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Knowledge management is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for organizations. Knowledge embedded in the organization’s business processes and employees’ skills provide the firm with unique capabilities to deliver customers with a product or service. Law firms represent an industry which seems well suited for knowledge management investigation. They are knowledge intensive, and use of advanced technology may transform these organizations in the future. To examine knowledge management in Norwegian law firms, a study that involves two phases of data collection and analysis was designed. The first phase was an initial field study of the leading law firm in Norway. The second phase will be a survey of Norwegian law firms. The conducted semi‐structured interviews in the initial field study document a strong belief in the potential benefits from knowledge management. Future research will investigate law firms’ competitive advantage, value of intangible assets, profitability and capabilities from knowledge management.

The purpose of this study is to examine a principal's knowledge of school law in Kuwait. It further aims to examine the relationship between a principal's knowledge of school law and other variables.

The study employed a quantitative research paradigm. Data for this study, collected via survey, were collected from a sample of 369 public school principals.

Using descriptive and inferential statistical methods, the findings indicated that school principals have only limited knowledge about the legal rights of teachers and students. Furthermore, the results revealed a significant difference in knowledge of school law relative to a principal's gender, school level, years of experience, knowledge source and the number of completed school law training courses.

The implications for professional development programs which prepare all school leaders to serve the needs of students’ and teachers’ rights are included.

Studies showed that there is a lack of research regarding a principal's legal knowledge in the Arab countries. As such, this study examined a school principal's knowledge of school law in Kuwait and discussed the associated implications for principal professional development programs.

Legal information work has expanded with the growth in knowledge management and emergence of a new type of knowledge/information manager, the professional support lawyer. This study aims to investigate competency requirements for library‐based information work in UK law firms, including the specialist subject knowledge required, methods of development and the impact on information professionals of professional support lawyers.

The investigation used a pragmatic mixed‐methods approach, including a mainly quantitative questionnaire, administered online to 64 legal information professionals, followed by eight semi‐structured interviews and a focus group with four participants. A literature review informed the questionnaire design and contextualised the findings.

The survey confirmed a broad range of competency requirements and clarified the specific subject knowledge needed. Participants favoured a varied combination of formal, and informal learning. Most participants also wanted specialised professional education for the sector.

The nature of the sample and use of categorised questions were limiting factors, partly compensated by inviting open‐ended comments and follow‐up interviews. A larger study using qualitative methods with professional support lawyers and fee‐earners would provide a fuller more rounded picture.

The findings indicate that the subject knowledge needed for legal information work in law firms is more extensive than for other sectors and suggest that information science departments should strengthen and extend curriculum content to reflect this need.

The study has advanced the understanding of the competency, education and training needs of UK legal information professionals, challenging assumptions about academic/professional qualifications and illuminating the blend of competencies needed.

This study is carried out to evaluate how well legal knowledge can be demonstrated by a built environment professional via the scenario-based approach to the learning of law modules.

A Delphi analysis of the advice provided by an MSC quantity surveying student, on a scenario-based legal problem arising due to a property contract, is carried out. The tendered legal advice was submitted as part of the assessment requirements for an MSc law module, following the university criteria, after the teaching of a law module. The student report, which attained an A-grade, and the assessment criteria used for marking/grading by the university were subsequently sent to 18 practicing lawyers, who were selected to constitute an expert panel, to independently judge the extent of legal knowledge demonstrated in the student report.

The Delphi analysis outcome showed that the expert panel holds a similar consensus view to the university on the level of legal knowledge demonstrated and by extension the effectiveness of the law module in imparting legal knowledge to a non-lawyer. The study outcome shows how well legal knowledge can be acquired and applied by a non-lawyer, within the context of the built environment, via scenario-based teaching of a law module.

This study serves as a preliminary step necessary to arouse further research toward empirically profiling the current outlook of a wider range of graduating students receiving scenario-based legal education in the built environment.

In recent years there has been a significant increase in the involvement of Australian schools with various aspects of the law and this has led to a number of claims that education has become legalised. A major consequence of this development is the need for principals to have a level of legal literacy sufficient to identify when a legal problem is developing in their school. Moreover, given the increased involvement of schools with the law, there would seem to be a need for principals to introduce preventive legal risk management strategies into school policies and practices. However, to implement such programmes, principals require a sound knowledge of those aspects of the law that they are required to manage. A recent study of some 300 principals from government schools in Queensland raises serious questions, however, regarding the level of principals’ professional knowledge of the law. This paper examines the concept of the legalisation of education and the extent to which school principals’ professional knowledge is adequate to meet the demands the law is making of them.

Legal systems govern social behaviour. They attempt to regulate order, collective peace and harmonious developments in society. The external social behaviour that law deals with is also a part of internal human behaviour. This external and internal nature of human behaviour, needs to be consciously studied and interlinked when legal systems desire elements of justice, equality, liberty, fraternity, dignity, integrity and unity for social collectivity. These elements, that legal systems guarantee come from an integration of individual and collective life on matters of social, political, economic etc., of various levels. The individuality and collectivity on these matters and levels are deeply psychological and spirited in sense as human behaviour operates through stimulus from inside to leave external effects outside or vice-versa through a function of thought-emotion-sensation-body complex. Thus, we see, our behaviour gets shaped by a two-way process of inner motivation and outer circumstance, individual and collective dimensions on a given matter and level. At this juncture, a critical study on this two-way relation in human behaviour and a set of unifying values to be identified for progressive intersections seem to be the future of legal systems for achieving greater goals of humanity. Additionally, legal systems that deal with justice are now becoming more than social, economic and political justice as new knowledge is revealing interrelations of spirit-mind-body or thought-emotion-sensation-body complex leaving us to think of new dimensions in justice. Thus, spirituality, as an exercise of human experiment and experience, provides a new scope for legal systems to deal with human and social behaviour to achieve order, peace and development. At this juncture, one even finds another unknown dimension gaining grounds and sinking to integrate or bring holistic responses to human problems and social challenges of the collective is the actual linking of spirituality through or with psychology or vice versa. Law and legalities of the thoughts and norms are interspersed in between these two disciplines. This is indeed a welcome trend as the psychological human and the social collective have become the axis on which every wheel of knowledge is tested and allowed to represent as spokes for inclusive, sustainable and harmonious inter-relational movement of things. One might see, know, feel or even ought to bear this interconnection that very often come in the actual spiritual practices where psychological dimensions emerge leading to wholesome experience of the state of our own individual and socio-collective nature. Among many kinds of spiritual experiences and experiments, two of them stand out for our legal consideration. One, an experience of timeless, space-less and boundless consciousness-awareness beyond life and world with which we witness, observe and understand the movement of things inside life and world, without our participation into them. Two, an experience of consciousness-awareness as power and force operating and animating through thought-emotion-sensation-body complex with our active participation in the movement of life and world. The former experience prepares the ground to remain free from all fetters of self-aggrandizing individualization before wider collectivity and, the latter experience prepares us to re-enter into wider collectivity to contribute with a freed sense of individualization, not imprisoned by its ego-aggrandizement that cuts the individual from the collective. These two spiritual experiences, one of the consciousness-awareness of freedom and, another of the consciousness-awareness with all potentials, when allowed to animate inside the human, it gives crucial understanding of the challenges of life and, pro-activation of solutions for those challenges that are extremely crucial for law and legal systems. A power of understanding the knowledge using spiritual experience of these two states of consciousness-awareness along with rationality, reason and logic, a strength operating through concentration of the energies in body aiding movement of knowledge, a harmony releasing itself through motivating-empathy and mutual-collaboration using knowledge and strength and, finally a near-perfect action operating through strategies, stages and steps in organizing daily life, human capital and all kinds of the systems of the world using knowledge, strength and harmony become our positive tools of empowerment. The combination of these two spiritual experiences of consciousness-awareness is useful to legal systems that look for solutions to human crises using interactive nature of individuality and collectivity on all issues of life, world and society. The chapter attempts to demonstrate that this kind of spirituality and its applied processes thus provide us the clue and strategy to achieve what the human nature and social existences of all kinds all over the world seek and aspire in the form of individual as well as collective peace, joy and compassion. It is also argued that this peace, joy and compassion that is spiritual in nature are in fact the origin and source of inspiration and stimulation for social, political and economic equality, liberty and fraternity in law, and the harmony and perfection of these elements seen as the justice that balances everything. The chapter demonstrates how applied spirituality can be used in law in the sense of law-making, judicial-interpretation, executive-governance, legal profession and finally a grand introduction of spirituality and its values into legal academics and research that are waiting to be liberated from the clutches of mere analytical knowledge of life and world moving towards new enriching powers of radiant collective life and wonderful harmonious world.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

Examines the attitudes of Thai police regarding drug enforcement in the following areas: drug laws, prosecutors and judges. Assesses the accuracy of officers’ knowledge of drug laws. Explores the effects of 16 independent variables, derived from personal background, institutional support and drug offense information, on officers’ attitudes and knowledge. Using data collected from a survey of 672 Thai police officers, employs ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to examine the aggregate effect of independent variables on officers’ attitudes about drug enforcement and to identify the most significant independent variables. Finds that the officers have positive attitudes regarding drug enforcement but are not knowledgeable about the drug laws, and that several institutional variables have a positive significant influence on these attitudes.

Handler's genealogy of postmodernism recounted in his address recognizes its origin in aesthetic disciplines and its somewhat viral transcription into social jurisprudence: “the postmodern concept of subversion developed first in language and literary theory, art, and architecture and then spread into politics and law” (1992a, p. 698). Although Handler's rejection of deconstruction stems from what he sees to be its political quiescence, its association with aesthetic critiques of modernism haunts his claims as one source of its essential conservatism. Aesthetic values, he implies, remain distant or distinct from pressing issues of political and social inequality.

This paper aims to investigate whether Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) can be driven by the creative compliance knowledge that firms gather in their home country through litigations with the government.

The authors draw on the knowledge-based view and organizational learning theory to argue that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between experience in litigating with the home State and a firm’s level of FDI. The authors test this hypothesis using negative binomial regressions on a sample of Spanish listed firms for the period between 1986 and 2008.

The findings of this study confirm the hypothesized inverted U-shaped relationship between a firm’s experience in litigating with the home State and its FDI levels. Firms seem to face an exploration–exploitation dilemma regarding their compliance with domestic regulation. Once they have accumulated a certain amount of creative compliance knowledge, it would be better for them to exploit it both domestically and internationally in the form of creative compliance routines, instead of continuing to push the limits of regulation.

Firms willing to explore the gray areas of the law are usually forced to litigate with the State. As a result, they develop creative compliance knowledge that they can incorporate into their legal routines and capabilities so that they can later exploit it in foreign countries. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that attempts to understand the influence of creative compliance knowledge on a firm’s international investments.