Corpus Of Law Research Articles

Modal Verbs Hedging: The Uses and Functions of “Will” and “Shall” in Nigerian Legal Discourse

This is a corpus-based study on the uses and functions of modal verbs “will” and “shall” in the Nigerian legal discourse. It aims at examining their pragmatic functions as hedges in the legal discourse. It specifically aims to investigate how hedges are used in the legal texts to indicate precision and uncertainty. To achieve these objectives a specialised corpus was constructed which we named as “Nigerian Law Corpus” (NLC). The compilation of NLC is based on the Nigerian court proceedings and law reports. Hence, the compiled NLC corpus contains 546,313-word tokens. Meanwhile, reference corpus of law with 2.2 million word tokens based on the British National Corpus (BNC) is retrieved for comparison with NLC. To this end, two concordance tools were utilised to analyse the data of this study viz. “AntConc version 3.5” a semi-automated computer-aided tool and a web-based tool “Lextutor version 7”. Based on the frequency distribution the results revealed that model verb “will” featured in 493 instances in the NLC and 7,711 instances in the BNC Law, while, “shall” occurred at 401 instances in NLC and 1,348 instances in BNC Law. The results also indicated that “shall” was an overused element in NLC than in BNC Law with standardised concordance hits per million (NLC=734, BNC Law =589) while, “will” is the least used element of NLC (902 instances per million) compared to BNC Law (3,369 instances per million). The study also enumerated different semantic and pragmatic functions of “will” and “shall” in legal discourse, citing examples from both tag corpus (NLC) and reference corpus (BNC Law). Some of the functions as hedges (conveying a truth value of a proposition) are epistemic meanings: politeness, obligation, precision, duty, intention, and permission. In nutshell, the results indicated that “will” and “shall” are used by legal practitioners more especially lawyers in a courtroom to achieve precision in their argument in a case to persuade the court by showing the true value of commitment of the proposition.

Probabilistic Partial Causation and a Gap in the Criminal Law

Cases in which a person merely contributes to the probability of harmful events such as death cannot be properly handled in the criminal law as it currently exists. These cases provide another kind of case (in addition to overdetermination cases) demonstrating that factual causation should not be understood in terms of but-for causation. They also imply that the corpus of substantive law is incomplete.

Attribution, State Responsibility, and the Duty to Prevent Malicious Cyber-Attacks in International Law

Malicious cyber-attacks, those cyber-attacks which do not rise to the level of force in international law, pose a significant problem to the international community. Attributing responsibility for malicious cyber-attacks is imperative if states are to respond and prevent the attacks from continuing. Unfortunately, due to both technical and legal issues attributing malicious cyber-attacks to the responsible state or non-state actor is difficult if not impossible in the vast majority of attacks. Even if an injured state may recursively trace the malicious cyber-attack to the responsible IP address, this is not enough under the current international customary law to hold a state or non-state actor responsible for the cyber-attack as it is virtually impossible to bridge the air gap between the computer system and end user to demonstrate affirmatively who initiated the attack. Even if a state could demonstrate the identity of the end user that initiated the attack, this is not enough to link the end user to the state for responsibility to lie under existing customary international law. As such this study was conducted to analyze the issue of malicious cyber-attacks as a matter of customary international law to ascertain mechanism to hold states responsible for malicious cyber-attacks which originate from a state’s sovereign territory. Specifically, this study addresses the issue of legal and technical attribution of malicious cyber-attacks for the purposes of holding states responsible for those attacks. This study argues that under existing customary international law attributing malicious cyber-attacks for the purpose of ascertaining state responsibility is difficult if not impossible. As such, this study proposes alternative theories, which already exist within customary international law, for holding states responsible for malicious cyber-attacks which originate from their sovereign territory. This study addresses alternative theories of state responsibility existing in customary international law such as those put forth in Trail Smelter and Corfu Channel and the theory of strict liability for ultra-hazardous activities. In addition, this study addresses the theory of indirect responsibility, the duty to prevent harm, and due diligence in cyber-space. Lastly this study analysis the impact of the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and NATO forces and determines that a burgeoning rule of attribution may be present which would impact the attribution of malicious cyber-attacks to states. This study makes an original and important addition to the corpus of international law by addressing the issues of technical and legal attribution, state responsibility, and the duty to prevent malicious cyber-attacks as a matter of customary international law. This study is needed; malicious cyber-attacks implicate international law, as the majority are interstate in nature. However, international law currently has no paradigm, per se, in place to effectively deal with the issue of malicious cyber-attacks.

Dissolving Royal Marriages: A Documentary History, 860–1600, by David d’AvrayPapacy, Monarchy and Marriage, 860–1600, by David d’Avray

The premise for David d’Avray’s studies of the papacy and royal marriages is an important but often overlooked insight: the social norms governing how high-status patriarchal males in medieval Europe approached the production of legitimate heirs were highly atypical by the standards of most other human societies throughout documented history. As codified through the corpus of canon law, these social norms required such men to commit to just one legal wife at any one time and they made it extremely difficult to repudiate a wife, once married. By contrast, polygyny has been extremely common in most societies outside Europe (in particular in Africa and the Islamic World), as indeed it was in many parts of Europe before their medieval Christianisation. The ancient Greeks and Romans had preferred monogamy but tempered this with easy divorce and remarriage. The emphasis on marriage as both sacramental and an insoluble bond, which twelfth- and thirteenth-century popes promoted with considerable vim, therefore took European societies into uncharted territory. The Church compounded this with further rules about who might marry whom: marriage between those within certain degrees of consanguinity was ruled out—originally seven, but revised to just four after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215—as was marriage between those with ‘affinity’ (marriage to a close relation of one’s former spouse) or ‘spiritual kinship’ (marriage to a close relation of one’s godparents). Acceptance of these ideas, which seems to have spread slowly but measurably from c.1000 to c.1200, had certain obvious effects, including that it encouraged clans and communities to expand their circle of kinship links. It also provided lucrative opportunities for popes and local bishops to earn revenue by granting dispensations to individuals throughout Christian societies when they wanted to marry within the family after all. But D’Avray points out that its effects at more exalted levels of state were much less benign: the chances of a succession crisis were greatly increased because each king was now entirely dependent on his queen to provide him with the necessary heirs. When such heirs were not forthcoming and his wife did not die of natural causes there was a significant problem for which the king no longer had any easy remedy.

Post-World War I/Quiet Revolution (1920-1970) Through the Lenses of Legal Interpretations and International Law

The first theme is legal interpretation. What appears to be a mere matter of methodology in the discipline has ramifications in all areas of substantive law, through the impact of the Constitution, and by means of a generous approach to the whole corpus of law in this country. A significant case in the 1930s changed the paradigm according to which courts give meaning to the written law found in constitutional documents, and this change eventually extended to all legislative texts. The decision by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Edward v. Canada (Attorney General), with what later became known as the metaphor of the “living tree”, marked the end of an era of strict legal construction and the beginning of a new model to ascertain the intention of the constituting authority in the Constitution Act, 1867, and also later in the Constitution Act, 1982 and the Canadian Charter. The second theme is interlegality, or the rules concerning the interaction between international law and domestic law, including the conclusion of treaties and the use by courts of non-national normativity. Again, it was in the 1930s when the courts of highest instance for Canada laid down the foundations for understanding the dynamic at play in this regard in the so-called Labour Conventions case. Indeed, given the principle of the separation of powers, as well as the federal structure of our country, the Privy Council had to find an equilibrium not only among the branches of governments, but also between the two levels (or orders) of constitutional authorities. In the end, this case recognized the plenitude of power of the federal government for the conclusion of international treaties, while holding that dualism meant that the (federal) Crown could make treaties, but that Parliament and the provincial legislatures needed to give legal effect to such conventions by means of statutes. The domestic implementation of treaty obligations had to be in line, rigorously, with the division of legislative powers under the Constitution. This articulation of interlegality has remained the applicable scheme to this day, although one feature has been challenged at the political level. Indeed, during the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, the province of Quebec started to claim its own jus tractatus. Thus the second section of this chapter ends with a look at the “Gerin-Lajoie” statement. Finally, the conclusion will examine the significance of these historical developments for contemporary public law in Canada.

The Multiple Levels of Governance of International Migration: Understanding Disparities and Disorder

There is no corpus of law that is global in nature. Rather, “global” migration law is a collection of legal instruments situated at levels ascending from the subnational to the international levels. International law instruments contribute to the global governance of international migration at the international and regional levels. Two issues arise with respect to the effectiveness of these instruments: voluntary state accession and subsequent enforcement, even when states are parties to them. Domestic law regulates issues of international migration at the national and subnational levels. Enforcement is assumed to be more effective here. But this effectiveness varies according to the power of states, their levels of development and their capacities.

The Human Right to Non-Religious Beliefs: A Prospectus

This paper proposes that there is an urgent need for an internationally recognized human right to non-religious beliefs, viz distinct from the right to religious freedom, within the corpus of international human rights law. The argument for the need for such treatment is essentially related to the fact that non religious beliefs have been sidelined by the preference over the religious beliefs. The main assumption of this proposal is that it implies that there is an irreconcilable yet overlapping dominion over the same area of inquiries where a competition is unavoidable in which the religious is on the winning side. For instance, the law to protect the religions is thriving not only in eastern countries, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Myanmar, but also in the U.S. and European countries. For all that, this proposal posits that currently there is no level playing field for this enduring conflict between these two views. Nevertheless, the main objective of this proposal is not simply about believers versus non-believers rather it is about the amplification of the existing aspiration for stronger legal protection for every individual without regard to her status of belief. Hence, it appears that the need has gone beyond the simple polarizing dualism between the religious and the secular. Simply put, in this proposal, I aim to investigate the international legal status and protection of non-religious ideas or beliefs in the present international legal system. Going further, the proposed project should not merely a description of its international legal status but also aims to discuss how it is protected so that it can identify the challenges which in turn may envisage a proposal for a more robust international legal regime to protect non-religious beliefs.

Responsibility to Protect in the Age of Global Terror: A Methodological Reassessment

Ten years after its formal adoption, the R2P doctrine remains an incomplete project in a world of continuing conflicts now aggravated by the existential threat of global terrorism. The debate on the permissibility of military action to stop mass atrocities when authorisation to use force is not forthcoming from the Security Council has produced only a plurality of conflicting theories but hardly any progress at the normative level. A two-pronged approach could be used to consolidate R2P as a doctrine fully integrated into the corpus of international law. The first prong requires the revamping of the largely neglected Article 48 of the ILC Draft on State Responsibility; the second involves using R2P as a platform to initiate a reform of customary international law to make it more consistent with elementary principles of justice and universal human rights.

Conflicting Norms in a World of Fragmented International Law and the Role of World Trade Organization: Constitutionalization or Linkage Facilitation?

In view of a fragmented international law, World Trade Organization is at the convergence point of most international law corpus and their conflicting norms. As such, WTO and the free trade it tries to protect can have both exasperating and harmonizing effects for these conflicting norms. WTO by simply allowing “exceptions” to some of its rules and “enabling” some other rules, it could facilitate its member States in taking unilateral and multilateral, domestic and international, measures for promoting and protecting human, labor, and environmental rights. Therefore, as stop gap measure, in the existing global governance, WTO can facilitate a short-to-medium-term solution by promoting and protecting non-trade rights, not by constitutionalization, but by external legitimization, through its existing internal procedures, dispute settlement system, and good faith interpretation of its treaties and agreements.

Supersessionist or Complementary?: Reassessing the Nature of Legal Revision in the Pentateuchal Law Collections

Scholars studying the evolution of the biblical law corpora are today divided into two camps. One camp argues that the authors of these corpora revised earlier law collections with the aim of superseding them. A growing countermovement has challenged the classical paradigm. This camp maintains that, as biblical authors revised an earlier code, they did not reject the authority and standing of the earlier collection. Rather, they viewed their own literary works as complements to the earlier ones. Scholars routinely adopt one position or the other and demonstrate how that position produces constructive readings of the passages at hand. One is hard put, however, to find studies that systematically set the methodological claims of each camp in conversation with each other to measure and mediate the validity of these respective approaches. This study seeks to remedy this situation. In considering the positions of the two camps, I emphasize how each relates to five critical issues: the ubiquitous use of lemmatic citation; their respective understanding of the reasons for the redaction of the Pentateuch; the ubiquitous blending of legal materials elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible; a consideration of the legal terminology and models each uses to assess the texts; and the phenomenon in Deuteronomy of cross-referencing other legal sources. With these underpinnings revealed, I assess each position, concluding that the complementarian position held by the more recent camp is the more cogent of the two.

A critique of certain aspects of the grounds, procedure and reliefs attaching to customary divorce law in Southern Nigeria

Divorce does great violence to marriage, and by extension to family and society. Although the provisions for divorce under the Nigerian Matrimonial Causes Act frustrates the ideal of a lifelong union made normative by the natural law, the provisions and practices of divorce under the various customary laws are arguably much more devastating to the quintessential stability of marriage. It is either that the grounds enabling divorce are so elastic and plural to encompass anything whatsoever; or that the procedure for initiating and securing divorce is overly discriminatory and human right insensitive; or that the reliefs attaching thereto are not satisfactory or sufficient. The purpose of this study is to advance some criticisms against the grounds, procedure and reliefs predicated on customary divorce law in southern Nigeria. It is the finding thereof that much of the corpus of the customary divorce laws applicable to southern Nigerian are contrary to natural justice, equity and good conscience. The methods employed in this study are analysis and hermeneutics of customs on the one hand and statutory and case constructions on the other hand. All in all, this study recommends a thorough going revision of the customary rules on divorce with statutory limitations as guard flies. Key words: Divorce, customary law, bride price and reliefs.

Die Tora im Judentum

Abstract The article assumes a formal difference of understanding of the Torah in Judaism and the biblical theology of the Old Testament. The Jewish understanding of the Torah as a self-contained complex of meaning could be identified by the fact that law and legal regulations formed the actual core of the cult and communal life. The leading idea therefore is the Torah as a corpus of law and as the spiritual-religious center of Judaism in history. Events and narrations would be secondary. In the center of the Torah there would be not the personal luck of the individual, but the means of existence of the people of Israel.

The Protection of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPS) Under International Law: A Myth or Reality?

Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are people who because of circumstances beyond their control have had to flee their traditional homes as a result of natural or man-made threats to their lives. The general perception is that IDPs are not offered any protection by international law. This article argues that though there may not be too many laws specifically enacted at the global level to cater for the plight of IDPs but this category of people are well protected within the extant juris corpus of international laws; further, the Africa Union by virtue of the Kampala Convention which came into force on 6 December 2012 has taken the bull by the horn to ameliorate the burden of IDPs, the said convention is the first of its kind at the international level.

English

Performing Right (Performing Rights) in the corpus of laws in Indonesia have not been strong in the rule and the protection of the law. Although the Copyright ACT in recent times revision rule has been loaded but still very narrow so there can take to become a rule of law that can reverse engineer the behavior of society (notably the community of users of copyrighted songs and music) to stick with it. This paper tries to do a review of the literature and the law. The birth of Act No. 28 by 2014 about copyright gives the feel of a broader legal and encouraged to provide protection of economic rights (economic right) over Copyrights in particular Performing Right with an emphasis on fostering recognition of Collective Management Institutions, as well as on Related Rights protection for emphasis that gives economic maximization of existing opportunities of performing actors, producer ponogram, and broadcasters. And thus, created a large corpus of law in the field of Performing Right in Indonesia .

Legal Framework as a Determinant of Implementation of Occupational Health and Safety Programmes in the Manufacturing Sector in Kenya.

Recent trends in the organization of work have increased the risk of occupational safety and health (OSH) in Kenyan industries through exposure to hazardous substances, work related accidents and increased stress-related illnesses. According to International lab our organization (ILO) everyone is entitled to the right to safe and healthy working conditions and therefore the corpus of law in Kenya dealing with occupational safety and health should be embedded in the international OSH legal instruments. Specifically the occupational health and safety Act (2007) is expected to provide for safety, health and welfare of workers and all persons lawfully present at workplaces. The purpose of this study therefore was to investigate legal framework as a determinant of implementation of occupational health and safety programmes in the manufacturing sector in Kenya. It focused on six legal areas predicted as affecting implementation of OSH. These factors were national OSH policy, OSHA (occupational safety and health Act) familiarity with OSHA, government OSH inspections and audits, ease of implementation of OSHA, Government support in the implementation of OSH and OSHA implement ability. The study adopted descriptive cross-sectional survey design but however intended to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. A self administered questionnaire was used to collect data from 257 OSH officers drawn randomly from 735 manufacturing industries registered by Kenya manufacturers association. 252 questionnaires were received back and analyzed with the help of SSPS window version 21. Both correlation and regression analysis were conducted and the results showed that there was a positive significant relationship between legal framework and implementation of OSH programmes.

The textual fit of translated EU law: a corpus-based study of deontic modality

This paper discusses the textual fit of translated EU law – that is, how its language differs from that of nontranslated Polish law – at the level of deontic modality patterns. The study is part of a larger three-year project and was conducted on the following multilingual comparative corpora: (1) The Polish Translation JRC Acquis Corpus, a corpus of acquis built by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre from which regulations and directives were isolated as separate sub-corpora (14.7m and 7.2m words, respectively), and corresponding English versions of translated regulations and directives. Translated regulations become automatically binding law in Poland while directives undergo intralingual translation by transposition into national law; (2) The reference corpus compiled by the author – the Polish Law Corpus, of 6.8m words, comprising Polish statutes as a source of naturally occurring legal Polish.The primary functions of law are to impose duty and to confer power. As a result, the language of the law is marked by a high frequency of deontic modals because of its need to express obligation and permission. Obligation and permission-coding modals are strong genre markers and have very high salience in translated and nontranslated law. However, they have a strikingly different distribution across the corpora, as well as within each corpus (between resolutions and directives as well as between codes and ordinary statutes of Polish law), with most modals ranking high in keywords lists. In Polish legislation, obligation and permission are mainly expressed through semi-modals, present tense and special phrasemes (e.g. jest obowiązany do ‘is obliged to’), which are not prompted in translated language. The distribution of modals in the Polish version of EU law directly reflects source language modality patterns, pointing to strong interference, overreliance on literal translation techniques and lack of normalisation to generic conventions of legislative Polish. The differences may also be attributed to a different structure of EU legal instruments (extensive non-normative preambles), the institutional culture of translating (guidelines for translators on how to translate certain modals) and power relations (interaction between majority and minority culture). In view of other differences between translated and nontranslated law, it may be argued that the low textual fit of translated law creates a distinct, more ‘European’ genre within the Polish language of the law, invading the integrity of and colonising the national genre. Such departures from generic conventions require a greater cognitive effort on the part of the reader and may increase interpretive doubts.

Corporate Actus Reus

In recent years there has been an increasing focus on the ways in which corporate policies are conducted and interacted with the environment, government and communities, as well as the lives and rights of individuals. The author through this paper likes to discuss about corporates criminal liability in violation of human rights. Basically the key conceptual problem of corporate criminal liability is forging a coherent link between the corpus of criminal law — which has been developed in the context of natural persons, and to reflect the psychology of human beings and the realities of the corporate form, which is a complex fabric of human actor on one hand, and corporate hierarchies, structures, policies and attitudes on the other. The author hereby intends to highlight and emphasize that corporations can only act through human beings, yet the actions of human employees or agents always occur within the matrix of these hierarchies, structures, policies and attitudes.

Automated reference resolution in legal texts

This paper investigates the task of reference resolution in the legal domain. This is a new interesting task in Legal Engineering research. The goal is to create a system which can automatically detect references and then extracts their referents. Previous work limits itself to detect and resolve references at the document targets. In this paper, we go a step further in trying to resolve references to sub-document targets. Referents extracted are the smallest fragments of texts in documents, rather than the entire documents that contain the referenced texts. Based on analyzing the characteristics of reference phenomena in legal texts, we propose a four-step framework to deal with the task: mention detection, contextual information extraction, antecedent candidate extraction, and antecedent determination. We also show how machine learning methods can be exploited in each step. The final system achieves 80.06 % in the F1 score for detecting references, 85.61 % accuracy for resolving them, and 67.02 % in the F1 score for the end-to-end setting task on the Japanese National Pension Law corpus.

John Harrington and Maria Stuttaford (eds). Global Health and Human Rights: Legal and Philosophical Perspectives * John Tobin. The Right to Health in International Law

Two recent publications present a defence of the right to as it is articulated in international law and also provide insights into the array of impediments to realizing the right. Despite a perceived conceptual lack of coherence and a limited appreciation of its relevance among care professionals identified in these two books, the right to has nevertheless succeeded in capturing greater attention in global policy circles. Local care system reform initiatives around the globe increasingly make reference to the right to health. Both books are particularly helpful additions to the literature in light of recent advances in the of the right. Yet, each offers a very different assessment of its present status and prognosis for its future development. John Harrington and Maria Stuttaford's edited volume brings together a variety of internationally renowned scholars of law, philosophy, and policy to offer an interdisciplinary exploration of the development of rights-based approaches to health (at i). John Tobin's book also draws from a range of different disciplines and offers a truly outstanding and comprehensive examination of the right. From the history of its inclusion in the corpus of international law, to its conceptual foundations and substantive content, to measures required to secure it, Tobin's text on the right to could well be the most helpful to date. It provides an accessible overview to readers interested in understanding obligations arising from the right to under international law and impediments to implementation. A central organizing claim of the Harrington and Stuttaford volume is that the right to health, previously relegated to a secondary status in the hierarchy of human rights, now enjoys an elevated status as policy makers and practioners increasingly realize that approaching problems in care delivery systems and public �

What to Protect, and How? Unfair Competition, Intellectual Property, or Protection Sui Generis

While legal theory postulates that a clear borderline exists between the area covered by intellectual property rights and the surrounding glacis where imitation of others’ achievements is free, the division is all but distinct in practice. In particular in continental European countries such as Germany where unfair competition laws have traditionally been employed for granting protection under certain conditions against “slavish imitation”, the distinction – which is formally one of object-related protection vis-a-vis conduct-oriented assessment – sometimes appears as a matter of semantics rather than substance. Unfair competition protection may thereby assume the role of an incubator for new types of rights to emerge, which are later-on integrated into the corpus of traditional intellectual property laws or are transformed into rights sui generis. After describing and analysing the phenomena, the article suggests a systematized approach towards such legal metamorphoses that strives to reconcile the diverging objectives of flexibility and legal security.