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This chapter examines the differing ways in which the criminal responsibility of children has been understood in English and Australian common law. The doctrine of “doli incapax” has for many centuries worked to establish a presumption in law that children between the ages of around 10 and 14 are incapable of forming criminal intent, unless it can be shown that they are capable of ‘guilty knowledge’ about their actions. In this approach, children are presumed to be ‘naughty’ until it can be shown that they are ‘bad’. However, events such as the murder of James Bulger in 1993 have led to the abolition of the doctrine in the UK, and its questioning in Australia. The chapter will outline how and why the law’s distinction between adults and children in relation to crime has become unstable, and explain the implications of the legal conception of childhood for the sociology of childhood more broadly. It will also explore how a closer look at the history of the doli incapax presumption sheds considerable light on the central and active role played by the judiciary and the legal profession, as opposed to other social and professional groups, in the development of a particular legal construction of childhood.

It is deservedly recognized that James Steuart advanced a monetary theory in which paper money played an important role. The successful establishment of Scottish banknote circulation and theoretical influences from his fellow countrymen such as John Law can be pointed out as backgrounds for his monetary theory. Little attention has been given however to the point that Steuart deduced theory on banks and banknotes quite differently from his predecessors. It is of great significance that Steuart’s theory on banks and banknotes in his first draft of The Principles of Political Oeconomy was, in the following years, drastically expanded and reconstructed. The theory in his first draft written in 1764 was based on the opinion that banknotes should be issued only on landed securities, in consideration of ideas from the Scottish banking system. He then expanded the theory into a dynamic three-stage banking theory where he concluded that as economies and credit grew, banks should issue notes not only on the basis of landed securities but also by discounting bills and giving public credit. By this expansion, banknotes gained a broad and central role in his monetary theory, and the expansion gave his monetary theory more ingenious evolutionary aspects.

Financial assurance rules, also known as financial responsibility or bonding requirements, foster cost internalization by requiring potential polluters to demonstrate the financial resources necessary to compensate for environmental damage that may arise in the future. Accordingly, assurance is an important complement to liability rules, restoration obligations, and other regulatory compliance requirements. The paper reviews the need for assurance, given the prevalence of abandoned environmental obligations, and assesses the implementation of assurance rules in the United States. From the standpoint of both legal effectiveness and economic efficiency, assurance rules can be improved. On the whole, however, cost recovery, deterrence, and enforcement are significantly improved by the presence of existing assurance regulations.

In 1767, did Sir James Steuart predict the political and financial crises that started the French Revolution? Étienne de Sénovert, the editor and translator of Steuart’s work, seems to argue to this effect in the introduction to the first French edition of An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy in 1789. The visionary “prediction” set forth by Steuart was the following: if the king of France had introduced public credit, this would have changed the political balance in French political society, making it very unstable. The English and the French governments used different ways of borrowing money in 1760: the French king contracted debts with a network of financiers close to the government, while the English government borrowed on the credit markets through the intermediary of the Bank of England. The second of these methods constitutes public credit and has proved its efficiency. According to Steuart, implementing the English public credit system in France could have dangerous consequences. Landed interests and moneyed interests would compete for the control of the State. The author realized that the French nobility, the landowners, as a social and economic group would have no chance in facing such a powerful rival (the public creditors). In this chapter, the author analyzes Steuart’s “prediction” as a coherent part of his systematic and original approach to political economy. Steuart’s theories about the role of political economy and the role of “interest” are connected to his understanding of institutions. Introducing such a complex support for the value as public credit might have different consequences in France and England. Steuart thinks each country’s economy should be analyzed according to its own institutional and social context.

Steuart’s work was still relevant in 1789 for two reasons. Firstly, the author’s prediction of political antagonism between capitalists and nobility anticipated the political conflict about debt expressed by pamphleteers such as Sieyès, Mirabeau, and Clavière between 1787 and 1789. This is the context of Étienne de Sénovert’s claim: the political narrative built by the revolutionaries of 1789 (rescuing the “sacred” public debt from royal despotism) fitted Steuart’s prediction. This may have been the incentive for the translation and publication of his work in 1789 and 1790. Secondly, Steuart’s financial and monetary theory was at the heart of the project of financial reform that would lead to the assignats. Steuart’s (1767) theory of public finance and state power in 1789 provides a key to the understanding the events of the time, and to how actors tried to make sense of them. Steuart made another crucial observation about the deep effect of what he called “the modern economy” upon the power of the governments of Europe: even an absolute monarch could not damage public credit without destroying his own sovereignty.

This paper will aim to explain two strategies for digital preservation of law reviews, informing law librarians of the options which might best suit their needs.

On November 7, 2008, the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship was released to the public. One of its main tenets – that law schools and libraries “stop publishing journals in print format and rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats” – was an open call to law libraries to start thinking about digital preservation strategies for their law reviews. The Legal Information Preservation Alliance responded to the need by developing the Law Review Preservation Program, an initiative, which archives law reviews hosted on the Bepress Digital Commons (DC) platform in Controlled LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) or CLOCKSS.

For those law libraries without subscriptions to DC, there is an open-source, freely available alternative solution for ingesting digital law reviews into any preservation platform. This application, called the Submission Information Metadata Packaging, or SIMP tool was developed at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, initially as a solution for ingesting content into the Ex Libris Rosetta Digital preservation platform, as part of a CONTENTdm digital asset management workflow. Though the development of the SIMP tool was inspired by Marriott’s need to ingest digital files from CONTENTdm to Rosetta, they built it to work with any Digital Asset Management System and Digital preservation platform.

Digital Preservation of law reviews is in its infancy. This is one of the first articles of its kind to provide specific solutions and technical advice for law libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether citizen characteristics (race/ethnicity and attire) or demeanor predicted how officers interacted in simulation scenarios that could turn violent.

Controlled-laboratory experiments were conducted during which police participants (n=50) responded to equivalent numbers of black, white, and Hispanic individuals in multiple branching video scenarios in a use-of-force simulator. Within these scenarios, the attire of on-screen individuals was varied (“street” or “business” clothing) as was their demeanor – individuals were either friendly or confrontational. Each scenario had the potential to end peaceably or turn violent, depending on how the officers treated people in the simulator.

Multi-level modeling revealed that neither the race/ethnicity nor the attire of on-screen individuals predicted how officers interacted with them. However, the demeanor of on-screen individuals did – officers were significantly more likely to verbally escalate and end up with a deadly outcome when faced with confrontational individuals (f=3.96; df=1, 558; p<0.05).

These findings offer important new insight into how fairly officers interact with people during routine encounters that have the potential to turn violent, and what this means for perceptions of police legitimacy, procedural justice, and allegations of racial bias.

This is the first laboratory study to test the impact of citizen characteristics and demeanor on how officers escalate and de-escalate encounters.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the use of legally and ethically dubious methods in ethnography can sometimes be justified in the pursuit of new knowledge. The paper offers reflections on the risks that participatory methods of enquiry can bring upon both researcher and research participants, particularly in terms of the physical and reputational risks that researchers must face when adopting ethnographic methods in unwelcoming research environments.

Ethnographic methods, specifically participant observation (PO), were adopted to penetrate a gang of criminal ticket touts in the UK through a gatekeeper who provided access to knowledge and experience.

Pushing the legal and ethical boundaries of research is not only justifiable, but sometimes necessary in the discovery of new, socially valuable and otherwise unobtainable knowledge. Ethnographic research and PO are the only methods through which it is possible to gauge an understanding and appreciation, and thus present a valid depiction, of deviant and hard to access groups. As such, the use of these methods can sometimes be justified, within certain parameters.

This research adopts ethnographic methods in the under-researched and topical area of black market ticket touting in the UK. Ethnography alone, through an “internal” understanding of the participants’ viewpoints, can reveal that much of what is discussed in the media and in Parliament is inaccurate. The paper builds on the existing literature on touting and on conducting illegal research, and offers reflections on why these methods can sometimes be justified.

With an estimated over 40 million Internet users all over the world, things that once happened only in “real life” are starting to occur in this virtual world. This Internet, just like the physical world, cannot rely on laws alone to keep order. The rules that regulate behavior, the policies for what is acceptable and the laws that pertain to activities have developed and will continue to emerge over time. However, conflicts of interest are inevitable and wherever conflict occurs, the government will regulate on matters including e‐mail, data theft, piracy, search and seizure, electronic banking, offensive behavior, and other legal liability issues.

In 2020, mining activity by Rio Tinto destroyed rock caves in Western Australia's Juukan Gorge that are considered sacred sites by the First Nation Peoples of that area, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) Peoples. This paper examines the public response to the damage caused at this culturally sensitive site and identifies cultural heritage protection strategies that emerged in the aftermath of this catastrophic event.

This research applies a qualitative case study method and analysis of open-sourced official policy documents, media reports and published institutional statements.

The research identified specific cultural heritage protection strategies, including stakeholder-driven advocacy and shared values approach to business practices to help foster a greater appreciation of the connections between people, objects and lands. Whilst the mining activities were considered lawful, significant gaps in the legislation to protect heritage sites were also exposed.

Using a recent case that occurred in 2020, this paper unpacks how the motivations for accessing minerals can override cultural sensibilities and legal/ethical frameworks established to protect cultural heritage. This paper brings to light the liabilities associated with the mining industry when operating in a culturally significant environment where appropriate due diligence to manage cultural heritage is not thoroughly applied. The paper highlights the role the community can play in demanding improved corporate social responsibility which can, in turn, act as a strategy for cultural heritage protection.

The increased use of checks in nonlocal payments at the end of the nineteenth century presented problems for their clearing and collection. Checks were required to be paid in full (at par) only when presented directly to the drawn-upon bank at its counter. Consequently, many, primarily rural or small-town, banks began to charge remittance fees on checks not presented for collection in person. Such fees and the alleged circuitous routing of checks in the process of collection to avoid them were widely criticized defects of the pre-Federal Reserve payments system. As the new Federal Reserve established its own system for check clearing and collection, it also took as an implicit mandate the promotion of universal par clearing and collection. The result was a bitter struggle with non-par banks, the numbers of which initially shrunk dramatically but then rebounded. A 1923 Supreme Court decision ended the Fed’s active (or coercive) pursuit of universal par clearing, and non-par banking persisted thereafter for decades. Not until the Monetary Control Act of 1980 was universal par clearing and true monetary union, in which standard means of payment are accepted at par everywhere, achieved.