Achieving satisfactory contractual terms for the engineer's role

An international survey of clients, consultants and contractors produced wide-ranging data on the views of users of the FIDIC form of contract. The purpose of the survey was to elicit views on a range of issues, prior to revising the model form, to ensure that the contract drafters produce a form that is satisfactory for its users. Those questions that focus upon the role of the engineer have been subjected to detailed statistical analysis. The analysis shows that, contrary to popular belief, the views of contract users from common law jurisdictions do not differ from those in civil code jurisdictions. The engineer’s role is not generally perceived as neutral in the contractual relationships between clients and contractors. Contractors would prefer someone other than the engineer to be the first-line settler of disputes in contracts.

The Lieber Code and the regulation of civil war in international law

In this paper, we consider one particularly interesting feature of the Lieber Code, which is the fact that it was drawn up by the U.S. Government to regulate the conduct of its armed forces in a civil war. In so doing, we hope to explore the extent to which there may be links between the Lieber Code and the contemporary regulation of non-international armed conflicts. In particular, we explore some similarities and contrasts between the views on the regulation of civil war that existed at the time of the drafting of the Lieber Code and the position that exists today.

Evidence for insertional codemixing: mixed compounds and French nominal groups in Brussels Dutch

In this paper we analyse mixed compounds, such as legume+winkel ‘vegetable shop, greengrocery’ and winter+paletot ‘winter coat’ which contain a French and a Dutch element, and French nominal groups, such as carte d’identité ‘identity card’, and journal parlé ‘radio news’, which bilingual speakers from Brussels frequently insert into Brussels Dutch utterances. Using Muysken’s (2000) typology of bilingual speech, we claim that the mixed compounds and the nominal groups display the characteristics of insertional code-mixing. In addition, some evidence for the existence of a continuum between borrowing and code-switching can be obtained from these examples. As the multimorphemic units that are inserted into Dutch are neither single words, nor full constituents, their status in the lexicon raises interesting issues for researchers interested in the interface between syntax and the lexicon (see also Backus 2003). We try to argue that nominal groups such as carte d’identité and journal parlé are probably best seen as lexical templates or constructional idioms (Booij, 2002b). The insertion of French constructional idioms in Brussels Dutch represents an innovation in the lexical patterns that are available to speakers of this language, which is highly relevant for theories of language change.

Missionary children: The French Holy Childhood Association in European context, 1843-c.1914

In the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of children in Europe and beyond were organized into battalions of fundraisers for overseas missions. By the end of the century these juvenile missionary organizations had become a global movement, generating millions of pounds in revenue each year. While the transnational nature of the children’s missions and publications has been well-documented by historians, the focus has tended to be on the connections that were established by encounters between the young western donors, missionaries overseas and the non-western ‘other’ constructed by their work. A full exploration of the European political, social and cultural concerns that produced the juvenile missionaries movement and the trans-European networks that sustained it are currently missing from historical accounts of the phenomenon. This article looks at the largest of these organizations, the Catholic mission for children, the French Holy Childhood Association (L’Œuvre de la sainte enfance), to understand how the principles this mission sought to impose abroad were above all an expression of anxieties at home about the role of religion in the family, childhood and in civil society as western polities were modernizing and secularizing in the nineteenth century.