Who is Qualified to Provide Expert Testimony on the Psychological Fitness for Duty of a Police Officer? A Guide for Agencies,Lawyers and Hearing Officers

The Rules of Evidence in the Federal Courts and most State Courts are lenient in qualifying witnesses as experts. This article looks at the most common standard for determining who is qualified to testify as an expert regarding the psychological fitness for duty of a serving police officer. The article then discusses key areas that agencies, attorneys and hearing officers should focus on in determining the credibility of an expert’s testimony. Finally, this paper suggests trial preparation techniques for counsel, should a disputed fitness evaluation become involved in litigation.     

Organizational factors that contribute to police deadly force liability

Police use of deadly force is a significant concern for municipal policymakers and law enforcement agencies. Following U.S. Supreme Court case law, police agencies and municipal entities may be held civilly liable under Section 1983 for force that is not objectively reasonable; for failure to train; and for policies, customs, and practices that cause constitutional injury. This article analyzes eighty-six cases from the U.S. District Courts and the U.S. Courts of Appeals on Section 1983 liability regarding police use of deadly force. The article focuses specifically on police firearm use in deadly force situations, highlighting how managerial disorganization and administrative breakdown impacts departmental decision making. Principles of management, such as division of labor, hierarchy of authority, span of control, unity of command, and communication are used to explain bad shootings that lead to potential police liability.     

ENGLISH COURTS' TREATMENT OF THE CHILDREN OF SAME‐SEX COUPLES

This article reviews the historical approach of the English Courts to the children who are raised in same‐sex households; it discusses the very recent reformation of attitude of the courts, and of the legislators, to such family arrangements, and it examines the current attitude of the English Courts. The article considers how the courts have struggled historically to apply ordinary welfare principles in the different context of homosexual parenting, and discusses the complex inter‐play of family relationships when children are born into same‐sex families through donor insemination. The article discusses the ongoing challenges for the courts in dealing with cases of this kind.     

Expert Evidence,Judicial Reasoning,and the Family Courts Information Pilot

The Family Courts Information Pilot took a modest step towards open justice in Children Act cases by publishing 161 judgments of the County Courts and Family Proceedings Courts. Combining socio‐legal and philosophical analysis on lines inspired by the work of Habermas, this article examines the epistemology of expert testimony implicit in the judgments. What emerges is a form of reasoning based on ‘inference to the best explanation’: judges seek to show that the best explanation for experts saying what they do is that they have good reasons for their opinions. While this approach is not blindly deferential, it has serious limitations in cases where the only experts are local authority social workers and the guardian, and an awareness of these limitations is one reason for the courts' willingness to allow other experts to be instructed. The article also criticizes the analysis of the courts’ use of experts by the recent Family Justice Review.     

Once more with ‘sympathy’ but no resolution for intended mothers: the EU,Ireland and the surrogacy dilemma

This article examines the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Z v A Government Department and the Board of Management of a Community School and the court’s interpretation of existing EU legislation on whether commissioning or intended mothers are entitled to paid leave equivalent to maternity benefit. It highlights the failure of the CJEU in this case to call for specific EU legislation on the issue of surrogacy. The Irish Courts have been more proactive in this regard. The Supreme Court has acknowledged that ‘pending the introduction … of legislation dealing with this field, it is … not for the courts to attempt to resolve the complex questions that need to be addressed’. This article compares recent decisions of the Irish Courts to that of the CJEU as they struggle to keep abreast with modern society in the absence of legislation at national and EU level.     

Judicial protection of fundamental rights in the transition from the world of atoms to the word of bits: The case of freedom of speech

This article underlines the role of Courts in protecting fundamental rights in the atomic and the digital dimension. The main aim of this work is to show how the coming of the Internet has affected the exercise and the judicial protection of freedom of expression in a comparative perspective. In order to answer this research question, this study will focus on the role of Courts as ‘playmakers’ in interpreting and solving issues deriving from interconnected legal regimes affecting the protection of fundamental rights and, especially, free speech. More specifically, the comparative focus will be on the decisions of the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Right and the US Supreme Court.     

合同救济方法之选择与适用

当事人订立的合法有效的合同具有约束力,当事人应当按照合同的约定履行自己的合同义务。但实际生活中却往往出现当事人违反合同义务的行为,即违约行为。在现有立法的框架下,由于合同救济方法和途径的多样化,使得当事人和人民法院不可避免地会遇到合同救济方法的选择与实用问题。本文对此展开了讨论。     

JUDGING WITHOUT CONSENSUS: The Diplock Courts in Northern Ireland

This article examines nonjury trials for political/terrorist offenses in Northern Ireland. It traces the origins of the current troubles; the breakdown of the jury system; the work of the royal commission, chaired by Lord Justice Diplock; and the establishment of courts, known as Diplock Courts, in which a single judge tries cases using modified rules of evidence and lowered standards for the admission of confessions. Finally, the article evaluates the work of the Diplock Courts, and suggests their wider relevance to future policy-making. In doing so, it touches upon a fundamental role of governing through courts—the maintenance of the ability to govern, particularly in a society that has neither political nor judicial consensus.     

European Competition Soft Law in European Courts: A Matter of Hard Principles?

This article analyses whether and how competition soft law instruments are taken into consideration by the European Courts and the Advocates General. The quantitative analysis of the case‐law reveals that even if arguments based on competition guidelines or notices were brought to court since the early days of European law, it is only during the last two decades that they have been taken seriously. The results of the qualitative analysis point to the fact that soft law instruments are considered by the European Courts an important and specific part of the body of European norms that they should use when deciding cases submitted for their judgment. Legal effects are recognised to these not legally binding instruments, but only when it serves the enforcement of hard, general principles of law.     

Guiding Principles for Family Justice Programs

The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and Relate, UK, co‐convened a 24‐hour consultation at St George's House, Windsor, UK, on modern family justice issues across Europe. This article identifies a preliminary set of guiding principles for family justice programs developed by consultation participants.     

A SURVEY OF UNIFIED FAMILY COURTS

The American Bar Association Coordinating Council on Unified Family Courts, with the assistance of Hofstra University's Center for Childre. Family and the Courts, recently conducted a survey of various courts and jurisdictions that either implemented or experimented with a unified family court structure. The purpose of the project was to get a sense of the state of unified family courts with the goal of building more support for the unified family court concept based on demonstrated effectiveness. The findings of the survey have been summarized in this article. The survey, survey data, and list of survey respondents can be found in the article's appendices.     

PROFILE: CHILD CUSTODY MEDIATION SERVICES IN CALIFORNIA SUPERIOR COURTS

California is now in its 11th year of mandatory child custody mediation, with a current yearly case volume statewide estimated at 65,494. This article profiles the variations in programs and mediation styles in 56 of the state's 58 Superior Courts. Two research studies provide the basis for the information on program structures, case activity, procedures, agreement formats, recommendations, facilities, security, and fees.     

Can Online Courts Promote Access to Justice? A Case Study of the Internet Courts in China

The right to access the courts is a basic human right in civilised societies, but the current legal system is unfriendly and often unaffordable for the victims of e-commerce disputes and copyright infringements seeking access to justice. Therefore, how to design a judicial system that is more accessible for the aforementioned victims has become a critical legal point of contention in the digital economy era. In particular, it is not easy to provide solid evidence of consumer disputes or copyright infringements on the Internet because the electronic evidence stored on the current centralised database has data security and trust problems. In response to this challenge, China established three Internet Courts in 2017 to move dispute resolution for e-commerce disputes and copyright infringements from the physical courts to the Internet. All the proceedings in these Internet Courts are conducted on the Internet, so the time and expenses of the litigants can be largely reduced. Most notably, these Internet Courts accept the use of blockchain as a method of securing evidence, to overcome the risks that evidence stored on the Internet can be hacked or falsified. The notion of an Internet Court, which substantially enhances popular access to justice, is a significant judicial innovation. It is of special significance for those lawsuits with small value claims and online evidence, and in which the parties are separated by long distances. However, these Internet Courts leave much to reflect on, including whether due process can be guaranteed, whether public trial can be fully implemented, and whether blockchain-based evidence is absolutely admissible. Even so, this article argues that true justice is not only to pursue absolute correctness of judgements, but that true justice should also strike a balance between the correctness and efficiency of trials. For this reason, Internet Courts may yet establish a new judicial paradigm to pursue a balance between correctness, time, and cost.     

The European Court of Justice – The Need for Change in a Changing World

The article, from a speech delivered at the 11th Liverpool Law ReviewAnnual Lecture at The Law School, Liverpool John Moore's University, November 2001, before invited guests and students, considers the role and position of the European Courts in achieving the objectives of the treaties and institutions of the European Union. It examines the current position of the Court of Justice of the European Communities and the Court of First Instance of the European Communities and the implications of the structural changes introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty. The article reflects upon how the future accession to the Union of new Member States may affect that situation. It also considers how changes proposed in the Treaty of Nice, when ratified, will enable the European Courts to meet future demands placed upon them. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Regulatory Reform: Creating Gaps and Making Markets

This article argues that dispute processing reform, such as regulatory negotiation, plays a role in constructing a "crisis" in regulatory litigation and defining a new partnership between regulated interests and the state. Unlike traditional studies of regulatory reform, which tend to evaluate the behavioral impact of legal reform on policy, I argue that reforms themselves play a constitutive role in politics. The article examines the ideology of regulatory negotiation and presents empirical data on federal regulatory litigation in the U.S. Courts of Appeals (1940–1985), to demonstrate that this legal reform is part of a general drive toward a minimalist state.     

Why Is the Equal Merit Principle (Almost) Straightforwardly Wrong?

This article challenges the ‘Equal Merit Principle’, introduced to the judicial appointment process by the Crime and Courts Act 2013. The author argues that this principle does not take diversity seriously enough and none of its possible justifications stand up to close scrutiny. The author also claims that the doctrine that judges should be appointed solely on the basis of merit is either wrong, for the very same reasons as the Equal Merit Principle, or rather uninformative because it fails to give sufficient guidance to those who select judges.     

The European Judicial Organisation in a New Paradigm: The Influence of Principles of ‘New Public Management’ on the Organisation of the European Courts

Recent reforms regarding the European Courts raise the question in which way do ‘new public management’ principles influence the European judicial organisation and how is a balance struck between these principles and classic ‘rule of law’ principles? The article first presents a classification of these types of principles in the framework for discussion regarding the European judicial organisation. Starting out from two paradigms, an inquiry is made into the status of the two sets of principles in the present‐day European ‘constitutional’ framework. Second, the interaction of principles is investigated with regard to a number of current dilemmas, including the demarcation of the judicial domain, the management of the Courts and the distribution of judicial competences.     

Lawyers' Duty to Do Justice: A New Look at the History of the 1908 Canons

This article examines a long-forgotten controversy about lawyers' duties to evaluate the justice of their clients' causes in civil cases that took place among the members of the Committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) that drafted the 1908 Canons of Professional Responsibility. The article presents an analysis of newly discovered internal working documents of this important, but never before examined, ABA committee, supplemented with primary historical research into the views and backgrounds of the committee's members. The article demonstrates how a clash of perspectives among these men-traceable in part to their backgrounds but also to their unpredictable allegiances to conflicting trends in legal thought at the turn of the century-prevented the committee from reaching a satisfactory resolution on the duty's to-do-justice issue. The committee members instead adopted ineffectual compromise language in the Canons, leaving us with a legacy of concealed ambivalence on the question of lawyers' "duty to do justice" in civil cases.     

Trámite legal para el pago de obligaciones pecuniarias impuestas al estado colombiano en decisiones sobre derechos humanos y derecho internacional humanitario

This article is one of the research results of the project “Impact of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights case law on Latin American High Courts rulings. Study about Brazil, Mexico and Colombia”. The author indicates how the Colombian State was seen compelled to send off a Law in the year 1996, through which, receiving a special procedure, he is included inside his internal code the guarantee of not repetition as mechanism of application of the decisions in matter of human rights and international human law in said country.