becomes a tool for risk management when prosecutors are responsible for case referrals. They also suggest that Crown attorneys bear some responsibility for the dangers of institutionalisation. This work thus contributes to a greater understanding of the functioning of institutionalised restorative justice in Canada. |