North American Law Research Articles

Police interviewing in Taiwan: A self-report survey of practices and beliefs

ABSTRACT Following upon a prior survey of 631 North American law enforcement officers, and in light of heightened concerns about false confessions, we assessed the interrogation practices and beliefs of 551 police investigators in Taiwan. Overall, participants estimated that they were 66% accurate at truth and lie detection, that 48% of suspects waived their rights, that they elicited self-incriminating statements from 75% of all suspects, and that 27% of suspects confessed in the presence of their attorney. Of particular note is the self-report by participants that 72% of their interrogation sessions were fully recorded. With regard to the use of various interrogation techniques, participants estimated that they often identified contradictions in the suspect’s story, confronted the suspect with actual evidence, appealed to the suspect’s self-interests, and isolated the suspect from family and friends. We discussed the consistency of our findings with prior research, addressed potential shortcomings, and made recommendations to future directions.

Beyond the Socratic Method: Exploring Alternative Theories in Legal Education

Legal education has changed very little over the last century. At the same time, there have been significant advances in the field of education leading to several theories. The following will examine the five leading theories of education: connectivism, humanism, constructivism, cognitivism, and behaviorism. Each of these will be evaluated next to the Socratic Method, which is the primary method employed by law school instructors. Specific examples of how some of these theories have surfaced in law school and how the Socratic Method embodies other theories will be noted. The effect of technology on law school instruction will also be addressed. The overall goal of this article is to reveal how these theories can be utilized in the law school setting to produce highly competent graduates who will improve the efficacy of the field as a whole. Anecdotal example from North American and African law schools will underscore the notions put forth in this article.

The doctrine of the revival of post-Soviet Turkmen statehood by Saparmurat Niyazov

The cultivation of traditionalism in law, based on universal human values and the history of jurisprudence, remains relevant in the post-Soviet space for almost three decades since the destruction of the unified state. At the same time, legal science does not recognize the primacy of the historical school of law, which was revived in the 90s XX century. together with other classical types of legal thinking, after the rejection of the centralism of the materialist theory that prevailed in Soviet jurisprudence. The reason for the attractiveness of traditionalism lies in the inclination towards it of many continental peoples, intensified by the visible consequences of leveling the experience of national legal development in North American and European law, positioning liberal trends, which are largely inappropriate for traditional states, to which Russia belongs, formed as a result of millennial evolution. Among complex nations that have a long experience in the development of statehood and the heterogeneity of the specifics of legal culture, the concepts that fix traditional values in the legal creation as a natural source of human rights, imperatively not connected with the law, which is rational and moral, but by its nature deafened and not necessarily reflects the historical mentality of the society. One example of such concepts aimed at reviving traditional statehood and preserving the integrity of society is the doctrine contained in the twovolume work of the Turkmen statesman Saparmurat Niyazov entitled “Rukhnama”, who tried to translate it into practice. Therefore, the object of the article is public relations associated with the revival of the Turkmen statehood through the formation in the period of a national human rights standard, harmonized with the interests of a traditional society. The subject of the article is a general description, the main content and applied significance of the concept of Saparmurat Niyazov, illustrating the possibility of forming a legal state taking into account traditionalism, as well as the importance of the corresponding doctrine for the development of the legal system of Turkmenistan. The concept of national revival of the republic, formulated by Saparmurat Niyazov, became the basis for the development of a social ideology that influenced the post-Soviet formation of republican legislation, is of scientific interest for other states experiencing the expansion of liberal tendencies in law, not excluding the Russian Federation. In conditions when the international universal security system is showing stagnation, sovereign states are turning to the toolkit of international regional and national means of ensuring security. Therefore, the revenge of traditionalism is predictable, illustrated by the example of Turkmenistan. Moreover, the Russian society, as well as the Turkmen one, shows an inclination towards it, and the construction of a welfare state, declared at the constitutional level, makes it possible to reflect this trend while improving legislation.

An examination of the effectiveness of Readers’ Theatre as a teaching strategy in legal education

ABSTRACTThe effectiveness of the case method of legal education in preparing for the practice of law has been questioned for more than a century. Students are encouraged to conceive conflict in a manner that often does not provide adequate context for the application of their personal perceptions of justice. A resulting criticism of the case method, then, is that it fails to adequately teach students how to act “with ethical substance” in the professional circumstances for which they are being prepared. As a means of addressing this perceived gap, North American law schools have been increasing their use of experiential education methods. In this paper, the utility of Readers’ Theatre (RT) is examined as an experiential teaching strategy to expose law students to the interpersonal and ethical dynamics of legal problem-solving communications.

Choice-of-law rules for secured transactions: an interest-based and modern principles-based framework for assessment

This essay examines the law applicable to secured transactions. It addresses in particular the codification of the choice-of-law rules for secured transactions (STCOL rules). These rules address the laws applicable to the creation, perfection, priority, and enforcement of security interests (security rights) — a form of legislative or statutory depecage. It draws on the 2016 UNCITRAL Model Law on Secured Transactions (Model Law) as well as relevant North American law (Uniform Commercial Code Article 9 and the Canadian provincial Personal Property Security Acts). The STCOL rules lie at the heart of the emerged and emerging modern principles of secured transactions law (Modern Principles) for personal property (movable assets). These Modern Principles are reflected by the Model Law and North American law as well as by various other model laws, other secured transactions ‘reforms’ over recent years, and laws that are currently being considered by various States. While disagreements exist, debates continue, and strict harmonization is unlikely, there is little doubt that there has emerged a global consensus as to a set of general principles to which secured transactions law should adhere. The STCOL rules and their relationship to substantive legal doctrine remain somewhat underdeveloped and undertheorized. This essay seeks to remedy this situation. It situates the STCOL rules as fundamental components of secured transactions law and central to understanding the normative principles and factual assumptions underpinning that important body of law. Its principal contribution is to offer a framework for assessing the existing STCOL rules and for the codification of future rules. The framework is based on the interests of stakeholders that participate in or are affected by secured transactions and the Modern Principles. These stakeholders include third parties in general, assignors and assignees of security rights, third-party obligors on assigned assets (such as debtors on an assignor’s receivables), and the States that enact and whose interests are affected by STCOL rules. This framework also illuminates the factual bases for its application. But it can evaluated only through its application and analysis, which necessarily produces an assessment of STCOL rules and conclusions as to the appropriate rules. While the conclusions reached here may represent only a modest contribution to the literature, the more important offering is the framework for assessment itself — the identification of the questions to be asked and answered.

Community Lawyering or Collaborative Lawyering?

Community lawyering and collaborative lawyering are two of the most widely used human rights advocacy tactics by North American law school clinics. However, existing literature shows that neither of these two tactics alone can effectively materialize the empowerment of the concerned underprivileged and marginalized communities. While community lawyering does focus on building leadership in close connection with the community, without collaborative lawyering the leadership can become stagnant in time. Similarly, while collaborative lawyering equitably shares the decision-making powers with the community, it does not specifically focus on building sustainable leadership within the community. Hence, by way of analyzing an ongoing clinical project of International Human Rights Clinical Project at Harvard Law School, I argue that a balanced amalgamation of both the advocacy strategies can produce the best result—effective community leaders with experienced partners to fight for their rights and provide for a more effective clinical pedagogical method for students. Due to the diverse nature of human rights advocacy tactics, this article focuses only on economic, social and cultural rights advocacy.

Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature by Judith Madera

MADERA, JUDITH. Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 312 pp. $94.95 cloth, $25.95 paperback. Simply put: Black Atlas flows. It is not narratively or conceptually simplistic--far from it. Rather, the flow of Black Atlas surfaces by way of a consistent unmooring of static meanings of geography. Adroitly, Madera conducts readers through fluid valences of locale, terrain at once domestic, international, human, and economic. Indeed, by volume's end, one grasps that territory is discursive and ideological, yet material and felt. In Black Atlas, milieu defies scale, while at the same time directly mediating architecture and aesthetics. Setting is productive and participatory. Further, land articulates a set of relationships in the nineteenth century: between the United States, Mexico, and Central America; in and between Caribbean sites such as Cuba and Haiti; and between West Africa, the Niger Valley, and Canada. Problematizing dominant space versus place binaries as well as exclusionary, temporal attributes of space, Madera traces the ways black authors have troubled normative topographic distinctions embedded in North/South and industry/agriculture, as well as in legal domains such as that created by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Even the boundaries of relatively invariable entities such as antique maps exist in flux. Black Atlas flows. Foregrounding novels, travelogues, black serials, and national maps published in the period from 1849 to 1900, Madera engages process geography and close reading methodologies to interrogate of dissension (following Michel Foucault) and nonrepresentational geographies (following Bruno Latour) as traverse broad cultural debates on diaspora and hemispheric expansionism. Pinpointing how African American intellectual production maps ways of knowing slavery and Native American removal, for instance, Madera exposes cartographic imagining as a mode of complicity and resistance. Ultimately, Black Atlas situates an agile worldview not on the outskirts but as a hallmark of early black literature and performance. Chapter one, National Geographic: The Writings of William Wells emphasizes Brown's attentiveness to the relationship between travel and subjectivity in Clotel; or, the President s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). To do so, Madera showcases moments of literary counter-transit in Brown's representation of Quaker homesteads and the Ohio River, as well as in panic such as Vicksburg. Virginia. Panic cartographies are spaces of dissimilitude, straining against their containing form. Madera writes: they are alternately sites of eruption and sites of quietude. But in their form house the potential to undo not only what is close or proximate, but the broader collective (26). Nineteenth-century black authors such as Brown mobilize spatial representation--often regional in scope and riddled with conflict--to contest the jurisdiction of North American law and nation. By juxtaposing midcentury Mississippi and Connecticut, the slave pens of Washington, DC, and labor discord in Richmond, VA, and Brown's striking emblems of place including iron collars, Madera captures the stakes of black self-making-as-world-making in the context of slavery and its aftermath. Indigenes of Territory: Martin Delany and James Beckwourth, the second chapter, pairs a text by an African American writer as eminent as Brown, Martin Delany's Blake: or, the Huts of America (1859-62), with one comparatively less well known, James Beckwourth's The Life and Adventures of James P. …

Direito Comparado, Organismos Geneticamente Modificados e o Princípio da Precaução: (IM) Possibilidades De Contribuições do Direito Norte-Americano para com o Sistema Pátrio

O estudo evidencia a (im)possibilidade de contribuições do Direito Norte-Americano para com o sistema pátrio, em relação ao meio ambiente equilibrado, princípio da precaução ambiental e consequências advindas da pesquisa, plantio, comercialização e consumo de organismos geneticamente modificados. Verifica, por meio de análise nos âmbitos executivo e legislativo de cada Estado, posicionamentos e entendimentos em relação à biotecnologia, para (in)devida consistência e eficácia da preservação de um meio ambiente equilibrado. Valer-se-á da abordagem qualitativa, analisando pontos centrais sobre a situação, especialmente no que tange à análise de riscos e tomada de decisões frente ao princípio da precaução. Para tanto, faz-se necessária a apreciação de questões legislativas e administrativas dos Estados Unidos da América e do Brasil. A Declaração da Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre o Meio Ambiente Humano, a Declaração do Rio sobre Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento, a Declaração Universal sobre Bioética e Direitos Humanos, a Convenção sobre Diversidade Biológica e o Protocolo de Cartagena, bem como doutrina especializada, também serão objetos de apreciação para o desenvolvimento da pesquisa.

IMMIGRATION AND DISABILITY IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

Disability arises from the dynamic between people’s physical and mental conditions and the physical and attitudinal barriers in the environment. Applying this idea about disability to United States and Canadian immigration law draws attention to barriers to entry and eventual citizenship for individuals who have disabilities. Historically, North American law excluded many classes of immigrants, including those with intellectual disabilities, mental illness, physical defects, and conditions likely to cause dependency. Though exclusions for individuals likely to draw excessive public resources and those with communicable diseases still exist in Canada and the United States, in recent years the United States permitted legalization for severely disabled undocumented immigrants already in the country, and both countries abolished most exclusions from entry for immigrants with specific disabling conditions. Liberalization also occurred with regard to U.S. naturalization requirements. Challenges continue, however. Under U.S. law, vast discretion remains with regard to the likely-public-charge exclusion, because consular officers abroad decide unilaterally whether to issue immigrant visas. Moreover, conduct related to mental disability, including petty criminality, can result in removal from the United States, and individuals with mental disabilities have only modest safeguards in removal proceedings. In Canada, families who have children with disabilities find themselves excluded from legal status because of supposed excessive demands on public resources, although an individual’s disability may provide grounds for avoiding removal in certain cases. The relaxation of some immigration exclusions in Canada and the U.S. and of some U.S. requirements for citizenship illustrates a significant, though conspicuously incomplete, removal of disability-related barriers in North American law and society. Le handicap découle de la dynamique entre les aptitudes physiques et mentales d’une personne et les obstacles physiques et comportementaux du milieu. L’application de cette perception du handicap au droit canadien et américain de l’immigration met en relief les obstacles à l’entrée et à l’obtention éventuelle de la citoyenneté pour les personnes handicapées. Dans le passé, le droit nord-américain a exclu de nombreuses catégories d’immigrants, notamment les personnes ayant une déficience physique ou intellectuelle ou une maladie mentale et les personnes affligées d’une condition pouvant mener à la dépendance. Bien que des exclusions soient encore en vigueur au Canada et aux États-Unis dans le cas des personnes qui risquent d’entraîner un fardeau excessif pour le secteur public et des personnes souffrant d’une maladie transmissible, au cours des dernières années, les États-Unis ont autorisé des immigrants sans papier gravement handicapés qui étaient déjà au pays à légaliser leur situation; de plus, les deux pays ont aboli la plupart des exclusions relatives aux immigrants souffrant de certaines affections incapacitantes. Les exigences américaines en matière de naturalisation ont également été assouplies. Cependant, de nombreuses difficultés subsistent. En droit américain, les autorités conservent un large pouvoir discrétionnaire en ce qui concerne l’exclusion des personnes susceptibles de représenter un fardeau pour le secteur public, car ce sont les agents consulaires en poste à l’étranger qui déterminent unilatéralement s’il y a lieu de délivrer ou non les visas d’immigrant. De plus, les comportements liés à une incapacité mentale, y compris les délits mineurs, peuvent entraîner le renvoi des États-Unis et les personnes souffrant d’une incapacité mentale ne disposent que de moyens de protection modestes dans les procédures de renvoi. Au Canada, les familles ayant des enfants handicapés sont exclues, en raison du fardeau excessif qu’elles risquent d’entraîner pour le secteur public, bien qu’il soit possible d’invoquer le handicap d’une personne pour éviter le renvoi dans certains cas. L’assouplissement de certaines règles d’exclusion au Canada et aux États-Unis ainsi que des exigences américaines en matière de citoyenneté témoigne d’un progrès important sur la voie de l’élimination des obstacles liés aux handicaps dans le droit et la société nord-américains, mais il reste encore beaucoup à faire dans ce domaine.

Saving virgins, saving the USA: heteronormative masculinities and the securitisation of trafficking discourse in mainstream narrative film

Sex trafficking has become a high-profile, celebrity endorsed issue, attracting much international attention. Accompanying this has been a proliferation of films, including full-length feature films, which address the topic and have done much to influence public perception of the issue. This paper analyses two of these films which were made for the mainstream US market: Trade and Taken. Both films present a conservative and heteronormative perspective revolving around middle-aged North American law enforcement officers rescuing innocent young girls. Hence, these films participate in the general securitisation of trafficking discourse in which the US has been a leader. In spite of their ostensible concern about the exploitation of women, these films present trafficking mostly as an occasion for the redemption and rehabilitation of the beleaguered white American male, appropriating the problem of trafficking in the service of a US-led neo-imperialism bolstered by masculinism and xenophobia, and implicitly problematising women's independence and justifying the control of their movements and sexuality.

Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity

Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity

The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty

To create social ties to support their professional or personal goals, people actively engage in instrumental networking. Drawing from moral psychology research, we posit that this intentional behavior has unintended consequences for an individual’s morality. Unlike personal networking in pursuit of emotional support or friendship, and unlike social ties that emerge spontaneously, instrumental networking in pursuit of professional goals can impinge on an individual’s moral purity — a psychological state that results from viewing the self as clean from a moral standpoint — and make an individual feel dirty. We theorize that such feelings of dirtiness decrease the frequency of instrumental networking and, as a result, work performance. We also examine sources of variability in networking-induced feelings of dirtiness by proposing that the amount of power people have when they engage in instrumental networking influences how dirty this networking makes them feel. Three laboratory experiments and a survey study of lawyers in a large North American law firm provide support for our predictions. We call for a new direction in network research that investigates how network-related behaviors associated with building social capital influence individuals’ psychological experiences and work outcomes.

The Right to Silence

In recent years, we have seen continued erosion of an individual’s right to silence. The most recent attempts in the author’s home country, Australia, include a current proposal to adopt the United Kingdom approach, and allow inferences to be drawn from a failure to answer questions at an early stage of investigation, in circumstances where later the person does provide an explanation. An attempt to protect the right to silence in Australia at constitutional level is challenging, because Australia is one of the few Western nations that has not seen fit to enact an express bill of rights. This article will consider whether arguments might be made that, at least in some contexts, infringement of the right to silence is, nevertheless, contrary to the requirements of the Australian Constitution. Courts in other countries around the world have also recognized the right to silence in some circumstances where legislatures have attempted to limit it, and these will be considered in the Australian context, acknowledging appropriate contextual differences. Many countries are faced with the difficulty of reconciling fundamental due process principles with the need for effective investigatory powers sufficient to deal with evolving criminal threats. It will be instructive to consider how a successful balance has been accommodated in a range of jurisdictions. It is believed that the law of the author’s home country could be greatly enriched by engaging with North American and European case law, as this article will seek to demonstrate. The article is considered to be of interest to those outside of Australia, to understand the difficulties in protecting fundamental human rights when an express bill of rights does not exist in the relevant country, and to consider how other ways may be found to protect such rights. In this way, this article will use Australia as the example of a country without an express bill of rights, and will consider how, in that context, fundamental human rights can practically be protected by the courts. The conclusions are considered relevant to a range of nations. Specific examples include Singapore and Malaysia, and to a lesser extent India, as will be explained.

Management Renewal? Consequences of the Current Evolutions of the 'Best Interests of the Corporation' in North American and French Corporate Law

The concept of the stakeholder can be integrated into corporate law through a broad interpretation of the idea of the interests of the corporation. In this paper, I address criticisms of the classic definition of the principal purpose of a firm. Even if U.S. law is less interventionist and more ambiguous than French law in this domain, it is still possible to put forward a broad interpretation of the interests of the for the USA. The interests of Canadian and French firms include their stakeholders. While the notion of interest is debatable in France, Canada has recently modified its stance regarding the purpose of the firm. Besides recent decision BCE Inc. v. 1976 Debentureholders, the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court Magasins a rayons Peoples Inc. (Syndic de) v. Wise in 2004 was a crucial step in the best interests of the corporation definition. With respect to fiduciary duties, this ruling set aside the traditional interpretation of the best interests of the corporation which gives primacy to shareholders' interests. The Court held that the expression best interests of the corporation refers to the maximization of the corporation's value. This innovative vision of the interest of the introduces stakeholder theory and corporate social responsibility (CSR) into corporate law and provides a new frame for management responsibilities. The legal system imposes in fine on the managers to orient their corporations in socially behavior way and to exercise their power on behalf of the corporation's constituents: shareholders, workers, suppliers and communities in which these corporations thrive. As a result, this paper concludes with an extended discussion of the implications for the future of research in management, corporate law, economics and finance.

Evidence‐based solution to information sharing between law enforcement agencies

PurposeThe aim of this study is to test a technological solution to two traditional limitations of information sharing between law enforcement agencies: data quality and privacy concerns.Design/methodology/approachEntity Analytics Software (EAS) was tested in two studies with North American law enforcement agencies. In the first test, duplicated cases held in a police record system were successfully identified (4.0 percent) to a greater extent than the traditionally used software program (1.5 percent). This resulted in a difference of 11,954 cases that otherwise would not have been identified as duplications. In the second test, entity information held separately by police and border officials was shared anonymously between these two organizations. This resulted in 1,827 alerts regarding entities that appeared in both systems; traditionally, this information could not have been shared, given privacy concerns, and neither agency would be aware of the relevant information held by the other. Data duplication resulted in an additional 1,041 alerts, which highlights the need to use technological solutions to improve data quality prior to and during information sharing.FindingsThe current study demonstrated that EAS has the potential to merge data from different technologically based systems, while identifying errors and reducing privacy concerns through anonymization of identifiers.Originality/valueWhile only one potential technological solution (EAS) was tested and organizations must consider the potential expense associated with implementing such technology, the implications resulting from both studies for improved awareness and greater efficiency support and facilitate information sharing between law enforcement organizations.

Marriage Dissolution: Property Rights or Social Ties?

The division of property rights affects the probability of marriage dissolution. However, this effect depends on the institutional environment. Throughout a comparative institutional analysis, we use data from the 2000 censuses of Brazil and the United States. The results, following previous economic predictions indicating that the probability of divorce, both in Brazil and the United States, is negatively related to the amount of property and income, as well as to the costs of leaving the relationship. Additionally, we found that this relation is moderated by the enforcement and coercion degrees presents in each country, including divorce laws (formal institutions) and social coercion, as religious orientation (informal institutions). Specifically for social coercion, our results present that religious orientation is relevant for marital dissolution in both countries. Nonetheless, the divorce laws and formal institutional environment as a whole, reduce the probability of divorce in Brazilian jurisdiction, but do not affect the divorce occurrence among the USA couples, even when controlled for the differences between state legislation. We suggested that this difference on law’ impact is related with a greater subjectivity on North American law, if compared with the written Brazilian code.

Limitations of European Union policy and law for regulating use of lead shot and sinkers: comparisons with North American regulation

AbstractExtensive shooting and angling causes, indirectly, fatal lead poisoning of birds. European Union policy on this major source of pollution is inconsistent with its laws regulating other forms of lead in the environment. Only three countries have banned the use of lead shot completely in the European Union, despite availability of substitutes and evidence that their use is a major contributor to bird conservation. The European Commission uses the criterion of amount of lead deposited and corroded, and the concentration of lead in water and soil, as the basis of their decisions. The USA and Canada used the prevalence of lead poisoning among birds as the basis of policy and law allowing them to reduce lead use at the continental level. The EU and North American policies and law on lead reduction are compared in this study, on the basis of which recommendations are developed indicating how the EU could revise its approach and resolve this environmental problem. Reluctance to act on lead reduction by the European Parliament and its member states reflects the current vested interests of the sporting communities. Companies in eight European countries already produce non‐toxic materials for hunting and shooting, and are not the limiting factor in this issue. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

'You Don't Have to Speak German to Work on the German Law Journal': Reflections on the Value of Being a Student Editor While Being a Law Student

Explaining the work of the German Law Journal has become almost second nature to student editors; at one point in our legal careers we all have to justify to a colleague, a future employer, a parent, or potential student editor recruits the existence of a journal that, based on name alone, appears to centre on a civil law country in Europe at a North American law school that teaches the common law. Most of us have some version of this statement ready:The German Law Journal is a monthly, English-language, peer-reviewed, online law journal that focuses on the recent developments in German, European and International Law. The name reflects the Journal's original purpose: to create a monthly English legal periodical that would make German constitutional jurisprudence more accessible to the non-German speaking world. While the mandate of the Journal has grown over time, the name, however, has stuck.

Towards a North American Law: A Literature Review

In the interest of sketching the parameters of a North American Law that defines the way in which firms do business in North America and possibly becomes a framework for harmonizing other sets of laws - from transactions and corporate law through human resources, human rights, and environmental laws - this review of literature will begin with a discussion of those factors that encourage progress toward that goal as well as those factors that impede progress. Part Two will begin with a definition of the term harmonization as it is to be used in this context. Part Three discusses historical attempts to harmonize legal regimes in the western hemisphere. Following this, the review in Part Four turns to those factors that act as impediments to the development of North American law, including the civil/common law dichotomy present in the member nations legal traditions, and the role federalism plays in shaping those institutions. Next, Part Five will review those factors that encourage progression towards a North American Law, including the relative success of other regional blocs such as the African Economic Community and the European Union, the role the North American Free Trade Agreement plays in the harmonization of laws amongst the three countries, and finally the role of technology and the rise of transnational legal mobility in elevating international legal awareness and transnational communication. Part Six will then consider several areas of potential legal harmonization in North America and any efforts to achieve such harmonization already in force. Finally literature directly touching on the issue of North American Legal harmonization will be reviewed highlighting any specific North American institutions that are called for in Part Seven. Part Eight will conclude with a centering of the work on North American legal harmonization in the greater context of a movement toward a North American Community, and emphasize the imports of legal harmonization to that end. This work is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather serves to provide a stepping off point for future analysis on moving towards a North American Law.

Ethical Considerations Regarding Pregnancy in Chronic Kidney Disease

Pregnancy in the context of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a daunting clinical scenario for both health-care providers and patients and raises ethical and social questions that have important implications for health policy and funding. Despite potential problems, women with CKD will continue to conceive and deliver babies, and nephrologists will be faced with the challenge of caring for them. This paper discusses ethical issues regarding pregnancy in CKD and highlights the controversies surrounding parental, fetal, and societal rights.