Legal Bar Research Articles

Learning on the job? Addressing students’ exposure to bullying, harassment or discrimination during legal placements

ABSTRACT Law schools in the UK regularly encourage and support students to apply for vacation placement schemes on the basis that they provide valuable work experience and improve career progression prospects. There are, however, rarely any processes in place within universities to ensure equitable access to such opportunities nor systematic procedures for enabling reflection and evaluation post-placement before encouraging repeat uptake from future cohorts. In a context in which the legal profession continues to face well-documented challenges in regard to bullying, harassment and discrimination, these placements have the potential to expose students to inappropriate workplace behaviour. However, the nature of students’ experiences in this respect, and the adequacy of existing mechanisms for reporting and responding to any complaints, have not to date been the subject of sufficient scrutiny. Drawing on scoping research involving semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, this article explores students’ potential exposure to bullying, harassment or discrimination in the particular context of mini-pupillages undertaken at the legal Bar, and calls for increased clarity across chambers, regulators and universities alike in regard to lines of communication and accountability to address this.

Contribution Analysis of Large Language Models and Data Augmentations for Person Names in Solving Legal Bar Examination at COLIEE 2023

This paper describes our system for COLIEE 2023 Task 4, which automatically answers Japanese legal bar exam problems. We propose an extension to our previous system in COLIEE 2022, which achieved the highest accuracy among all submissions using data augmentation. We focus on problems that include mentions of person names. In this paper, we present two main contributions. First, we incorporate LUKE as our deep learning component, which is a named entity recognition model trained on RoBERTa. Second, we fine-tune the pretrained LUKE model in multiple ways, comparing fine-tuning on training datasets that include alphabetical person names and ensembling different fine-tuning models. We confirmed that LUKE and its fine-tuned model on person type problems improve their accuracies. Our formal run results show that LUKE and our fine-tuning approach using alphabetical person names were effective, achieving an accuracy of 0.69 in the COLIEE 2023 Task 4 formal run.

The Crime of Aggression and National Law: The UK

Although no domestic crime of aggression currently exists in the UK, the chapter argues that there would be no inherent legal bar to its prosecution should the legislature choose in future to enact one. This is not to say that such prosecution would necessarily proceed, insofar as in a case involving a foreign State official it would come up against the defendant’s potential immunity, either ratione personae or ratione materiae, from the jurisdiction of the UK's criminal courts. In the event, however, that the defendant to a charge of aggression could permissibly be proceeded against in a UK court, the questions implicated by the adjudication of a statutory crime of aggression would be within the rightful power of that court to determine. The only fundamental bar to such adjudication is the political will to enact a crime of aggression.

Prosecuting Starvation under International Criminal Law

Abstract Historically, international criminal tribunals have not included a specific provision criminalizing the use of starvation within their respective statutes or founding legal documents. In light of this, and after clarifying what material/objective and mental/subjective elements characterize starvation, the present article seeks to explore whether it can be adjudicated as a crime against humanity or as an act of genocide and how this could be accomplished within the existing framework of international criminal law. In this respect, it is submitted that the general absence of an explicit reference to a crime of starvation in the statutes of international criminal tribunals is not a legal bar to the prosecution of the corresponding behaviour. Furthermore, this article briefly considers starvation as a war crime, particularly pursuant to Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Statute — which criminalizes starvation in international armed conflicts at the ICC — and the conspicuous absence of a corresponding and parallel provision that would criminalize starvation as a war crime in non-international armed conflicts.

Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court. By Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. $24.00 hardcover.

Crook County: Racism, and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court. By Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. $24.00 hardcover.Crook County is a powerful sociological exploration of the largest unified criminal courthouse in the United States-Cook County, Chicago-a telling excavation of America's separate and unequal system of racialized criminal (in)justice. Based on 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork, Van Cleve dramatically reveals the role of the courts, and what she calls their working groups, judges, sheriffs, prosecutors, police, public defenders and private attorneys, in reproducing racial inequalities, in ways that remind one of Diane Vaughan's powerful thoughts on bureaucratic-organizational cultures. Portrayed here is a Goffmanesque world in which justice is absent, racial animus ever present, and bureaucratic rules of efficiency prioritize quantity over quality, all at the expense of defendants, their families and victims, mostly of color.Van Cleve opens the courthouses' doors to show the legal habitus behind Durkheimian rituals of ceremonial racialized degradation that separate the criminalized poor from the sacred supposedly law-abiding White citizenry and concomitant White suburban legal establishment processing them through the system. Most defendants are charged with lower-level nonviolent offenses, too poor to obtain adequate legal representation or make bail. Hence, as in the film, the Lincoln Lawyer, they are guilty until proven innocent. Van Cleve uses her ethnographic gifts to underscore the culture and code of the courts, where a largely White professional class, including the substantial majority of Cook County's state's attorneys and judges, process defendants, overwhelmingly of color, with pictures of successful court cases won put up like prize fights. The title of the book comes from the nickname given to the court by persons of color who are the primary persons going through its halls in the segregated ghetto of Chicago where it resides, alongside the massive jail complex, dubbed the Hotel California by residents-you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave-of which it forms the larger part.The spatially and racially segregated nature of Chicago is mirrored in the complex, with front-stage and backstage performances of those at the bottom of the legal bar expertly and richly described, most especially for the persons of color that are the majority entrants to its hallowed halls of justice. In her ethnographic exploration, Van Cleve illustrates the central role of the White courtroom as a gateway for the much higher rates of incarceration among disadvantaged communities of color that Robert Sampson has dubbed punishment's place. In a justice system dominated by plea bargains-some 95% of all cases-Van Cleve shows how procedural justice becomes a charade. Particularly telling are the racial and moral codes that reinforce the distance between the largely White suburban professionals who staff the courtroom and the racialized, criminalized other, adding nuanced ethnographic detail to the changing racial demography and political geography of the criminal justice system outlined so powerfully in the scholarship of William Stuntz and the music of hip-hop artist extraordinaire, Tupac Shakur. …

Stronger together: Strategies to protect local sovereignty, ecosystems, and place-based communities from the global fossil fuel trade

In the Pacific Northwest, residents are mobilizing to prevent the coastal export of fossil fuels and protect unique ecosystems and place-based communities. This paper examines the diverse groups, largely from the Bellingham area, and how they succeeded in blocking construction of what was to be the largest coal-shipping port in North America, the Gateway Pacific Terminal (GPT). Tribes, environmental organizations, faith-based groups, and other citizen groups used a multitude of approaches to prevent development, both independently and in concert. This paper reviews the various ways in which the groups collaborated and supported one another to resist the neoliberalization of the coast and support local sovereignty, unique ecosystems, and place-based communities. Groups like Power Past Coal, Protect Whatcom, and Coal-Free Bellingham fought for important and protective changes and evidenced communitywide political support, but the sovereign rights of the Lummi Nation were the legal bar to constructing the coal terminal.

Towards a Synthesis of Judicial Perspectives on Technology-Assisted Review

DOCUMENT review accounts for an estimated 70% of all e-discovery costs. This means that document review also represents the greatest area of potential cost savings in e-discovery. Over the past ten years, the number of technological approaches to document review for litigation has increased, with the application of methods long in the domain of information retrieval. These advances call upon lawyers practicing civil litigation to gain a familiarity with the various technological options available, lest an opportunity is missed or the opponent, court, or client catches the unwary lawyer by surprise. Technology-assisted review (TAR) is not a luxury available only to large firms handling very large cases. Properly chosen and deployed, technological methods can enable a smaller firm to handle larger cases, and thereby compete with larger firms. In the end, the goal is to make litigation more cost-effective, allowing more cases to stay in the judicial system rather than having litigants settle because the discovery costs outweigh the value of the matter. In addition to gaining an understanding of the technology behind the available techniques, lawyers should appreciate that the match (or mismatch) between the problem to be solved, the technology chosen, and the expertise of the user are as important as the technology in determining whether the results will be both satisfactory and defensible. Part I of this article explains TAR and the variety of approaches available. Part II synthesizes the meaning of the various judicial decisions dealing with TAR in a substantive fashion. Consideration of the judicial opinions proves the importance of understanding available technology. If there is an overall theme from the cases on this topic, it is that courts increasingly expect counsel to consider technological approaches and be competent to discuss what is warranted for a case. While the producing party still has the power to decide how to handle its production, if parties do reach agreement on an approach, they will be held to it, no matter how ill-advised it might turn out to be. Counsel must bring to the conversation sufficient expertise to understand the nuances and import of any proposed discovery protocol applying technology. I. Technology Assisted Review Before 2000, review was done with large teams of document reviewers. Between 2000 and 2010, online review platforms entered the market, hosting whole cases on a single platform and reducing the transactional costs involved in having to manually pull or deliver documents. As court rules and courtroom lawyers began to focus on discovery of electronic information, research turned to understanding how search could be applied to the review process. Research conducted from 2006-2011 under the auspices of the National Institute of Standards and Technology showed that TAR could significantly outperform or significantly underperform human review, depending on the tools used and the expertise of the users. An analysis of some of those results published in the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology (JOLT') concluded: Overall, the myth that exhaustive manual review is the most effective--and therefore, the most defensible --approach to document review is strongly refuted. Technology-assisted review can (and does) yield more accurate results than exhaustive manual review, with much lower effort. (1) The methods used by participants that returned top results ranged from sophisticated Boolean search to machine learning algorithms; some of the methods that performed less well fell into the same categories. With the help of cases like United States v. O'Keefe and Victor Stanley v. Creative Pipe in 2008, the conversation about the process and expertise needed to successfully navigate document discovery in the increasingly electronic world of both individual and corporate clients entered the legal bar. Those foundational cases, followed by the JOLT article and the article Search, Forward (2) in Law Technology News authored by SDNY Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck, increased the awareness of the uses of search in this context. …

Valuing difference? Experiences in two clinical environments

<p>What do most people think of a law degree – plentiful amounts of hard work, boundless reading, an expensive Legal Practice Course or Bar Vocational Course followed by an extremely competitive application process to secure a job in the graduate’s respective field of work? What if students were given the opportunity to work in another jurisdiction, such as Australia, for one month in a student run law office, during the summer, with £1000 to get them on their way? ‘Sounds good’, I thought. ‘So what do I have to do to get the chance’? And then the one catch is divulged – the students must complete a compulsory piece of coursework and achieve one of the top 10 marks in their year. (The writer expects a few raised eyebrows at this stage!)</p>

Exchanging Places: Experiences of the First Irwin Mitchell International Clinical Scholar

<p>What do most people think of a law degree – plentiful amounts of hard work, endless reading, an expensive Legal Practice Course or Bar Vocational Course followed by an extremely competitive application process to secure a job in the graduate’s respective field of work? What if students were given the opportunity to work in another jurisdiction, such as Australia, for one month in a student-run law office during the summer, with £1000 to get them on their way? ‘Sounds good’, I thought. ‘So what do I have to do to get the chance’? And then the one catch is divulged – the student must complete a compulsory piece of coursework and achieve one of the top 10 marks in their year. (The writer expects a few raised eyebrows at this stage!)</p>

Did liberalising bar hours decrease traffic accidents?

Legal bar closing times in England and Wales have historically been early and uniform. Recent legislation liberalised closing times with the object of reducing social problems thought associated with drinking to “beat the clock.” Indeed, using both difference in difference and synthetic control approaches we show that one consequence of this liberalisation was a decrease in traffic accidents. This decrease is heavily concentrated among younger drivers. Moreover, we provide evidence that the effect was most pronounced in the hours of the week directly affected by the liberalisation: late nights and early mornings on weekends. This evidence survives a series of robustness checks and suggests at least one socially positive consequence of extending bar hours.

MOOCs and the Future of Nursing

NOT ONLY ARE MASSIVELY OPEN ONLINE COURSES (MOOCS) PART OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION CONVERSATION, THEY ARE ALSO DISCUSSED IN THE BLOGOSPHERE AND THE POPULAR MEDIA. For example, on April 25, The Charlie Rose Show on PBS featured a conversation with four guests representing different perspectives: Dr. Anant Aragwal, CEO of EdX and MIT professor of computer science and artificial intelligence, Dr. Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania; Joel Klein, former schools chancellor for New York City and now CEO of Amplify, Inc.; and Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times and author of The World Flat. I was very inspired by this conversation (visit www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12897) and would like to share some thoughts with you. Rose started the conversation by asking: Is this an idea whose time has come? The answer was a resounding yes. Friedman described MOOCs as able to deliver the best teaching from the best teachers from a whole range of universities to people around the at the speed, scope, scale and price that was simply impossible just a decade ago. Think about what this could mean to higher across the globe and the future of nursing. Agarwal, describing MOOCs as a partial accelerator for learning, discussed how learning analytics could be used to personalize the learning experience. Klein took it a step further, proposing that we now have data to inform our teaching and to personalize instruction. Gutmann mentioned that MOOCs are not focused on what we teach but on what students learn and how they learn. All guests spoke to the amplification of access, not only across the globe, but to allow those who may not qualify for the college of their choice to still gain knowledge. Agarwal described this as flipping the funnel; instead of filtering many students through a funnel to be admitted to college, we are now democratizing education, allowing more people access to knowledge and the best teachers. He thinks of as a basic human right and likes to imagine a in which students from 162 countries learn with each other and work to resolve global issues in areas such as health care. Although there was agreement that faculty are key to the MOOC movement, Gutmann reminded us that there are always skeptics who challenge ideas and inventions. She used the example of Socrates, who mistrusted the intervention that gave the impression of wisdom rather than wisdom itself. That intervention was writing, which Socrates called disruptive of thinking, as memorization was a key to wisdom. In contrast, MOOCs have led some teachers to become more excited about teaching and finding new ways to help students learn. The faculty role is being transformed from knowledge disseminator to mentor, a guide for student through their learning process. As Agarwal stated, MOOCs put education front and center; faculty are becoming rock stars. They also provide, Gutmann noted, constructive competition to motivate faculty to think of new methods of student engagement and to learn how to be a Master Teacher. I took three major messages away from this conversation. First, Friedman described MOOCs as being at the Alta Vista stage. (Alta Vista, designed by Yahoo, was one of the first search engines; it was displaced with the rise of Google.) As Klein put it, We are in the early innings of a game that is just beginning, a bold experiment that has enormous opportunities for Second, Friedman metaphorically described the next steps as a 401k world where students will need to make defined contributions and everyone will need to pass the (referring to the legal bar exam). In his blog, Walter Russell Mead speaks of a of stuff learned versus time served (visit http://blogs. the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/04/22/washington-blessesstuff-learned-vs- time-served-degree-program/). Not all students will be able to participate in this model of education. …

The Lesser of Two Inefficiencies: An Anticommons Alternative to Perpetual Conservation Easements

This paper argues that a spatial anticommons is a relatively more efficient land-preservation mechanism than a perpetual conservation easement.Conservation easements represent a new kind of right in the bundle of sticks that is property ownership — a perpetual negative restriction on land, enforceable by the holder, that prohibits the land owner from using the land in any way that is contrary to the terms of the easement. The requirement of perpetuity raises efficiency concerns. Even if it is socially optimal to conserve the land at the time the easement is created, changes in technology, climate, and preferences may render conservation suboptimal in the future. Yet future landowners have no ability to reallocate the land to a more efficient use. Conservation easements are nearly impossible to modify or terminate. As a result, conservation easements may impose long-term costs on society as land is tied up in socially suboptimal conservation. This paper argues that an anticommons may provide a way to both protect conservation interests and allow for the reallocation of land when reallocation is efficient. Creating an anticommons preserve involves fragmenting the land into small parcels and distributing them to individuals. The parcels are too small to develop, and so, any potential developer must acquire many parcels before the land can be converted from conservation. Facing high transaction and strategic costs, the developer will choose to acquire and develop the land only when the land’s value as a development is significantly higher than its value as a preserve. Thus, although the anticommons is not absolutely efficient, it is relatively more efficient than a perpetual conservation easement because it does not include a legal bar to reallocation.Part I of the paper defines the anticommons and the perpetual conservation easement. Part II explores the problems with perpetual conservation. Part III explains why perpetual conservation easements succumb to these problems and why conservation easements cannot simply be modified to be more efficient. Part IV describes the structure of the anticommons preserve and explains when, and why, the anticommons is preferable to perpetual conservation easements. Finally, Part V considers legal hurdles to creating an anticommons land preserve.

The Second World War and Legal Publishing Advertisements

The Second World War was a total war in its scale and scope and every aspect of civilian life was affected. The American legal system was greatly transformed by the conflict and legal publishing changed significantly. This article includes several advertisements from American legal periodicals and bar association publications between 1941 and 1945 that included World War ll themes.

Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (review)

Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial. By Steven Lubet. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 384 Cloth, $29.95.)By Erik J. ChaputWhile the numerous fugitive slave cases conducted under the provisions of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act were very real for the participants involved - often tragically ending in their return to bondage - they also took on symbolic and political significance. Supporters of these proceedings never admitted they constituted a trial because to do so would open a Pandora's Box of constitutional objections. In Fugitive Justice, Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet has written a lively and entertaining account of three of the most celebrated fugitive slave trials in the 1850s. The intention of the Compromise of 1850 was to remove slavery the political arena. However, the act, according to Lubet, transferred the controversy remote, and barely settled, territories to the population centers of the East, potentially entangling the federal government in every escape, warrant, seizure, rescue, and trial until the advent of the Civil War (49).Lubet is particularly skilled at building suspense and reader interest in the legal strategies of both sides in the courtroom. The author leads the reader step by step through the maze of arguments, taking what would seemingly be dry material and raising it to the level of high drama. Lubet maintains in the first part of the decade the antislavery legal bar argued the revamped fugitive slave law (the law was really an amendment to the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law) violated civil liberties and constitutional protections for a jury trial.In the latter half of the decade, arguments solely based on theories of moral justice began to take over. From 1850 to 1859, higher law arguments transformed from an abstract inspiration to an unapologetic legal (8).The first case Lubet covers is the 1851 treason trial of Castner Hanway. On September 11, 1851, a group of blacks violently resisted a Maryland slaveholder's attempt to reclaim four fugitives near Christiana, Pennsylvania. When the dust settled, the slaveowner was dead and his son lay wounded. Because the fugitives had successfully fled the scene, the Fillmore administration was forced to bring charges against anyone they could find. Eventually, thirty-eight men were charged on 1 1 7 separate counts of treason. The trial of the white abolitionist Hanway in the U.S. Circuit Court (ironically located in Independence Hall in Philadelphia) was packed with spectators. Lubet's in-depth discussion of the defense arguments shows the antislavery legal bar was interested primarily in results and not in directly challenging the fugitive slave law or slavery itself. With Hanway's eventual acquittal, Lubet sees cracks in the sectional compromise because of the Fillmore administration's decision to abandon attempts to indict opponents of the new fugitive slave law for treason. Moreover, in subsequent cases, claims of innocence were for less availing as they were in Hanway's trial and that very circumstance would create far greater latitude for invoking higher law in the courtroom (131).The second fugitive slave controversy covered by Lubet is the multiple trials connected with the 1854 Anthony Burns affair in Boston. On May 24, 1854, Burns was arrested on his way home his job at a clothing store. Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson and other Boston abolitionists led an abortive attempt to rescue Burns. Having already endured one embarrassing rescue in 1851, officials were prepared. A guard was killed, but Burns remained in custody. Burns was defended by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Charles Ellis, and Robert Morris. …

SOCIOECONOMIC, DEMOGRAPHIC AND LEGAL INFLUENCES ON CONSANGUINITY AND KINSHIP IN NORTHERN COASTAL SWEDEN 1780–1899

Most studies on consanguinity have been conducted on contemporary populations and have focused on the prevalence and types of preferred intra-familial marriage. With its comprehensive birth, marriage and deaths records dating back to the late 17th century, and the legal bar on first cousin marriage removed in the mid-19th century, Sweden offers unique opportunities to examine the factors that determine by whom, where and why consanguineous marriages were contracted. The present study covers the period 1780-1899 and presents a detailed portrait of cousin and sibling exchange marriages in the Skellefteå region of northern coastal Sweden. The combined prevalence of first, second and third cousin marriage increased from 2.3% in 1790-1810 to 8.8% in 1880-1899, and multi-generation consanguinity also increased significantly over the study period. The distribution and prevalence of first cousin marriages was strikingly non-random, with a significantly greater propensity for consanguinity among land-owning families, especially involving first-born sons, within specific pedigrees, and in a number of more remote inland communities. Additional factors associated with a greater likelihood of consanguineous marriage included physical or mental disability among males, and among females the prior birth of an illegitimate child. Besides the inherent interest in the social and demographic structure of this region of northern Sweden during the course of the 19th century, in future studies it will be important to determine the degree to which the observed patterns of consanguineous and sibling exchange marriages in these past generations could have influenced present-day genetic structure.

Modesty Can Be a Virtue: Judicial Economy in the ICJ Kosovo Opinion?

AbstractThe Kosovo Advisory Opinion reaches its conclusions in what is admittedly a very condensed and swift way of reasoning. The Court did not expand upon the question that was put to it. However, it is unfair to criticize the Court for failing to address the very issues the drafters of the question carefully and deliberately did not ask. Moreover, the Court did in fact clarify a number of important points that go beyond the narrow question of the lawfulness of Kosovo's declaration of independence. In particular, the Court confirmed that a state is a matter of fact in the first instance. It can come into being in consequence of unilateral secession when attempts to negotiate a separation have been frustrated by the central government. The doctrine of territorial integrity operates among states and furnishes no legal bar in such instances that applies to the seceding entity. Moreover, a decision on independence by such an entity cannot be evaluated according to the domestic legal order of the state from which it secedes. In this instance, Kosovo's secession was in any event not quite as unilateral as it may have seemed. Its declaration of independence and new constitution fully incorporate the entire package of measures proposed by the UN mediators in the final status talks. Hence, Kosovo has implemented what was in fact developed and proposed under the UN mandate for final status talks contained in Resolution 1244. Rather than overturning that resolution, it has acted in accordance with its terms.

The profile of pupil barristers at the Bar of England and Wales 2004–2008

This article presents the findings from a survey of pupil (trainee) barristers at the legal Bar of England and Wales between 2004 and 2008. Barristers are compared with other professionals and pupil barristers with other university graduates. Wherever possible, findings are disaggregated by ethnicity, gender, social class, age and disability status. The analysis is largely descriptive but includes some causal explorations between pupils' social origin, attainment and pupillage characteristics such as earnings. The findings show that the participation rates of women and minorities in pupillage compare favourably with other professions, but participation by those from working class backgrounds, is lower among pupils than the university population. Education factors such as degree class, university attended and performance on the Bar Vocational Course are the strongest predictors of young barristers' earnings, employment status and geographic location. However, residual effects of social origin characteristics remain with men earning more than women, and young graduates earning more than their older peers. This suggests that the Bar can still further enhance its accessibility for individuals regardless of their social origin.

Braving Jim Crow to Save Willie McGee: Bella Abzug, the Legal Left, and Civil Rights Innovation, 1948–1951

This article considers the role of Bella Abzug, lead counsel for Willie McGee from 1948–1951, in shaping the defense of this Cold War era Mississippi rape case. Representing McGee left an indelible mark on Abzug: she made her first trip south, wrote her first Supreme Court petition, and faced her first death threat. Participation in the Left legal bar—especially the National Lawyers Guild and Left feminist circles—shaped Abzug's legal consciousness as she redirected the McGee defense significantly in 1950. By joining race and sex, Abzug's legal argument zeroed in on the taboo of interracial sexual relations at the heart of Southern rape cases, thereby exposing the innermost sexual color line. She urged the courts and cause lawyers—albeit unsuccessfully—to pursue a more radical civil rights agenda than outlawing public segregation, as ultimately achieved inBrown v. Board of Education(1954), and typically recognized in Cold War civil rights scholarship.

The Capacity to Protect: Diplomatic Protection of Dual Nationals in the 'War on Terror'

Covert, extrajudicial removals of suspected terrorists from Western countries to face interrogation in nations using torture are now a feature of the post-9/11 world. These ‘extraordinary renditions’ may transgress human rights obligations. They may also engage an often forgotten principle of international law: diplomatic protection of nationals. In the best documented rendition to date, the individual removed by the United States and tortured in Syria was a national, not only of the latter state, but also of another country, Canada. The question this article asks is whether international law stands in the way of countries like Canada extending diplomatic protection to their rendered dual nationals. The article concludes that old rules precluding protection in a contest between two states of nationality are no longer part of international law. For this and other reasons, dual nationality is not a legal bar to diplomatic protection of persons swept up in extraordinary renditions.

We are sailing: Multi‐national legal practice and overseas bar associations ‐ the commonwealth Caribbean prospective

We are sailing: Multi‐national legal practice and overseas bar associations ‐ the commonwealth Caribbean prospective