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Investigates the differences in protocols between arbitral tribunals and courts, with particular emphasis on US, Greek and English law. Gives examples of each country and its way of using the law in specific circumstances, and shows the variations therein. Sums up that arbitration is much the better way to gok as it avoids delays and expenses, plus the vexation/frustration of normal litigation. Concludes that the US and Greek constitutions and common law tradition in England appear to allow involved parties to choose their own judge, who can thus be an arbitrator. Discusses e‐commerce and speculates on this for the future.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the lessee eviction process in Zimbabwe in order to suggest possible ways of improving this process that has become a rutted road characterised by a litany of hiccups.

The study is guided by the qualitative methodology. Data were mainly collected from property managers operating in the real property market in Harare using in-depth interviews. Analysis of data was done through content analysis.

It emerged from the study that the eviction process in Zimbabwe is fraught with impediments and expenses that are sometimes exasperating to property owners and investors. The current eviction regulations favour the lessees at the expense of lessors thus niggling lessees have aggravated the already protracted process by unnecessary appeals.

The paper only focuses on residential property management and eviction of legal lessees due to non-payment of rentals.

The rent regulations should be reviewed in order to create a fair legal system that protects the rights of both the lessors and lessees in Zimbabwe.

The perpetual decline of the economy in Zimbabwe has crippled lessees’ ability to pay rentals. Yet, it has also become intricate to evict defaulting lessees thereby causing loss of income to rental housing investors. Thus, the paper challenges the protracted eviction processes in the real property industry that have prejudiced property owners and scared away potential rental housing investors that are greatly needed to boost the rental market.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive examination and analysis of the current literature on the use of blockchain technology in courts. The paper aims to explore the potential benefits of implementing blockchain technology in courts, such as increasing transparency and accountability, improving the efficiency of court procedures and enhancing the security of court records. Additionally, the paper intends to identify the challenges and limitations of using blockchain technology in courts and propose potential solutions to overcome these obstacles. The ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the potential applications and implications of blockchain technology in the context of the court system.

The research design of this study is qualitative, involving a thorough examination and analysis of existing literature on the use of blockchain technology in courts. The data collection procedure involves gathering information from various sources, such as academic publications, official reports and other relevant records. Data analysis is conducted using a thematic analysis approach, which identifies and categorizes recurring themes that emerge from the data. This approach ensures that the results are credible, dependable and accurate representations of the experiences of the participants. By using these methodologies, the study is able to draw meaningful conclusions and insights into the use of blockchain technology in courts.

The major findings of this paper suggest that the implementation of blockchain technology in courts has the potential to bring significant benefits such as increased transparency, efficiency and security. The use of blockchain technology in courts can enable the creation of tamper-proof records that are immutable, secure and transparent, which can help prevent fraud, reduce costs and enhance trust in the judicial system. However, adopting this technology also poses challenges and limitations, such as interoperability, governance and scalability. Overall, the paper concludes that while there are challenges to be addressed, the benefits of blockchain technology in courts are significant and should be explored further.

The study has several limitations that need to be taken into account. Firstly, the availability of data on blockchain implementation in the court system is limited, making it challenging to provide a comprehensive analysis of the topic. Thus, the study’s findings may not be generalizable to other contexts. Secondly, the study takes a technology-centric approach and does not consider blockchain technology’s social and legal implications in court operations. Thirdly, the case studies presented in this paper are limited to a few countries. Moreover, the implementation of blockchain technology in the court system is still in its early stages and lacks standardization, technical expertise and regulatory frameworks. Lastly, uncertainty around the legal framework may hinder its widespread adoption and use.

The practical implications of this study suggest that the use of blockchain technology in courts has the potential to improve efficiency, security, transparency and accountability in the court system. It can reduce the risk of data tampering, expedite case resolution and lower the cost of legal proceedings. Therefore, this study provides a framework for courts to consider blockchain technology’s potential benefits and explore its future adoption.

The social implications of this study are significant, as the adoption of blockchain technology in the court system can have a profound impact on society. Firstly, by increasing transparency and accountability, blockchain technology can promote public trust in the court system and improve access to justice, particularly for disadvantaged communities (Liu et al., 2020). Secondly, blockchain technology can reduce the reliance on intermediaries, such as lawyers, and streamline the case management process, making legal services more accessible and affordable for the general public (Khurana, 2020). Finally, the use of blockchain technology can create a more secure and efficient court system, enhancing the overall effectiveness of the judicial system and promoting public confidence.

This study provides an original contribution to the literature by exploring the use of blockchain technology in courts from a qualitative research design perspective. While there are a growing number of studies on the potential applications of blockchain technology in various fields, this study provides a comprehensive examination of the current literature on the use of blockchain in courts, identifying the benefits and limitations of its implementation. The study’s focus on the strengths and limitations of blockchain technology and its implications in court adds to the originality of this research.

After the precipitated decline of the Soviet Empire and its satellite states, a system change seemed to be called for, and many countries embarked on social and political reforms focussing on property structures in the economy. This raised the issue of governance in the institutions that would constitute the structures in which production would have to take place. In particular, some Central European countries opted for mass privatisations of the means of production, on the face of it so as to have the people participate in the wealth of the nation. In fact, the wealth of the nation depends on the structures in which it is constituted. Dissipation of property rights will reduce the value of the nation's productive capital, whereas an intelligent structure that creates good governance structures at the same time, increases the value of the producing capital. This relatively simple insight lies at the heart of our understanding of how to analyse different processes of mass privatisation. This essay develops a theoretical framework by which different governance structures can be analysed. The framework consists of a blend of the economic theory of property rights, new institutional economics and Austrian economic theory.

To demonstrate the value of formal process modelling languages for the description of legal constraints and their verification in public and private business processes.

A highly regulated governmental process in Germany – applying for premium rate service numbers at the German Federal Network Agency – is taken as an example to demonstrate that laws and rules define processes for those who want to use them. A novel formal process language is used to verify whether applicants' processes fulfil these constraints or not.

With the presented approach, contradictions between business processes of private organisations and the given laws could precisely be identified.

The results are currently restricted to the use of formal process languages as the one suggested in the paper. It would be helpful to extend the work on conceptual process models.

The paper motivates a process‐oriented analysis of laws and rules. The approach can be used for both, verification after the event and as a normative guideline for the development of new workflows.

This paper identifies a need for formal process definitions as a medium to understand legal constraints and to behave in accordance with them.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of soft law as a technique for repressive and preventive anti-money laundering control (hereinafter AMLC).

This article focuses heavily on understanding the nature of international anti-money laundering (AML) law-making process. The approach towards this question is interdisciplinary and looks at the treaty and non-treaty AML obligations through a prism of two theoretical lenses (legal positivism and liberal/legal process theory) to explain the role of soft law in the area.

Current international effort to combat money laundering (ML) is fragmented (as evident in the enormous variety of law-making processes), despite the role of soft law. Part of the problem is the divergent nature of domestic criminal legislation, which is reflected in the choice of predicate crime and a lack of procedural rule to identify and enforce the law at the state level. To address the limit of current efforts, the paper will propose a uniform codification of AML law directed by a more representative body or commission of experts offering means of restating, clarifying and revising the law authoritatively and systematically.

The research is focused mainly on the theoretical issues relating to the subject of ML and less on any empirical case study.

The paper will focus on the role of soft law as a technique for repressive and preventive AMLC. Based on current analyses of the role of soft law as an alternative to hard law or as a complement to hard law (leading to greater cooperation), it attempts to outline the possible advantages and disadvantages that soft law could have in the context of AMLC. For example, the use of soft law promotes harmonisation of international AML standards through the Financial Action Task Force, while the role of the FATF remains unclear in international law. This is important for the purpose of responsibility, as the law on state responsibility clearly states when a State is responsible, in the event of a breach, and the consequence in international law.

The implication of the paper is that it contributes to the on-going debate about the increasingly role of soft law-making in international law.

The research perspective to the study of ML is theoretical and focuses on the nature of the law.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how public relations (PR) professionals develop co-narratives with legal counsel when formulating crisis communication strategies. Understanding how PR practitioners work with their legal counterparts may help lead to more advanced and effective PR practice in the area of crisis communication and management. The authors attempt to do so in this study through interviews conducted with PR practitioners in two Asian countries – South Korea and Singapore.

In total, 11 semi-structured interviews with PR consultants, 6 in Korea and 5 in Singapore were conducted between May and August 2016. Data analyses revealed key points of interest for PR practice.

First, PR consultants in both countries reported increased collaboration with legal counsel in times of crisis. Second, PR consultants report that legal professionals have begun to realize the significance of winning in the court of public opinion. However, the process by which PR–legal collaboration takes place to develop co-narratives followed extremely different patterns in the two countries.

This exploratory study is not exempt from limitations. The findings from this study may not be applicable to other countries. As data collection in both countries relied on snowball sampling techniques, the participants in the interviews may not be representative of PR consultants in South Korea and Singapore. E-mail interviews had limitations due to their lack of richness and details compared to other forms of interviews (i.e. face-to-face or Skype interviews). However, computer-mediated interviews including e-mail interviews can still create good level of understandings about the phenomenon in question.

This study was an attempt to understand PR–legal collaboration particularly in times of crisis and contribute to the development of Asia-centric models of PR practice. There has been little research that explores how legal and PR counsels actually collaborate to devise optional crisis communication strategies for their clients (or organizations) in the times of crisis. Given that crisis communicative strategies have been shown to affect publics’ perceptions of an organization’s credibility and trustworthiness, it is important to understand how PR work with legal practitioners to develop co-narratives for optimal crisis management, and understand how their different professional perspectives, practices, and approaches affect the collaboration.

This paper aims to build a legal intelligent auxiliary discretionary system for predicting the penalty and damage compensation values. After extensively considering current the characteristics of the current Chinese legal system, a practical legal intelligent auxiliary discretionary system based on genetic algorithm-backpropagation (GA-BP) neural network (NN) is proposed herein.

An experiment is designed to analyze cases involving mental anguish compensation in medical disputes, and a Chinese legal intelligent auxiliary discretionary adviser system is built based on a GA-BP NN. Because BP neural networks perform well for nonlinear problems and GAs can improve their ability to find optimal values, and accelerate their convergence, a combined GA–BP algorithm is used. In addition, an ontology is used to reduce the semantic ambiguities and extract the implied semantic information.

We confirm that a case-based legal intelligent auxiliary discretionary adviser system based on a GA-BP NN and ontology techniques has good performance in prediction. By predicting the mental anguish compensation values, the legal intelligent auxiliary discretionary adviser system can help judges to handle cases more quickly and ordinary people to discover the suggested compensation or penalty. In contrast to BP NN or SVM, the result seems more close to the actual compensation rate.

Recently, smart court has been developed in China; the purpose of which is to build the legal advice system for improving judicial justice and reducing differences in sentencing. A practical legal advice system is an urgent requirement for the judiciary.

This paper presents a study of a case-based legal intelligent auxiliary discretionary adviser system based on a GA-BP NN and ontology techniques. The findings offer advice to optimize legal intelligent auxiliary discretionary adviser systems for mental anguish compensation in medical disputes.

The aim of legal deposit is to ensure the preservation of and access to a nation’s intellectual and cultural heritage over time. There is a global trend towards extending legal deposit to cover digital publications in order to maintain comprehensive national archives. However, including digital publications in legal deposit regulations is not enough to ensure the long‐term preservation of these publications. Indeed, there are many practical difficulties associated with the entire deposit process. Conceptsm, principles and practices that are accepted and understood in the print environment, such as publication, publisher, place of publication and edition, may have new meanings or no longer be appropriate in a networked environment. Mechanisms for identifying, selecting and depositing digital material either do not exist or are inappropriate for some kinds of digital publication. There is a great deal of work on developing digital preservation strategies; this is at an early stage. National and other deposit libraries are at the forefront of research and development in this area, often in partnership with other libraries, publishers and technology vendors. Most of this activity is of a technical nature. There is some work on developing policies and strategies for managing digital resources. However, not all management issues or users’ needs are being addressed.

Following an analysis of English construction lawyers’ perceptions, attitudes and practices relative to mediation, this paper aims to offer an insight into the initial stages of the legal decision-making process, involving an examination of the degree of control construction lawyers’ exercise over the decision-making process itself, as well as an analysis of the factors that determine the decision to use mediation. The empirical work thus far focuses on the different potential barriers to mediation that typically characterize the relationship clients’ and legal advisors, addressing to divergent monetary interests, non-monetary and psychological interests and barriers in the principal–agent relationship.

Based on a quantitative survey of legal advisors in England and Wales (n = 212), the purpose of this paper is to explore mediation, specifically the factors that support its use, barriers that hinder use and the perceptions of the efficacy and level of effectiveness of the process.

The findings indicate that more experienced construction lawyers reported using mediation to a far greater extent than less experienced lawyers, consistent with the proposition that more experienced lawyers develop a cooperative reputation as a function of their professional encounters. The results reveal that the absence of good mediators, influence of the courts, inability to create enforceable precedents, negative experiences and preferences for other forms of dispute resolution do not seem to be significant factors militating against the referral of cases to mediation. It would also seem that self-reported financial interests do not deter construction lawyers from referring cases to mediation. Nevertheless, there may be a need to develop more standardised approaches to setting mediation fee scales to minimise lawyers’ diminished fee income as a consequence of their increased involvement as advocates or counsel in mediated cases.

The recent Jackson Cost Review has provided greater impetus for the use of mediation. A failure to respond to a request to engage in mediation may also be deemed unreasonable by the courts, as, for example, in the case of PGF II SA v. OMFS Company 1 Limited. Nevertheless, while the Civil Procedure Rules are being used by the courts in England and Wales increasingly to “encourage” parties to look to alternative methods to settle differences, little can be gleaned from the literature on the central role of construction lawyers in mediation, and more specifically the extent to which they refrain from referring cases to mediation in a manner inconsistent with their clients’ interests. Much of the construction-based research so far has focused on how mediation is bearing up in practice, its use, appealability and possible improvements.