Messina, a Sicilian town, was devasteted by an earthquake in1908. It was an hecatomb. Stricken through this unfathomable disgrace Messina’s institutions and civil society collapsed and a sort of wild natural state replaced the rule of law. In this situation there was a first intervention of the Russian Czarist navy who came to help but immediately enforced cruel emergency measures. The Italian army followed and there was a formal declaration of an ‘emergency situation.’ Around this event and the several exceptional measures taken by the government a debate took place about the legality of those exceptional measures. The article tries to reconstruct the historical context and the content of that debate and in a broader perspective thematizes how law (and morality) could be brought to meet the breaking of normality and ordinary life by an unexpected and catastrophic event.

The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan empowers the federal and provincial Governments via the President and the Governors of the respective provinces to enact the primary legislation independent of the representative legislatures in the form of Ordinances. However, the resulting enactment remains in force for a few months, and notionally, must be promulgated only under the circumstances of urgent necessity and when the national legislature is not in session. Yet, owing to the vagueness of the text of the relevant Constitutional provisions, the scope of this legislative authority has much potential for abuse, and it has so been alleged too, in numerous Constitutional petitions filed from time to time in the superior courts of Pakistan seeking the judicial review of the promulgating action on the ground of malafide etc. But the judicature in Pakistan has largely abstained from exercising its authority to keep itself from being stigmatized from the usual aftermath of the judicial pronouncement on questions of political fiat. Resultantly, the natural democratic right of the illiterate and ignorant people of Pakistan to be governed by laws made by the designated representative legislature is persistently being jeopardized. In this view of the matter, on the basis of an empirical study of the Ordinance and the emergency legislation in the United Kingdom, and the ensuing principles of good governance and democratic norms, this article argues that the Constitutional authority of the Governments in Pakistan to enact primary legislation by way of promulgating Ordinances is an arbitrary legislative endowment, and entails a review by a truly representative, legitimate and competent Constituent Assembly.

Legislative drafting is a skill slowly developing in the Pacific today. This abstract identifies and records an update on the challenges to legislative drafting in Pacific island countries. Due to lack of information on legislative drafting in the Pacific, research was undertaken with the assistance of Parliamentary Counsel and other Pacific drafters. I also attended the second biennial meeting of the Pacific Drafters’ Technical Forum in October 2009 where more current challenges were discussed. My own experiences as a legislative drafter are also reflected in this abstract.
The outcomes of the abstract will show that whereas legislative drafting as a specialised skill is recognised by Pacific governments and interests have grown in pursuing legislative drafting as a career, the challenges faced by Pacific legislative drafters are commonly more diverse and complex. In addition to analysing some of these challenges, this paper offers some recommendations to combating them.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as seen by observers, resembles a greedy international cartel that preys on the public in defiance of market competition. High oil prices are considered as a principal cause of the US economic woes. Some US congressmen pinpointed OPEC’s alleged inconsistency with the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and called upon the US administration to open dispute settlement proceedings against OPEC. This article discusses the legal issues arising from a US action at the WTO level against OPEC countries. The first sections of the article comprise an institutional review of the WTO and OPEC. The article addresses the interplay between the WTO and OPEC. It then illustrates the central provisions of the WTO that can be used for arguments and counter-arguments concerning such a WTO action. It culminates with a set of concluding thoughts.

The discussion about corporate sustainability performance already has a rich and longstanding history.Todate corporate sustainability performance is a key issue in many companies. However, when asked what it means or how to apply this construct in a concrete business context, many entrepreneurs and managers are not able to give an answer. This confusion may be due to the multitude of definitions and descriptions of corporate sustainability performance constructs.To get a better understanding of corporate sustainability performance and to help companies shape their corporate sustainability performance, a plenitude of (reporting) guidelines are available today. However, because of a rich variation in foci, these guidelines also contribute to the corporate sustainability performance confusion among business people.Companies are no longer solely judged on the financial performance, but they also have to account for their sustainability performance to a variety of stakeholders. However, along with the increasing attention of stakeholders for corporate sustainability performance, the number of organizations that assessing companies’ governance, social, ecological and economic performance also increasesThe aim of this paper is to research the validity and compatibility of the screening instruments of two widely respected sustainability rating agencies: the Zurich (Switzerland) based Sustainable Asset Management Group (SAM) and the Boston (USA) based KLD analytics, Inc (KLD). These screening instruments are benchmarked against the Corporate Sustainability Analysis Framework designed and developed by Dommerholt 2009. The results suggest that the SAM and KLD instruments are imperfect measures of corporate sustainability performance, implying that the validity of these measures is questionable. The results also show that the screening instruments are not really compatible indicating that these instruments cannot be used interchangeably because of differences in the underlying conceptions of corporate sustainability performance. Therefore we can say that these screening instruments too seem to add to the confusions surrounding corporate sustainability performance (measurement).