Identifying and recording every casualty of armed conflict

This article discusses the international legal obligation to identify and record every casualty of armed conflict that finds its basis in the treaties and customs of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. The article applies the various facets of the legal obligation to the armed conflicts in Iraq and Sri Lanka and argues that the parties in these conflicts failed in their international legal responsibility to civilians.

Game-theoretic aspects of international mergers: Theory and case studies

This paper studies the exclusion of potential competition as a motivating factor for international mergers. We propose a simple game-theoretic framework in order to discuss the conditions under which mergers that prevent reciprocal domestic competition will occur. Our analysis highlights the shortcomings of antitrust policies based on pre-merger/post-merger concentration comparisons. A review of several recent European cases suggests that actual merger policy often fails to consider potential competition.

Market transparency and collusion: on the UK agricultural tractor registration exchange

We review the decision by the European Commission in the case of the UK Agricultural Registration Exchange. We propose a theoretical model, offering a basis for some of the intuitive arguments used by the Commission on the anti-competitive role of information exchange in the case of price and non price collusion. Market transparency on non price data is shown to be a collusion facilitating device which may achieve stability in otherwise unstable cartels.

Multiproduct activity and competition policy: The Tetra Pak case

We propose the Tetra Pak case as a real-world example to study the implications of multiproduct activity for European Competition Policy. Tetra Pak, a monopolist in aseptic carton packaging of liquid food, competes with Elopak in the nonaseptic sector. The EC Commission used the effect of Tetra Pak's dominance in the aseptic sector on its rival's performance as an evidence of the former's anticompetitive behavior. With linear demand and cost functions and interdependent demands, the Commission's position can be supported. However, a more general model suggests that the Commission's conclusions cannot be supported as the unique outcome of the analysis of the information available.

Housing or property? The dynamics of housing policy and property principles in the right to buy

This paper examines the interplay and tension between housing law and policy and property law, in the specific context of the right to buy (RTB). It focuses on funding arrangements between the RTB tenant and another party. It first examines how courts determine the parties' respective entitlements in the home, highlighting the difficulty of categorising, under traditional property law principles, a contribution in the form of the statutory discount conferred on the RTB tenant. Secondly, it considers possible exploitation of the RTB scheme, both at the macro level of exploitation of the policy underpinning the legislation and, at the micro level, of exploitation of the tenant. The measures contained in the Housing Act 2004 intended to curb exploitation of the RTB are analysed to determine what can be considered to be legitimate and illegitimate uses of the scheme. It is argued that, despite the government's implicit approval, certain funding arrangements by non-resident relatives fail to give effect to the spirit of the scheme.

Governance, agricultural intensification and land sparing in tropical South America

In this paper we address two topical questions: How do the quality of governance and agricultural intensification impact on spatial expansion of agriculture? Which aspects of governance are more likely to ensure that agricultural intensification allows sparing land for nature? Using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, the World Database on Protected Areas, and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, we estimate a panel data model for six South American countries and quantify the effects of major determinants of agricultural land expansion, including various dimensions of governance, over the period 1970–2006. The results indicate that the effect of agricultural intensification on agricultural expansion is conditional on the quality and type of governance. When considering conventional aspects of governance, agricultural intensification leads to an expansion of agricultural area when governance scores are high. When looking specifically at environmental aspects of governance, intensification leads to a spatial contraction of agriculture when governance scores are high, signaling a sustainable intensification process.

Environmental justice and conceptions of the green economy

Green economy has become one of the most fashionable terms in global environmental public policy discussions and forums. Despite this popularity, and its being selected as one of the organizing themes of the United Nations Rio+20 Conference in Brazil, June 2012, its prospects as an effective mobilization tool for global environmental sustainability scholarship and practice remains unclear. A major reason for this is that much like its precursor concepts such as environmental sustainability and sustainable development, green economy is a woolly concept which lends itself to many interpretations. Hence, rather than resolve long-standing controversies, green economy merely reinvigorates existing debates over the visions, actors and policies best suited to secure a more sustainable future for all. In this review article, we aim to fill an important gap in scholarship by suggesting various ways in which green economy may be organized and synthesized as a concept, and especially in terms of its relationship with the idea of social and environmental justice. Accordingly, we offer a systemization of possible interpretations of green economy mapped onto a synthesis of existing typologies of environmental justice. This classification provides the context for future analysis of which, and how, various notions of green economy link with various conceptions of justice.

Shared authority: courts and legislatures in legal theory

This book advances a fresh philosophical account of the relationship between the legislature and courts, opposing the common conception of law, in which it is legislatures that primarily create the law, and courts that primarily apply it. This conception has eclectic affinities with legal positivism, and although it may have been a helpful intellectual tool in the past, it now increasingly generates more problems than it solves. For this reason, the author argues, legal philosophers are better off abandoning it. At the same time they are asked to dismantle the philosophical and doctrinal infrastructure that has been based on it and which has been hitherto largely unquestioned. In its place the book offers an alternative framework for understanding the role of courts and the legislature; a framework which is distinctly anti-positivist and which builds on Ronald Dworkin’s interpretive theory of law. But, contrary to Dworkin, it insists that legal duty is sensitive to the position one occupies in the project of governing; legal interpretation is not the solitary task of one super-judge, but a collaborative task structured by principles of institutional morality such as separation of powers which impose a moral duty on participants to respect each other's contributions. Moreover this collaborative task will often involve citizens taking an active role in their interaction with the law.

Revolution blues: the reconstruction of Health and Safety as a ‘common-sense’ form of regulation

This paper provides a review of the last five years of policymaking in the area of health and safety law; this includes multiple reviews, legislative reform, and the reframing of rhetoric around the issue. It characterises this as a process of social construction of a new ‘universe of meaning’ around health and safety regulation, which provides a basis for a particular, narrow, neoliberal conception of regulation and responsibility to permeate the mainstream. Deliberative and public-facing policymaking processes have been utilised as a key element of this process.

Effect of pair interactions on transition probabilities between inactive and active states: achieving collective behaviour via pair interactions in social insects

To understand the evolution of well-organized social behaviour, we must first understand the mechanism by which collective behaviour establishes. In this study, the mechanisms of collective behaviour in a colony of social insects were studied in terms of the transition probability between active and inactive states, which is linked to mutual interactions. The active and inactive states of the social insects were statistically extracted from the velocity profiles. From the duration distributions of the two states, we found that 1) the durations of active and inactive states follow an exponential law, and 2) pair interactions increase the transition probability from inactive to active states. The regulation of the transition probability by paired interactions suggests that such interactions control the populations of active and inactive workers in the colony.

Search engine liability for autocomplete suggestions: personality, privacy and the power of the algorithm

This article is concerned with the liability of search engines for algorithmically produced search suggestions, such as through Google’s ‘autocomplete’ function. Liability in this context may arise when automatically generated associations have an offensive or defamatory meaning, or may even induce infringement of intellectual property rights. The increasing number of cases that have been brought before courts all over the world puts forward questions on the conflict of fundamental freedoms of speech and access to information on the one hand, and personality rights of individuals— under a broader right of informational self-determination—on the other. In the light of the recent judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) in Google Spain v AEPD, this article concludes that many requests for removal of suggestions including private individuals’ information will be successful on the basis of EU data protection law, even absent prejudice to the person concerned.