The State of the Judiciary, 2015

My job today as chief justice is to inform you and all Iowans of the condition of the Iowa Judicial Branch. The judicial branch is accountable to do its work so that Iowans can see the value of its fair and impartial courts. It is accountable every day for the resources it is given and the important responsibilities with which it has been entrusted. We best meet these obligations by becoming the best court system we can be. I am honored to report the progress the judicial branch has made towards becoming the best court system in the nation and the value of this progress for all Iowans. Both my grandfathers were carpenters. Like others who build with their hands, they could look at their work at the end of the day and see progress since the beginning of the day. Building Iowa’s court system consistent with its goals may not reveal progress at the end of every day as easily as the work of a carpenter. It is a long, careful process that requires the hands of many, working every day. But, certain days do come along when progress can be seen and our goals are closer within reach. Again this year, the goals of the judicial branch are to:  Protect Iowa’s children;  Provide full-time access to justice;  Operate an efficient, full-service court system;  Provide faster and less costly resolution of legal disputes;  Remain open and transparent; and  Provide fair and impartial justice for all.

St. Petersburg Court Chant and the Tradition of Eastern Slavic Church Singing

The present study examines the repertory of liturgical chant known as St. Petersburg Court Chant which emerged within the Imperial Court of St. Petersburg, Russia, and appeared in print in a number of revisions during the course of the 19th century, eventually to spread throughout the Russian Empire and even abroad. The study seeks answers to questions on the essence and composition of Court Chant, its history and liturgical background, and most importantly, its musical relationship to other repertories of Eastern Slavic chant. The research questions emerge from previous literary accounts of Court Chant (summarized in the Introduction), which have tended to be inaccurate and generally not based on critical research. The study is divided into eight main chapters. Chapter 1 provides a survey of the history of Eastern Slavic chant and the Imperial Court Chapel of St. Petersburg until 1917, with special emphasis on the history of singing traditional chant in polyphony, the status of the Court Chapel as a government authority, and its endeavours in publishing church music. Chapter 2 deals with the liturgical background of Eastern chant, the chant genres, and main repertories of Eastern Slavic chant. Chapter 3 concentrates on chant sources: it introduces the musical notations utilised, after which a typology of chant books is presented. The discussion continues with a survey of the sources of Court Chant and their content, the specimens selected for closer analysis, the comparative materials from other repertories, and ends with a commentary on some chant sources that have been excluded. The comparative sources include a specimen from around the beginning of the 12th century, a few manuscripts from the 17th century, and printed and manuscript chant books from the early 18th to early 20th century, covering the geographical area that delimits to the western Ukraine, Astrakhan, Nizhny Novgorod, and the Solovetsky Monastery. Chapter 4 presents the approach and methods used in the subsequent analytical comparisons. After a survey of the pitch organization of Eastern Slavic chant, the customary harmonization strategy of traditional chant polyphony is examined, according to which a method for meaningful analysis of the harmony is proposed. The method is based on the observation that the harmonic framework of chant polyphony derives from the standard pitch collection of monodic chant known as the Church Gamut, specific pitches of which form eight harmonic regions that behave like the usual tonalities of major and harmonic minor. Because of the considerable quantity of comparative chant forms, computer-assisted statistical methods are applied to the analysis of chant melodies. The primary chant forms and their respective comparative forms have been pre-processed into reduced chant prototypes and divided into redactions. The analyses are carried out by measuring the formal dissimilarities of the primary chant forms of the Court Chant repertory against each comparative form, and also by measuring the reciprocal dissimilarities of all chant versions in a redaction, the results of which are subjected to agglomerative hierarchical clustering in order to find out how the chant forms relate to each other. The dissimilarities are determined by applying a metric dissimilarity function that is based on the Levenshtein Distance. Chapter 5 provides the melodic and harmonic analyses of generic chants (chants used for multiple texts of different lengths), i.e., chants for stichera samoglasny and troparia, Chapter 6 of pseudo-generic chants (chants that are used for multiple texts but with certain restrictions), i.e., chants for heirmoi, prokeimena, and three other hymns, and Chapter 7 of non-generic chants, covering nine chants that in the Court repertory are not shared by multiple texts. The results are summarized and evaluated in Chapter 8. Accordingly, it can be established that, contrary to previous conceptions, melodically, Court Chant is in effect a full part of the wider Eastern Slavic chant tradition. Even if it is somewhat detached from the chant versions of the Synodal square-note chant books and the local tradition of Moscow, it is particularly close to chant forms of East Ukraine and some vernacular repertories from Russia. Respectively, the harmonization strategies of Court Chant do not show significant individuality in comparison with those of the available polyphonic comparative sources, the main difference being the part-writing, which generally conforms to western common practice standard, whereas the deviations from this tend to be more significant in other analysed repertories of polyphonic chant. Thus, insofar as the subsequent prevalence of Court Chant is not based on its forceful dissemination by authorities (as suggested in previous literature but for which little tangible evidence could be found in Chapter 1), in the present author’s interpretation, Court Chant attained its dominance principally because musically it was considered sufficiently traditional, and as a chant body supported by the government, was conveniently available in print in serviceable harmonizations.

Rights jurisprudence and the charter : evaluating the changing structure of Canadian federalism /

Abstract . Rights jiirisprudence in Canada dates back as far as Confederation in 1867. Between this date and 1982, the organizing principle of Confederation - federalism - has kept this jurisprudence solely within the supremacy of Parliament, subject to its confines and division of powers. After 1982, however, a new constitutional organizing principle was introduced, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced the patriation initiative, touted as the "people's package". Individual rights and freedoms were now guaranteed by the Constitution. Citizens of Canada now had a direct link to the Constitution via the Charter and there were now two significantly different organizing principles within the constitutional order widch created an unstable coexistence. This instability has led to a clash between judicially enforced Charter rights and federalism. The Charter has since had both a nationalizing and centralizing effect on Canadian federalism. This thesis explores the relationship between rights and federalism in Canada fix)m Confederation to present day by comparing the jurisprudence of pre and post Charter Canada. An analysis of Supreme Court's (and its predecessor's, the JCPC) decisions shows the profound effect the Charter has had on Canadian federalism. The result has been an undermining of federalism in Canada, with Parliamentary Supremacy replaced by Constitutional supremacy, and ultimately. Judicial Supremacy. Moreover, rights discourse has largely replaced federalism discourse. Canadians have become very attached to their Charter, and are unwilling to allow any changes to the constitution that may affect their rights as political elites discovered the hard way after the collapse of the Meech and Charlottetown Accords. If federalism is to remain a relevant and viable organizing principle in the Constitution, then governments, especially at the provincial level, must find new and iimovative ways to assert their importance within the federation.

Criteria for the validation of specialized verb equivalents : application in bilingual terminography

Multilingual terminological resources do not always include valid equivalents of legal terms for two main reasons. Firstly, legal systems can differ from one language community to another and even from one country to another because each has its own history and traditions. As a result, the non-isomorphism between legal and linguistic systems may render the identification of equivalents a particularly challenging task. Secondly, by focusing primarily on the definition of equivalence, a notion widely discussed in translation but not in terminology, the literature does not offer solid and systematic methodologies for assigning terminological equivalents. As a result, there is a lack of criteria to guide both terminologists and translators in the search and validation of equivalent terms. This problem is even more evident in the case of predicative units, such as verbs. Although some terminologists (L‘Homme 1998; Lerat 2002; Lorente 2007) have worked on specialized verbs, terminological equivalence between units that belong to this part of speech would benefit from a thorough study. By proposing a novel methodology to assign the equivalents of specialized verbs, this research aims at defining validation criteria for this kind of predicative units, so as to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of terminological equivalence as well as to the development of multilingual terminography in general, and to the development of legal terminography, in particular. The study uses a Portuguese-English comparable corpus that consists of a single genre of texts, i.e. Supreme Court judgments, from which 100 Portuguese and 100 English specialized verbs were selected. The description of the verbs is based on the theory of Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1976, 1977, 1982, 1985; Fillmore and Atkins 1992), on the FrameNet methodology (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010), as well as on the methodology for compiling specialized lexical resources, such as DiCoInfo (L‘Homme 2008), developed in the Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte at the Université de Montréal. The research reviews contributions that have adopted the same theoretical and methodological framework to the compilation of lexical resources and proposes adaptations to the specific objectives of the project. In contrast to the top-down approach adopted by FrameNet lexicographers, the approach described here is bottom-up, i.e. verbs are first analyzed and then grouped into frames for each language separately. Specialized verbs are said to evoke a semantic frame, a sort of conceptual scenario in which a number of mandatory elements (core Frame Elements) play specific roles (e.g. ARGUER, JUDGE, LAW), but specialized verbs are often accompanied by other optional information (non-core Frame Elements), such as the criteria and reasons used by the judge to reach a decision (statutes, codes, previous decisions). The information concerning the semantic frame that each verb evokes was encoded in an xml editor and about twenty contexts illustrating the specific way each specialized verb evokes a given frame were semantically and syntactically annotated. The labels attributed to each semantic frame (e.g. [Compliance], [Verdict]) were used to group together certain synonyms, antonyms as well as equivalent terms. The research identified 165 pairs of candidate equivalents among the 200 Portuguese and English terms that were grouped together into 76 frames. 71% of the pairs of equivalents were considered full equivalents because not only do the verbs evoke the same conceptual scenario but their actantial structures, the linguistic realizations of the actants and their syntactic patterns were similar. 29% of the pairs of equivalents did not entirely meet these criteria and were considered partial equivalents. Reasons for partial equivalence are provided along with illustrative examples. Finally, the study describes the semasiological and onomasiological entry points that JuriDiCo, the bilingual lexical resource compiled during the project, offers to future users.

Charter and Context: The Facts for Which We Need Evidence and The Mysterious Other Ones

Cet article a précédemment été publié par la Supreme Court Law Review (Second Series).

Caimanes and the Water - Infinite Legal Struggles about a Finite Good

This report is intended to shed more light on the ongoing water struggle in Caimanes, a small urban area in the central northern area of Chile, neighbouring Latin America’s biggest tailings dam. Undoubtedly, the water in Caimanes is running out and the conflict between the opponents of the dam and its owner, a multinational copper enterprise, is getting more and more attention by the national and also international media. In the discussion a judgment of the Chilean Supreme Court from last October plays a central role, because it is said to have granted the people from Caimanes their right to water. After a short introduction with some details about Camaines and the tailings from the dam El Mauro, the key points of this judgment shall be outlined. The final part of the report is dedicated to various institutional problems of the Chilean resources law and policy that can become virulent for the water supply and the environmental well-being of many other urban areas in the industrialized north of Chile.

Italian citizenship and the descendants of Italian citizens emigrated in Colombia. Removing a social injustice

Law is often the source of social discriminations, but, at the same time, it can be thekey to delete these social discriminations. The authors try to give an example of thisphenomenon, by analyzing the impact of the Italian citizenship’s rules over the descendantsof the Italian citizens emigrated abroad and, especially, in South America.Indeed, according to the former Italian law, only fathers could transmit iure sanguinisthe citizenship to their children: moreover, women automatically lost theItalian citizenship if they get a foreign citizenship by concluding a marriage witha foreign husband.These rules hardly discriminate the Italian women emigrated abroad and, especially,their descendants who were prevented to get the Italian’s citizenship.These discriminatory rules were finally deleted by the Italian Constitutional Courtin the Seventies and in the Eighties: however, the effects of those rules still persisted,since the decision of the Constitutional Court could not overcome the temporal limit of the entry into force of the Constitution (01.01.1948) and, therefore, could not“cover” the discriminatory facts occurred before that date.Finally in 2009, the Italian Supreme Court, by extending the effects ratione temporisof the decisions of the Constitutional Court, “reopened the doors” of the Italiancitizenship to a huge number of Italian citizenship born from Italian women beforethe 01.01.1948.Therefore, the authors focus on the social impact of this decision for all the potentialItalian citizens living in South America and try to assess its juridical effects overthe Italian law.

The Court of Justice of the European Union as a fundamental rights tribunal: challenges for the effective delivery of fundamental rights in the area of freedom, security and justice. CEPS Paper in Liberty and Security in Europe No. 49, 29 August 2012

This paper reflects on the challenges facing the effective implementation of the new EU fundamental rights architecture that emerged from the Lisbon Treaty. Particular attention is paid to the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and its ability to function as a ‘fundamental rights tribunal’. The paper first analyses the praxis of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and its long-standing experience in overseeing the practical implementation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Against this analysis, it then examines the readiness of the CJEU to live up to its consolidated and strengthened mandate on fundamental rights as one of the prime guarantors of the effective implementation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. We specifically review the role of ‘third-party interventions’ by non-governmental organisations, international and regional human rights actors as well as ‘interim relief measures’ when ensuring effective judicial protection of vulnerable individuals in cases of alleged violations of fundamental human rights. To flesh out our arguments, we rely on examples within the scope of the relatively new and complex domain of EU legislation, the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ), and its immigration, external border and asylum policies. In view of the fundamental rights-sensitive nature of these domains, which often encounter shifts of accountability and responsibility in their practical application, and the Lisbon Treaty’s expansion of the jurisdiction of the CJEU to interpret and review EU AFSJ legislation, this area can be seen as an excellent test case for the analyses at hand. The final section puts forth a set of policy suggestions that can assist the CJEU in the process of adjusting itself to the new fundamental rights context in a post-Lisbon Treaty setting.

The margin of appreciation, domestic irregularity and domestic court rulings in ECHR environmental jurisprudence: Global legal pluralism in action

Global legal pluralism is concerned, inter alia, with the growing multiplicity of normative legal orders and the ways in which these different orders intersect and are accommodated with one another. The different means used for accommodation will have a critical bearing on how individuals fare within them. This article examines the recent environmental jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights to explore some of the means of reaching an accommodation between national legal orders and the European Convention. Certain types of accommodation – such as the margin of appreciation given to states by the Court – are well known. In essence, such mechanisms of legal pluralism raise a presumptive barrier which generally works for the state and against the individual rights-bearer. However, the principal focus of the current article is on a less well-known, recent set of pluralistic devices employed by the Court, which typically operate presumptively in the other direction, in favour of the individual. First, the Court looks to instances of breaches of domestic environmental law (albeit not in isolation); and second, it places an emphasis on whether domestic courts have ruled against the relevant activity. Where domestic standards have been breached or national courts have ruled against the state, then, presumptive weight is typically shifted towards the individual.

Second Strike and you are (finally) out? The Quashing of the Prevention of Infiltration Law (Amendment no. 4)

The blog-post critically analyses the Israeli Supreme Court judgment (HCJ 8425/13 Anon v. Knesset et al) quashing the Prevention of Infiltration Law (Amendment no. 4), offering themes of comparative constitutional interest.

Courts as healthcare policy-makers: the problem, the responses to the problem and problems in the responses

This article starts by analysing healthcare litigation in Brazil by means of a literature review of articles that contribute with empirical findings on this phenomenon. Based on this review, I argue that health care litigation in Brazil makes the public health system less fair and rational. In the second part of this article, I discuss the three most overarching responses to control the level of litigation and its impact on the public health system: (i) the public hearing held by the Supreme Federal Court and the criteria the court established thereafter; (ii) the recommendations by the National Council of Justice aimed at building courts’ institutional capacity; and (iii) the enactment of the Federal Law 12.401/11, which created a new health technology assessment system. I argue that latter is the best response because it keeps the substantive decisions on the allocation of healthcare resources in the institution that is in the best position to make them. Moreover, this legislation will make the decisions about provision of health treatments more explicit, making easier for courts to control the procedure and the reasons for these decisions.

Disputing the application of laws: the constitutionality of the Brazilian Statute against domestic violence in the courts

This study aimed to map the key positions regarding the constitutionality of the Maria da Penha Law (Law 11.340/2006) in the Brazilian judicial system. The law, the result of political struggles by the Brazilian feminist movement, has been the subject of discussions in the public sphere and actions aimed at consolidating its constitutionality before the Federal Supreme Court. We examined and discussed the arguments used in the Courts, intending to show that the creation of law is not limited to the legislative moment, but rather that its social meaning is also constituted through disputes within the Judiciary.

Discrimination in the workforce: how it impacts a business

Discrimination, in its best form, is a hard concept to fathom as an employee or ordinary citizen. In the workplace, there are times when discrimination is necessary due to extenuating circumstances that revolve around the form or act of discrimination. It could be conveyed to save a life or avoid future conflict. However, it must be clearly stated as a written law that the act is lawful. When unlawful discrimination occurs, it stages an entirely different tone, as it is mainly conducted out of malice, hatred, greed, control, or ignorance. Over the last few decades, discrimination has existed in the workplace, although Federal laws mandate that it does not occur. It does not exist in just one geographical area or is country specific, but covers a wide spectrum, linking countries together from their points of view to creating rifts amongst those who are affected and those who are not, not only from a business perspective, but social humanistic relationships as well. This thesis will use quantitative and qualitative data to support discrimination of sexual harassment, race or color, and gender issues, as well as personal experiences, and how it has and will continue to impact businesses if the acts do not cease, permanently. Leadership, from the Presidents and Heads of Countries, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), managers, lowest-ranking supervisor, and employees should make it their personal goal to ensure these issues do not continue or arise in their perspective areas of responsibilities. When employees understand that they are valued, will be taken seriously when reporting acts of discrimination, and that some form of action will be taken, performance and productivity will escalate, and morale will increase in the workplace, resulting in higher productivity and subsequently higher profit margins for the company.