The legal constitution: United Kingdom parliament and European court of justice

Membership of the EC has transformed the legal status of the UK parliament. Prior to British accession, Acts of Parliament were the supreme law of the land, unchallengeable in any court. This paper argues that EC membership raised the courts ‐ national as well as European ‐ above parliament and that at the time of accession parliamentarians were almost wholly unaware of this fundamental change. The author links MPs’ ignorance to the highly political, rather than legal, nature of the British constitution and traces the evolution of their constitutional understandings. Identifying a new dynamic interplay between British judiciary and parliament, the study argues that the creeping hegemony of law within constitutional politics merits continuing analysis by legislative scholars.     

The reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom

In this paper, we examine the reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom (UK) after the 1988 Education Reform Act.¹ We test the hypothesis that softening tenure encourages incumbent academics to consolidate their hold on academic life [ Carmichael (1988)]. We also assess the economic significance of the English and American case law on tenure, because an understanding of the legal aspects of tenure is required to identify the possible effects of tenure reform. The years after passage of the Act provide an interesting natural experiment, as the broad effect of the legislation was to soften, though not to remove, tenure in British universities. ² We can find support for the Carmichael hypothesis prereform but do not believe that the Act caused incumbent academics to consolidate their hold on senior posts after the reform.Tenure implies that the holder of a post cannot be removed from it except for good cause, usually based on gross moral turpitude or gross incompetence. Such removal is historically characterized by a costly procedure governed by organizational statutes, as shown in Hines v. Birkbeck College.³ In the United Kingdom, academic tenure has been associated with open-ended contracts of employment and often had a particularly hard form before 1988. In the United States, where it has often been possible to dismiss academics for financial reasons by abolishing whole departments, tenure has taken a softer form (although often harder to obtain) and can still be held to exist even when an employment contract is of a fixed term as long as it is renewable. ⁴ The details of universities’ tenure statutes have always varied between institutions, in both the United Kingdom and United States, which is often overlooked.

Abstract

“Before 1988, could your university make academics redundant by giving notice and paying statutory redundancy pay, or was it extremely hard to sack academics—having to buy them out or use arguments based on gross moral turpitude or incompetence?”     

英国法律援助费用控制探析

英国具有发达的法律援助制度,但该制度近年来也面临一些问题,最为突出的是其援助经费投入虽逐年增加却仍无法满足日益增长的法律援助需求。本文着重探讨英国近年来在使用和控制法律援助费用方面的一些改革措施。文章介绍了法律援助经费来源和管理以及费用支出情况,列举了援助费用支出存在的弊端,并在分析有关控制援助费用的改革措施和后续改革尝试的基础上对其效果进行合理性评析。     

Adaptations of Aboriginal justice in the United States

Aboriginal justice in the United States is unique for two reasons. First, Aboriginal Natives subscribed to the Harmony Ethos, a system whereby Natives did not detach themselves from nature. Unlike Western cultures, they lived cooperatively with ‘Mother Earth’, ‘Father Sky’ and everything these two entities represented. Secondly, no other group in US history has been subjected to the magnitude of deliberate policies aimed at their destruction. Manifest physical genocide towards Native peoples was exercised and sanctioned by the US government until the 1890s while the more subtle practice of ‘cultural genocide’ continues to the present. Yet, in spite of these assaults on Native culture, attributes of their Aboriginal ways have not only survived but have experienced a resurgence within the past decade. Unfortunately, it appears that the more Native traditions survive, the more adamant are local, state, and federal efforts towards destroying any remnants of traditional values and customs including tribal autonomy.     

Reducing delay in the administration of justice: The case of Uganda

This is a revised version of a paper presented at a conference organized by the Society for the Reform of Criminal Law on Criminal Law Reform in Southern Africa, Windhoek, Namibia, June 15–17, 1992.     

Linear programming in criminal justice administration

Most criminal justice administrators can no longer rely on a single problem solving technique. Consequently, effective administrators must become familiar with (though no experts in) various techniqes. Linear programming (LP) is a powerful managerial technique which provides narrow-range solutions to problems in which the impact of key variables is both linear and certain. LP is especially useful when applied to problems involving the allocation of limited resources. This article discusses a simple how-to appraoach to LP, which is a mathematical problem solving computation that provides solutions which can be applied under conditions of certainty. Besides defining the key characteristics of LP, this article illustrates the procedures used to calculate the simplex method, the most widely used method for calculating a set of LP equations. The simplex method is mathematically efficient because it considers only the best solutions with a minimum number of solutions computed. Once the solution is computed, it is relatively easy to interpret the computer output.     

The use of simulation in criminal justice policy evaluation

The criminal justice system is administered at the local level by many independent agencies and departments, often without regard to each other's objectives and often at the expense of overall effectiveness. This study has attempted to relate the primary system goal of crime control to a set of policy alternatives distributed over each criminal justice sector. Specifically, a simulation model based on the techniques of “industrial dynamics” was developed to evaluate combinations of the following policies: speedy trial, no plea bargaining, and restricted bail. Data obtained from the District of Columbia's criminal justice agencies were used to validate the model. The results of the analysis indicate that the system is basically insensitive to small perturbations, but is susceptible to disruption from large changes in input and procedure. Under the given set of assumptions, continuation of current practices will lead to a gradual deterioration in performance that can only be stemmed by large expenditures on manpower and facilities.     

Knowledge management and administration of justice

Legal knowledge management is probably, taking aside legal reasoning, the most important activity in legal systems. Usually only treated as an important support factor, a deeper analysis shows that knowledge management improves efficiency in knowledge handling and offers important support for legal reasoning. In addition, standard cases may be solved using such methods. With knowledge management, the industrialization of the intellect has entered the field of administration of justice. The main applications are legal information systems, electronic registers and electronic communications.     

Seminar on criminal appeals in the United Kingdom

Conference Report

Seminar on criminal appeals in the United Kingdom