Rewarding Merit in Judicial Appointments?: A research project undertaken by the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast for the Northern Ireland Judicial Appointments Commission

This research involved carrying out an online survey using a number of vignettes/scenarios to explore understandings and attitudes to judicial appointments. This sort of survey is relatively novel in this context and provided a useful way of understanding how a range of factors such as merit and seniority, career paths and connections, as well as gender and visibility, are perceived as operating within the appointments system. The research also involved a series of focus group interviews with a number of individuals with various professional backgrounds and at different levels of seniority. These, and a limited number of individual interviews, afforded an opportunity to explore more closely some of the themes arising from the scenarios as well as a chance to look in some depth at some of the views and concerns of a range of members of the legal professions.

Building upon the previous research project, this work was less concerned with revisiting earlier themes and more interested in exploring how the idea of “merit” as a governing factor in judicial appointment is seen as working in practice, and whether it is perceived as being most likely to be found within particular career profiles. We also investigated issues such as the possible development of formal and informal pathways to a judicial career and practical problems such as how an applicant might become known to the senior judiciary, and the importance of this. Overall our interest was primarily in developing an understanding of how gender is perceived to operate in the appointments process and how any barriers to recruiting women, particularly to the senior judiciary, could be further broken down.

Capital Markets Union and ending short-termism: lessons from the European Commission's public consultation

The European Commission’s initiative to establish a Capital Markets Union is in sharp conflict with the more radical goals of downsizing significantly certain financial activities and firms that have become too-big-to-fail and too-big-to-govern and of ending or at least drastically limiting extreme speculation and short-termism in finance and the real economy in order to increase financial stability. The recent public consultation on the Commission’s Green Paper Building a Capital Markets Union gives evidence of how weak such demands are compared to calls for deeper capital markets with more ‘shadow banking’ and rebuilding (sound) securitisation. The consultation is an example of how framing the problem and the refined better regulation agenda influence post-crisis financial reregulation and help to marginalize more radical ideas demanding a return to a more traditional banking model and transforming finance back to serving the real economy.

Comparison of excess radiological risk of building materials and industrial by-products according to I-index (EU-BSS) and revised room model (IAEA SSG-32)

To get a better insight into the radiological features of industrial by-products that can be reused in building materials a review of the reported scientific data can be very useful. The current study is based on the continuously growing database of the By-BM (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015) project (By-products for Building Materials). Currently, the By-BM database contains individual data of about 431 by-products and 1095 building and raw materials. It was found that in case of the building materials the natural radionuclide content varied widely (Ra-226: <DL-27851 Bq/kg; Th-232: <DL-906 Bq/kg, K-40: <DL-17922 Bq/kg), more so than for the by-products (Ra-226: 7-3152 Bq/kg; Th-232: <DL-1350 Bq/kg, K-40: <DL-3001 Bq/kg). The average Ra-226, Th-232 and K-40 contents of the reported by-products were respectively 2.52, 2.35 and 0.39 times higher than the building materials. The gamma exposure of bulk building products was calculated according to IAEA Specific Safety Guide No. SSG-32 and the European Commission Radiation Protection 112 based I-index (EU BSS). It was found that in most cases the I-index without density consideration provides a significant overestimation in excess effective dose.