RESEARCH ON INTERNATIONAL LEGAL REGIME OF SHIP'S BALLAST WATER

Harmful alien invasive species transported by ballast water is considered as a significant threat to marine environment.IMO has adopted the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships' Ballast Water and Sediments in 2004 which has not yet come into force.The convention is important for the control and management of ballast water and sediments.Before its entry into force,state responsibilities required under other conventions will help reduce the risk resulting from the spread of harmful alien invasive species carried by ballast water.This paper will discuss the threats of ships' ballast water on marine ecological safety at first,and then analyze the nature of harmful alien invasive species,the state's prevention obligation will be expounded thereafter,and finally conclude the contents,challenges and defects of the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships' Ballast Water and Sediments of 2004.     

STATE AND LEGAL AUTHORITY

The idea of authority lies at the conceptual heart of much legal policy analysis. This essay discusses three perspectives on state and legal authority—the liberal-constitutional, the corporatist, and the technocratic—as a broad political framework for understanding major issues of judicial policy-making in the United States today. The essay examines recent literature on judicial legitimacy and capacity within the context of the three perspectives and raises research questions which derive from this approach to judicial policy. This framework provides a theoretical basis for seeing not only a decline, but changes in patterns of judicial authority and their relationship to any existing crisis of authority in the state in general.     

LEGAL CONSUMERS AS COPRODUCERS

Although the extent of unbundling among private legal practitioners in the changing Australian marketplace remains uncertain, there is a shift in thinking about the appropriate role of consumers in accessing everyday legal services. This is evident in the delivery of legal services other than those provided by private practitioners, where the consumer's role in legal service delivery arrangements is gradually being transformed. Among those institutions that are responding positively, if not inevitably, to the rising tide of legal self-helpers is the Family Court of Australia. The court's activities in attempting to meet the needs of its pro se consumers is simultaneously creating opportunities for unbundled legal service delivery, at least for those lawyers willing to seize these opportunities. It would appear that family law disputes, together with the large numbers of voluntary and involuntary legal self-helpers that these disputes generate, is fertile terrain for the development of alternative forms of legal service delivery.