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This paper aims to investigate the impact of environmental risk on corporate governance through market reaction to bank loan announcements.

Using the establishment of environment court in China as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper adopt the difference-in-differences approach based on listed firms during 2003–2013 to explore the impact of environment court on corporate governance.

This paper find that the environment court would weaken the cumulative abnormal return of loan announcements. Then, this paper confirm that the potential reason is that environment court worsens the interest conflict between majority and minority shareholders. Further, cross-sectional analysis suggests that bank’s supervision, market competition and analyst coverage can alleviate the impact of environment court on corporate governance.

Environment courts intensify firms’ internal interest disputes, thus causing the decrease of corporate governance, which can be observed through the effect of bank loan announcements.

This paper provide reference for environmental policy formulation and implementation, firms’ decision-makings and improving the banking regulatory system.

This paper makes a contribution to the studies about the impact of environment court on firms’ decision-making and investors’ reaction, the impact of external factors on corporate governance and bank loan announcements effect.

States have intervened with legislation to improve cashflow within construction project supply chains. The operation of the UK’s Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 leads to payment obligations stated either as a contract administrator’s certificate (or equivalent) or an adjudicator’s decision. The purpose of the intervention would be defeated unless there are speedy ways of transforming these pieces of paper into real money. The combination of the legislation, contractual provisions and insolvency law has produced a minefield of complexity concerning enforcement of payment obligations stated in these documents. Unfortunately, the knowledge and understanding required to navigate these complexities have been sorely lacking. The purpose of this paper is to plug this gap.

Legal research methods and case study approaches, using relevant court decisions as data, were adopted.

The enforcement method advised by the court is the summary judgment procedure provided under the Civil Procedure Rules. An overdue payment obligation, either under the terms of a construction contract or an adjudicator’s decision, amounts to a debt that can be the subject of insolvency proceedings. Although the insolvency enforcement method has been successfully used on some occasions, using it purely as a debt collection weapon would be inappropriate and likely to be punished by the court.

The paper contributes to knowledge in two ways: (i) it maps out the factual situations in which these payment challenges arise in language accessible to the construction industry’s professions; and (ii) comparative analysis of payment enforcement methods to aid decision-making by parties to construction industry contracts. It is relevant to the other common-law jurisdictions in which similar statutory interventions have been made.

European justice systems are facing a dramatic performance crisis due to the frequent inability to resolve cases without incurring unreasonable delays and backlogs. In this framework, the Italian Judicial system places itself well below the European countries average, in terms of speed of resolution of administrative, civil and criminal trials. The purpose of the paper was to (1) identify factors affecting Italian judicial system efficiency and (2) identify potential actions to manage them, improving judicial system efficiency.

In order to achieve the aims of this paper, a systematic review to map all critical factors discussed in previous studies was performed. Studies were extracted from Google Scholar, Web of Science and SSRN databases. In total, 22 studies were included.

The identified factors of inefficiency of the Italian judicial system have been divided into three macro-classes depending on whether they concern human resource management, the judicial process or whether they pertain to internal or external outside the judicial organization. For each of these, possible strategies have been developed in a new conceptual framework.

The framework seeks to assist policymakers in forming policy measures that can significantly increase court effectiveness. This is the first attempt to review and map all factors affecting judicial system efficiency systematically, providing a new conceptual framework to manage them.

This paper aims to determine the adaptability of China’s legal system in recognizing and enforcing foreign judgements in China.

Academic articles, case law and books are examined as are relevant reports by various regulatory authorities and organizations.

Historically, Chinese courts have strictly adhered to “de facto reciprocity”, which made it difficult for foreign judgements to be recognized and enforced in China. Fortunately, Chinese courts have since abandoned their rigid adherence to de facto reciprocity, and have instead, used flexible tests of reciprocity such as de jure reciprocity, reciprocal commitment and reciprocal understand/consensus. Accordingly, this would facilitate the recovery of stolen assets, as there is a lower threshold for the recognition and enforcement of a foreign judgement.

There are limited data available in relation to the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgements pertaining to the recovery of stolen assets. Any discussions within this paper are based on the impressionistic observations of this author, which may not reflect the true state of affairs within the Belt and Road Initiative.

Those who are interested in examining the viability in recognizing and enforcing foreign judgements relating to stolen assets will have an interest in this topic.

The value of the paper is to demonstrate the difficulties in recognizing and enforcing foreign judgements in China in relation to stolen assets.

Knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs henceforth) rely heavily on knowledge as the primary resource to provide public services. This study deals with a specific kind of KIPO in the judiciary system: the courts. The paper aims to explore the court’s managerial and organisational change resulting from the national recovery and resilience plan (NRRP) reform in response to Covid-19, focussing on how this neglected KIPO responds to change, either by showing acts of resistance or undergoing a hybridisation process.

The paper adopts a qualitative research design, developing an explorative case study to investigate the process of a court’s managerial and organisational change caused by NRRP reform and to shed light on how this neglected KIPO reacts to change, showing resistance acts and developing the hybridisation process. Thirty-one interviews in six months have been conducted with the three main actors in Courts: judges, clerks and trial clerks.

The paper shows that in this understudied KIPO, judges fiercely resist the managerial logic that decades of reforms have been trying to impose. The recent introduction of an office for speeding up trials (Ufficio Per il Processo (UPP)) was initially opposed. Then, the resistance strategy changed, and judges started to benefit from UPP delegating repetitive and low-value tasks while retaining their core activities. Clerks approached the reform with a more positive attitude, seeing in UPP the mechanism to bridge the distance between them and the judges.

Considering their relevance to society, courts must be more addressed in KIPOs' studies. This paper allows the reader to enter such KIPO and understand its peculiar features. Secondly, the article helps to understand micropractices of resistance that may hinder the effectiveness of managerial reforms.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the phrase “just and equitable”, and associated terminology, within New Zealand’s strata law, to inform other jurisdictions. In particular, this paper temporarily suspends the notion of a statutory hendiadys to consider what kind of justice is reflected in judicial consideration of the phrase.

This paper takes a mixed-methods approach, drawing on a combination of black-letter law, property law theory and insights from literary and philosophical analysis.

While justice is often considered as “treating like cases alike”, this is not apparent from this study. The analysis shows that different kinds of justice outcomes emerge, with some emphasis on justice as economic efficiency. In addition, the paper highlights the inherent uncertainty in what is “just and equitable” and how associated disjunctive phrases, such as “unjust or inequitable” are still treated as hendiadys, but are no more clear.

The research is limited to consideration of a single jurisdiction (New Zealand), though the useful degree of case law from this jurisdiction provides broad insight.

Among other things, the paper argues for further consideration of the usefulness of the “just and equitable” test in light of the kind of justice we want to achieve. The addition of mandatory considerations to existing statutory tests may allow more of a focus, beyond the exigencies of individual cases or narrow outcomes of economic efficiency.

While there is existing literature on the “just and equitable” phrase within strata law, the paper is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to provide an analysis focused on how suspending the statutory hendiadys normally inherent in “just and equitable” provides insight into the kind of justice that emerges from the application of this test within a single strata jurisdiction. As such, the paper provides lessons for other jurisdictions on how to improve relevant statute and case law outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and evaluate the current legal position on the admissibility of illegally obtained evidence in money laundering cases in Pakistan.

A comprehensive exploratory analytical examination indicates that illegally collected evidence from money laundering offences can be considered acceptable as long as it does not compromise the fairness of the judicial process or the right to a fair trial.

The admissibility and exclusion of illegally obtained evidence in money laundering cases are primarily governed by the rule of admissibility due to the absence of written or codified regulations in Pakistan.

The Pakistani Criminal Justice System has always depended on well-established admissibility rules to determine the acceptance or rejection of illegally obtained evidence. For many years, courts have exercised their discretion to allow illegally obtained evidence to be admitted using the relevance test. Additionally, they have also shown their discretion by excluding highly unfavourable material. Illegally obtained evidence may be considered admissible if it is relevant to the matter in issue. Illegally obtained evidence from an act related to illegal actions or a predicate offence in money laundering might impact the prosecution's case and, in turn, protect a defendant's right to a fair trial.

This study aims to investigate the digital information needs and seeking behaviour of legal practitioners practising at the Lahore High Court in the Punjab province of Pakistan.

This study adopts a quantitative approach based on an e-questionnaire survey to collect data from legal practitioners following a comprehensive census. Among the 9,933 registered legal practitioners, a random sample size of 370 respondents was determined, of whom 302 responded to the survey, resulting in a response rate of 81.6%.

Legal practitioners prefer the Pakistan Law Site and law journals as primary sources of information acquisition, with a distinct inclination towards digital formats over traditional print. These resources are primarily used for court case preparation, significantly enhancing the research capabilities of legal practitioners and ensuring they remain current in their field. However, several challenges were identified, including time constraints, limited access to digital resources and inadequate availability of legal resources in digital format. These challenges emphasize the critical need for enhancing the digital infrastructure of law libraries.

The study calls for law libraries to adopt technological advancements and underscores the necessity of improving digital infrastructure to better serve the evolving information needs of legal practitioners.

This study underscores the preferred information sources and formats of legal practitioners for seeking information, their purpose for using law resources and the impact of digital media on their information-seeking behaviour. In addition, this study reveals the challenges they face in seeking them.

This paper aims to know the legal nature of the court’s discretionary power in business contract revocation.

Following the normative method that analyzes legislation using secondary data consisting of primary, secondary and tertiary legal materials, this research was conducted during the period November, 2023 – February, 2024. Moreover, studies that addressed the legal nature of the court’s discretionary power in business contract revocation and published since 2000 were included. The focus was made upon the business contract’s retroactive effect in relation to the Court’s discretionary power.

From the initial 312 studies reviewed, 20 met the inclusion criteria. The business contract's retroactive effect in relation to the Court’s discretionary power has been considered by the relatively small number of studies included in the review. Researchers from different countries explored the phenomenon, using different approaches to explore the topic. However, none of these researchers has examined the phenomenon in the Jordanian Context.

This research is unique, as it examines the legal nature of the court’s discretionary power in business contract revocation, which has not been investigated in the Jordanian context. The previous researches on business contract revocation have addressed laws other than the Jordanian law.

This research will be a guide for the Jordanian legislation to draft a business contract law that regulates the court's interference in cases of business contract revocation and clearly specify its role in this regard.

This research will increase the Jordanian people's awareness of the legal nature of court in cases of business contract revocation. Moreover, it will make them familiar with the current laws so that they will legally deal with cases of this kind.

It is very important to conduct this research to review the papers and laws related to business contract revocation in Jordan since this issue has not been investigated.

This paper aims to examine how Sweden, as a member state of the European Union (EU), has implemented the EU Directive on Public Access to Environmental Information (AEI directive) in the context of the principles of good administration.

This paper adopts the EU law methodology, as this paper mainly examines the implementation of the EU AEI directive by the member states and, as an EU member state, how Sweden used procedural autonomy to implement the EU directive at the national level. The EU law methodology further guides how national laws are to be interpreted considering obligations under the EU law. This paper further applies a comparative review to determine the differences in the approaches used by the AEI directive and relevant Swedish national laws to facilitate access to environmental information.

Despite Sweden used a minimalist approach rather than maximal harmonization while implementing the AEI directive at the national level, the Swedish model of the accessibility and availability of environmental information is fully compliant with the principles of good administration. The Swedish approach has an enormous effect on promoting access to environmental information as an integral part of good governance and fundamental rights.

It was not possible to perform a comparative review of court cases on relevant issues from different EU member states.

Access to environmental information could be a tool for environmental democracy and sustainable development.

Access to environmental information could contribute to more public engagement and participation in environmental decision making and hence could make developmental projects more inclusive to meet societal objectives.

This study makes a unique contribution by evaluating access to environmental information in the context of the principles of good administration under EU law.