Legal Responses to Racism: Innovation and Retrenchment in Ireland

Following decades in which the absence of immigration allowed Governments to claim there was no problem of racism in Ireland, the 1990s saw Ireland adopt new equality measures to combat racism. Whilst these innovations are important and even innovative, paradoxically they are accompanied by policy initiatives which indicate the equality agenda is still very much a controversial one and possibly even in retreat. More radical reforms are needed than merely tinkering with the Equality laws.

Application of guar gum as a flocculant aid in food processing and potable water treatment

The paper deals with use of a food grade coagulant (guar gum) as a replacement for synthetic coagulants for potable water treatment.

Making the law accessible to non-lawyers: effects of different kinds of expertise on perceived usability of online legal information services

To help design an environment in which professionals without legal training can make effective use of public sector legal information on planning and the environment - for Add-Wijzer, a European e-government project - we evaluated their perceptions of usefulness and usability. In concurrent think-aloud usability tests, lawyers and non-lawyers carried out information retrieval tasks on a range of online legal databases. We found that non-lawyers reported twice as many difficulties as those with legal training (p = 0.001), that the number of difficulties and the choice of database affected successful completion, and that the non-lawyers had surprisingly few problems understanding legal terminology. Instead, they had more problems understanding the syntactical structure of legal documents and collections. The results support the constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) of the effects of expertise on information retrieval, with implications for the design of systems to support the effective understanding and use of information.

Two Birds, One Stone: Combining Student Assessment and Socio-Legal Research

We describe here a method of assessment for students. A number of short-comings of traditional assessment methods, especially essays and examinations, are discussed and an alternative assessment method, the student project, is suggested. The method aims not just to overcome the short-comings of more traditional methods, but also to provide over-worked and under-resourced academics with viable primary data for socio-legal research work. Limitations to the method are discussed, with proposals for minimising the impact of these limitations. The whole �student project� approach is also discussed with reference to the Quality Assurance Agency benchmark standards for law degrees, standards which are expected of all institutions in the UK.