The Bombing of Omagh, 15 August 1998: The Bombers,Their Tactics,Strategy, and Purpose Behind the Incident

The purpose of this article is to review the above incident: what happened, how it happened and who did it and why. Also, to place it in the context of the current "peace process," Irish history and the history of Irish Republican violence. In looking at who carried out the bombing there is also an attempt to explain the split between the Provisional and Real IRA, their motives and ideas, the complex relationship between the two and what they hope to achieve. This is then followed by an analysis of the actual bombing, the tactics involved in carrying it out and what went wrong. And finally to look at the after effects of the bombing. In many ways the bombing was not as unusual as portrayed by the media, just a continuation of what had been happening for the last 30 years; thus, it is instructive in itself as an "ideal" terrorist operation.     

How Much Disagreement is Good for Democratic Deliberation?

The ideal of deliberation requires that citizens engage in reasonable discussion despite disagreements. In practice, if their experience is to match this normative ideal, participants in an actual deliberation should prefer moderate disagreement to conflict-free discussion within homogeneous groups, and to conflict-driven discussion where differences are intractable. This article proposes a research design and methods for assessing the quality of a deliberative event based on the perceptions of the participants themselves. In a structured deliberative event, over 2,000 individuals were assigned to small groups composed of about 10 persons of varying levels of ideological difference to discuss health care reform in California. We find that participants experience higher satisfaction with deliberation under moderate ideological difference than when they are in homogeneous or in highly disparate groups. That moderate disagreement induces optimal deliberation is consistent with normative expectations and empirically demonstrates the deliberative quality of this event.     

Explaining Myanmar's regime transition: the periphery is central

In 2010, Myanmar (Burma) held its first elections after 22?years of direct military rule. Few compelling explanations for this regime transition have emerged. This article critiques popular accounts and potential explanations generated by theories of authoritarian “regime breakdown” and “regime maintenance”. It returns instead to the classical literature on military intervention and withdrawal. Military regimes, when not terminated by internal factionalism or external unrest, typically liberalize once they feel they have sufficiently addressed the crises that prompted their seizure of power. This was the case in Myanmar. The military intervened for fear that political unrest and ethnic-minority separatist insurgencies would destroy Myanmar's always-fragile territorial integrity and sovereignty. Far from suddenly liberalizing in 2010, the regime sought to create a “disciplined democracy” to safeguard its preferred social and political order twice before, but was thwarted by societal opposition. Its success in 2010 stemmed from a strategy of coercive state-building and economic incorporation via “ceasefire capitalism”, which weakened and co-opted much of the opposition. Having altered the balance of forces in its favour, the regime felt sufficiently confident to impose its preferred settlement. However, the transition neither reflected total “victory” for the military nor secured a genuine or lasting peace.     

Properly drafted arbitration agreement as a safeguard to its adequate interpretation: Rwanda case study

Since the seminal Sex Discrimination Act 1975, modern British equality law developed in a piecemeal fashion over four decades. The landmark Equality Act 2010 was designed to unify, simplify and, to a limited extent, strengthen the legislation in this area. Despite its long gestation period, the Bill suffered from a lack of parliamentary scrutiny. This article sets the Equality Act in context and, by analysing certain aspects, discusses how far it has met those aims.     

Decline of the English jury*

Abstract

This biographical study of the lived experiences of six law teachers offers a new dimension to understanding the dynamics of law teaching. The overall purpose of the study is to reveal how these law teachers make sense of the world of legal education in terms of individual identities, values and whether they necessarily regard themselves as academics. The significance of the study is the contribution it seeks to make in understanding individual law teachers and how they experience the dynamics of a rapidly changing teaching environment. The study reveals how different experiences emerge through a complex interplay between spheres of influence and theoretical frames of reference. A theoretical perspective considers three possible explanations, work orientation, performativity and supercomplexity, with regard to how experiences fit within apparent epistemological shifts in the academy.

The biographical method has not hitherto been applied to understanding this dimension of legal education. The purpose in adopting this method is to make a deliberate departure from more traditional research methods in legal education and to determine the extent to which it might be possible to see the world of legal education as a lived experience. This approach provides tools of analysis for understanding the dynamics of law teaching and dynamic identities.     

Lawyers’ wellbeing and professional legal education

Abstract

THIS PAPER examines the wellbeing and satisfaction levels of lawyers in the workplace. It argues that research suggesting a crisis in the legal profession in the United States is comparable with research on wellbeing and levels of satisfaction for lawyers in Australasia. Some reports in both jurisdictions are critical of conventional legal education and practical legal training programs, which do not encourage students to develop personal and interpersonal skills that can improve self‐awareness, communication skills and the capacity to manage stress and anxiety. Consequently, law students are allowed to assume that these “soft skills” are less important for lawyers compared with cognitive skills such as “knowing the law” and “thinking like a lawyer”.

The paper describes the preliminary results of research conducted with graduates of the School of Law at the University of Newcastle Australia. The results confirm existing research to show that clinical legal education programs that expose law students under supervision to clients with real cases may promote the development of interpersonal skills, which in turn may help them cope with stressors in legal practice, especially in the first few years post‐admission.     

Climate change: It's happening in the legal profession too

What conscientious law professor of first year, large format classes in torts, contracts, or criminal law has not pondered how to better engage students while easing their reluctance to speak out in class? While students entering law schools are quite adept with student engagement technologies (SETs) from undergraduate classes, some law faculties seem tied to the passive environment of lectures and PowerPoint presentations and hence reject SET methodologies as so much techno-wizardry. With the entry of web-based programmes into the expanding field of SETs, and increasing empirical evidence that active learning improves grades and closes gender and socio-economic gaps, the ethical question arises, are we not obliged as law teachers to employ them? This paper examines in three steps that gap between pronouncing from the podium and actively engaging learners by clicker response or web-based devices. Part I reviews the growing literature on active learning including SET-based methods. Part II examines two models of SETs, remote-based and web-based, for their comparative attributes and drawbacks, with a particular focus on law teaching. Part III details the author’s experiences with the clicker system teaching introductory law and criminology and offers practical suggestions for facilitating its use. The paper concludes that, in light of recent evidence of heightened learning success using active learning methodologies, and the impending complexity to education posed by wearable technologies, the ethical question of pedagogical competence grows in importance.