A STUDY OF CLIENT SATISFACTION WITH FAMILY COURT COUNSELLING IN CASES INVOLVING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

The Family Court of Australia provides conciliation counselling to couples who are involved in disputes regarding their children following separation. In situations where domestic violence has occurred, the appropriateness of providing counselling to such couples has been seriously questioned This study examines the experience of clients attending counselling at the family court. Two groups of clients are studied—one group who reports domestic violence as a significant issue and a comparison group who does not report domestic violence. The results indicate that the two groups do not differ in their expressed level of satisfaction with the counselling they have received and that both groups consider counselling to have been helpful in resolving their issues. The preliminary results of this study have implications for the provision of postseparation counselling/mediation to couples when domestic violence has occurred.     

ibn Kenyatta,poems for an imperiled world

Scott Lash and John Urry, THE END OF ORGANIZED CAPITALISM (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)

Michael E. Porter, THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF NATIONS (New York: The Free Press, 1990)

Alice Teichova, Maurice Lévy‐Leboyer and Helga Nussbaum, eds., MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)     

Sex and Capacity: The Management of Monsters?

The first consideration by a civil court of the test of capacity to engage in sexual relations – X City Council v MB, NB and MAB – is as recent as 2005. This article places this and subsequent cases in the historical context of the way in which the law has constructed the sexuality of persons with intellectual impairment. The article argues that, beginning with a series of rape cases in the mid to late nineteenth century, which recognised the concept of consent given through the expression of animal instincts, the law has accepted and deployed a model of intellectual impairment which understands expressions of sexuality in terms of an increasingly unstable opposition between vulnerability and danger, understood as the presence or absence of instinct, and as indicating an underlying ‘monstrosity’. The article argues that the historical continuity apparent in the modern case law is unfortunate and should be rectified.     

Susan Gellman has it right

Michael Tonry, Sentencing Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 240pp.     

The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview...     

A unified model of settlement and trial expenditures: The Priest–Klein model extended

Settlement and trial expenditures are crucially interrelated. The literature on settlement, however, takes no account of models of trial. In this paper, we develop a unified model of settlement and trial expenditures. We do this by discarding the usual assumption of settlement models that trial costs are constant across cases. Instead, we follow the literature on trial by permitting trial costs to vary with the legal merit of the plaintiff's case. Our approach can be used to extend standard models of settlement such as the well-known Priest–Klein model as well as models based on asymmetric information. As a demonstration, we extend the Priest–Klein model and generally overturn that model's canonical results. In particular, we show that even in a fully symmetric model, predicted win rates at trial can deviate substantially from 50 percent. Furthermore, win rates will vary in response to legal reforms that shift the decision standard.