Contract, Employment and the Contract of Employment

Many of the rights and duties of the parties in an employmentrelationship arise out of the characterisation of the contractof employment as such. Employment also occurs by virtue of thefact that a contract of employment has been entered into. Inconsequence, it is natural to think of the contract of employmentand the employment relationship as co-existent. It is thus ofsome importance, both in legal theory and in practice, to establisha logical account of the rights and obligations between theparties that exist because of the contract of employment otherthan during the period of employment, both after and possiblybefore that relationship exists. Various possible accounts areexplored, and the conclusion is reached that the theoreticalnexus between employment and contracts of employment shouldbe broken in order to provide a more logical conceptual framework.     

Sport and Diplomacy: A Global Diplomacy Framework

ABSTRACT

The actors, or “players,” involved in the transactions of diplomacy occasioned by sport are manifold. In the case of the world’s “global game”—association football—they include but are not limited to individual footballers, football clubs, national leagues, national associations, football’s international governance structures, multi-national sponsors, and numerous hangers on. Importantly for this analysis, such a panoply of actors creates an architecture, replicated across other sports, which speak to the necessity of furthering the understanding of the relationship between sport and diplomacy. These two phenomena share a long-standing similarity in global affairs; both having been over-looked as means of comprehending relations between different polities otherwise centred on the nation-state. This exegesis advances our understanding in two areas. First, it addresses the parameters of the discussion of “sport and diplomacy” and problematises the discourse between the two with a note on language; and second, it utilises a framework provided by an appreciation of “global diplomacy” to explore concepts of communication, representation, and negotiation in sport and diplomacy.     

Sub-surface characterisation of latest-generation identification documents using optical coherence tomography

The identification of individuals, particularly at international border crossings, coupled with the evolving sophistication of identity documents are issues that authorities must contend with. Particularly, the ability to distinguish legitimate from counterfeit documents, with high throughput, sensitivity, and selectivity is an ever-evolving challenge.Over the last decade, an increasing number of security features have been introduced by authorities in identification documents. The latest generation of travel documents (such as passports and national ID cards) forego paper substrates for several layers of polycarbonate, allowing security features to be embedded within the documents. These security features may contain information at either the superficial and sub-surface levels, thus increasing the document’s resilience to counterfeiting.As the documents become harder to forge, so does the sophistication of forgery detection. There appears to be an unmet and evolving need to identify such sophisticated forgeries, in a non-destructive, high throughput manner.In this publication, we report on the application of optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging on assessing security features in specimen passports and national ID cards. OCT allows sub-surface imaging of translucent structures, non-destructively enabling quantitative visualisation of embedded security features.