A green stick or a fresh stick?: Locating customary penalties in the post-colonial era

Former colonies and dependencies in the South Pacific do not have the luxury of entirely ‘homegrown’ laws. Their legal systems are burdened with a ‘legacy’ of transplanted laws, developed for use in a foreign country, imposed on pre-existing systems of custom and culture. As a result, many small island countries are struggling to balance the demands of law from different sources, designed to operate in fundamentally different circumstances. In addition to the conflict that occurs in areas of substantive law, where customary and introduced law may prescribe a different rule for the same situation, the two systems differ in their approach to procedure, penalties and relief. This paper considers the divide between the theory and practice of introduced law and customary law and examines the way in which conflicts have been dealt with by the courts. In particular, it uses the example of banishment to illustrate the type of problems that arise in a plural system. The paper looks at the balancing exercise which has been necessary when custom, in the form of banishment, comes into conflict with introduced law, in the form of constitutional rights.

Rethinking the labour movement in the "new South Africa"

The socio-economic system underpinning apartheid in South Africa was based on the exploitation of black workers in the mines, the factories, the fields and the shops. It is widely recognized that the struggles of the South African black working class contributed decisively to the overthrow of the racist regime. In recognition of the power of organised labour, the democratic government elected in 1994 granted South Africa's unions unprecedented legal and constitutional rights. However, despite these gains, the country's labour movement has been facing a fresh set of challenges, from macroeconomic policy to the factory floor, many of them emanating from labour’s political allies in Government. The purpose of this book is to examine how the South African labour movement is responding to these challenges in the new millennium. A variety of experts on South African labour, both within the country and outside deal with crucial issues: How has South Africa's labour movement reacted to the ANC Government's neoliberal economic agenda? How do the unions relate to an increasingly diversifying, “flexible” and vulnerable workforce? What are labour’s prospects of contributing to a left project in democratic South Africa? What are the challenges facing the unions in relation to new forms of militancy and social movements?

Singapore 'shared values' and law: Non east versus west constitutional hermeneutic

This article examines the apparent contradictions in Singaporean interpretation and application of its Westminster modeled Constitution in which the Constitution is treated as any other piece of legislation and Western style individual rights are easily overrun. It also examines the Government's particularist claim to Asian values as an explanation for its handling of the Constitution and seeks an alternative approach to understand the Constitution with reference to the Government publication, the Shared Values. The author suggests that this Document serves as a quasi-Constitution, and finds that interpreting two leading cases with this hermeneutic leads to a more satisfactory understanding of the court's decisions. The article concludes that the Government's approach toward the law to create the society it envisioned and published in the Document is a different and pragmatic issue, rather than a result of any fundamental East versus West cultural difference.

The effect of grain refinement and silicon content on grain formation in hypoeutectic Al-Si alloys

The effect of increasing the amount of added grain refiner on grain size and morphology has been investigated for a range of hypoeutectic Al-Si alloys. The results show a transition in grain size at a silicon concentration of about 3 wt% in unrefined alloys; the grain size decreasing with silicon content before the transition, and increasing beyond the transition point. A change in morphology also occurs with increased silicon content. The addition of grain refiner leads to greater refinement for silicon contents below the transition point than for those contents above the transition point, while the transition point seems to remain unchanged. The slope of the grain size versus silicon content curve after the transition seems to be unaffected by the degree of grain refinement. The results are related to the competitive processes of nucleation and constitutional effects during growth and their impact on nucleation kinetics. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.