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The purpose of this paper is to analyse how novel homicide defences predicated on contemporary neuroscience align with legal insanity.

Doctrinal analysis, systematic investigation of relevant statutes and cases, was used to elucidate how the law of insanity is evolving. Cases represent the first recorded instance of a particular neuroscientific defence. US appellate cases were categorised according to the mechanism of action of neurotransmitter relied upon in court. A case study approach was also used to provide a contextualised understanding of the case outcome in depth.

Findings broadly depict how the employment of expert testimony runs parallel with our contemporary understanding of key neurotransmitters and their function in human behaviour. Generally, medico-legal evidence concerning neuromodulating agents and violent behaviour was inconclusive. However, the outcome of defence strategy may depend on the underlying neurotransmitter involved.

This study shows that as more discoveries are made about the neurobiological underpinnings of human behaviour; this new knowledge will continue to seep into the US court system as innovative defence strategies with varying success. Medical and legal practitioners may gauge the success of a defence depending on the neuromodulating agent.

Many scholars have focused on the role of neuroimaging as neuroscientific evidence and how it is used is shaping US criminal jurisprudence. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no study has incorporated the true origin of neuroscientific evidence as being underpinned by the understanding of neurotransmitters.

This paper seeks to examine certain important aspects of the domestic laws of Nigeria, the UK, the USA and Canada with a view to pointing out the remarkable differences capable of affecting adversely the war on terror.

Analyses the domestic laws of all four countries with a view to pointing out the remarkable differences capable of affecting adversely the war on terror.

Despite the obvious zeal and commitment with which nations and states of the world have set out to wage a legal war on terrorism, particularly the aspect of financing it, and despite the existence of a convention of which they are members, serious disparity exists in the legal frameworks adopted for the war. Even amongst such countries as the UK, the USA and Canada, uniformity of laws and approach is still a far‐fetched idea, a situation that is capable of hurting the international collaboration against terror. There is an urgent need for closer affinity between the laws of such countries while even countries like Nigeria that may not presently consider themselves as serious targets of terrorism need to urgently shirk themselves of such impressions and reform their laws.

The paper makes suggestions as to how the differences in the laws of the four countries may be corrected or down played, and how the international objectives of uniformity of laws may be achieved.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between regulation, market discipline and banking distress.

To address the empirical question put forward above, a multivariate logit model is applied to an international sample of 586 banks from 21 European countries in the period between 2000 and 2012. To give robustness to the results, different variables have been used to test the role played by market discipline and regulation as well as an alternative methodology known as duration/survival analysis.

It can be found that market discipline is a good indicator in signalling banking distress, that is, market discipline has penalized more banks with a higher likelihood of being in distress. Nonetheless, as broadly acknowledged, market discipline was not sufficient per se to avoid banking distress in Europe. With regard to regulation, this paper evidences that the adoption of other regulatory measures beyond the simple transposition of changes occurred in the EU Directives such as borrower-based measures and limits on pre-emptive exposures’ concentration, have contributed toward reducing the probability of distress of EU banks, showing that the introduction of this kind of measures was necessary and relevant. In addition, in this paper, it can be found that the NPL ratio, size, capital (including the well-known regulatory capital ratio, as well as the novel leverage ratio which discards the risk weights present in the former one) and liquidity are good indicators of banking distress which lead us to conclude that the new regulatory framework known as Basel III is on the right path to mitigate the probability that a new banking crisis similar to the last one takes place again.

The first limitation regards the period of time chosen, that is, from 2000 to 2012, empirically neglecting, to some extent the important regulatory changes occurred after the aforementioned period. Nonetheless, as mentioned in the Data and Methodology section, the period ends in 2012 because it is difficult to flag a reasonable number of banks’ bailouts afterwards, to properly run the type of model used in this paper. The second limitation is the fact that the possible changes in the risk management and risk assessment by institutions and in the behaviour of investors, acknowledge as weak and inappropriate before the on-set of the global financial crisis, albeit very relevant, are not in the scope of this paper.

Despite the welcomed changes performed by regulators so far, some aspects are not complete yet and new areas deserve more empirical work and attention by the regulators and supervisors. Some of them stem directly from the results obtained from this paper such as the enhancement and a close monitoring of the current Pillar 3 framework the increase of the adoption of more targeted tools, in a more preemptive way, to counter the build-up of risks and the implementation of the leverage ratio.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the identification of leading indicators signalling emerging risks to the banking system has become a major priority to central banks and supervisory authorities. As a consequence, several studies have formulated the aim of analysing predictive characteristics of a set of macroeconomic variables, such as GDP Growth, Credit-to-GDP, Inflation, M2-to-GDP, among others. Other studies take a different perspective and complement the analysis with bank-specific risk indicators. Nonetheless the aforementioned studies do not consider the relationship between regulation and market discipline and banking distress. This is the gap the authors wanted to fill, and this assessment is the main contribution of this paper.

In the development of powder bed additive manufacturing (AM) process parameters, the characterization of mechanical properties is generally performed through relatively large mechanical test samples that represent a bulk response. This provides an accurate representation of mechanical properties for equivalently sized or larger parts. However, as feature size is reduced, mechanical properties transition from a standard bulk response to a thin wall response where lower power border scans and surface roughness have a larger effect.

For this study, samples of wall thickness varying between 4.0 and 0.25 mm were built in 304L on the selective laser melting (SLM) platform and Ti-6Al-4V on the electron beam melting (EBM) platform. Samples were then mechanically tested, and fractography was performed for analysis.

This study experimentally identifies the threshold between bulk and thin wall mechanical properties for 304L SS on the SLM platform and Ti-6Al-4V on the EBM platform. A possible method for improving those properties and shifting the transition from bulk to thin wall response to smaller wall thicknesses by manipulation of scan pattern was investigated.

This study is a novel investigation into the effect of reduced wall thickness on the mechanical properties of a part produced by powder bed AM.

Previous empirical studies examine the effect of asymmetries across bidders on auction outcomes. This paper tests for asymmetries in behavior when bidders are confronted with different regulatory environments. Data from federal and state highway resurfacing projects in Colorado are used to determine if bids are more aggressive when contractors switch from federal projects, with Davis-Bacon prevailing wage and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise regulations, to less-regulated state projects. Results from fixed effects estimates of winning bids indicate that the level of aggressive bidding is not altered with a change in regulations, at least not with respect to the policies and types of projects examined here.