Part VII Criticism and Law Reform Proposals, 23 Criticism and Reform Proposals

Author(s):  
Beale Hugh ◽  
Bridge Michael ◽  
Gullifer Louise ◽  
Lomnicka Eva

This chapter discusses how aspects of law governing security over personal property, and especially the registration requirements for company charges and for bills of sale and the rules of priority, have been criticized for many years. There has been a series of reports recommending reform; some of these have recommended amendments to the Companies Act and the rules of priority of charges registered under the Act. Meanwhile, others have proposed more radical reforms that would replace both the Companies Act and the Bills of Sale Acts with a ‘notice filing’ scheme based on Article 9 of the United States Uniform Commercial Code and subsequently adopted, with slight variations, in many Canadian provinces and New Zealand.

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-575
Author(s):  
Roderick J Wood

Abstract The enactment of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code in the USA has had a profound influence on the reform of secured transactions law in other countries. The operational principles that animate Article 9 were first transplanted into Canada and later into New Zealand. In the last two decades, at least 25 countries have passed personal property security legislation (PPSA) based on these principles. On one level, one could claim that Article 9 has been transplanted into each of these 25 countries. However, on another level this story is far too simplistic. If one examines the various statutes, it becomes clear that a more complex process has been at work in which there has been innovation as well as borrowing. These innovations, in turn, influence the borrowings of other countries that enact a PPSA. In this highly dynamic environment the source of borrowing can be difficult to identify. This article examines the nature and extent of the borrowings that occur in connection with the reform of secured transactions in countries that have enacted a PPSA. It will identify three major templates that are available—namely, the most recent version of Article 9, the Canadian/New Zealand model, and the UNCITRAL Model Law. These templates will be reviewed in order to find markers that are present only in that template and not in the other two. These markers will be used to ‘fingerprint’ the PPSA legislation in other countries in order to measure the extent to which the jurisdiction has borrowed from each of the three templates. The article will conclude with a number of observations about the path of secured transactions law reform on an international level.


2011 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard McCormack

AbstractThis article provides a critical evaluation of the main provisions of the UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Secured Transactions. It examines the Guide in the context of other international and national secured transactions instruments including article 9 of the United States Uniform Commercial Code. The clear objective of the Guide is to facilitate secured financing. It is very facilitating and enabling, and permits the creation of security in all sorts of situations. Security is seen as a good thing, through enhancing the availability of lower-cost credit. The paper suggests that this closeness in approach to article 9 is likely to militate against the prospects of the Guide gaining widespread international acceptance. This is the case for various interlocking reasons including the battering that American legal and financial norms have taken with the global financial crisis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 287-305
Author(s):  
John Hartshorne

In the United States, New Zealand and the Canadian province of Ontario, recognition has been afforded to privacy torts remedying intrusions upon seclusion or solitude, and the creation of such a tort has also been recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission. In England and Wales, recognition has so far only been afforded to a privacy tort remedying misuse of private information. This article considers the current prospects for the recognition of an intrusion upon seclusion tort within English law. It will be suggested that there is less necessity for such recognition following the apparent recent confirmation by the decisions in Gulati v MGN and Vidal-Hall v Google that misuse of private information claims may still be brought where there is no ensuing publication of wrongly acquired private information. Given that intrusions commonly result in the acquisition of private information, it will be suggested that many of the privacy interests protected by the intrusion torts in other jurisdictions may now therefore be protected in English law through a claim for misuse of private information.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amaia Del Campo ◽  
Marisalva Fávero

Abstract. During the last decades, several studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of sexual abuse prevention programs implemented in different countries. In this article, we present a review of 70 studies (1981–2017) evaluating prevention programs, conducted mostly in the United States and Canada, although with a considerable presence also in other countries, such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The results of these studies, in general, are very promising and encourage us to continue this type of intervention, almost unanimously confirming its effectiveness. Prevention programs encourage children and adolescents to report the abuse experienced and they may help to reduce the trauma of sexual abuse if there are victims among the participants. We also found that some evaluations have not considered the possible negative effects of this type of programs in the event that they are applied inappropriately. Finally, we present some methodological considerations as critical analysis to this type of evaluations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Newton-Howes ◽  
M. K. Savage ◽  
R. Arnold ◽  
T. Hasegawa ◽  
V. Staggs ◽  
...  

Abstract Aims The use of mechanical restraint is a challenging area for psychiatry. Although mechanical restraint remains accepted as standard practice in some regions, there are ethical, legal and medical reasons to minimise or abolish its use. These concerns have intensified following the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Despite national policies to reduce use, the reporting of mechanical restraint has been poor, hampering a reasonable understanding of the epidemiology of restraint. This paper aims to develop a consistent measure of mechanical restraint and compare the measure within and across countries in the Pacific Rim. Methods We used the publicly available data from four Pacific Rim countries (Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the United States) to compare and contrast the reported rates of mechanical restraint. Summary measures were computed so as to enable international comparisons. Variation within each jurisdiction was also analysed. Results International rates of mechanical restraint in 2017 varied from 0.03 (New Zealand) to 98.9 (Japan) restraint events per million population per day, a variation greater than 3000-fold. Restraint in Australia (0.17 events per million) and the United States (0.37 events per million) fell between these two extremes. Variation as measured by restraint events per 1000 bed-days was less extreme but still substantial. Within all four countries there was also significant variation in restraint across districts. Variation across time did not show a steady reduction in restraint in any country during the period for which data were available (starting from 2003 at the earliest). Conclusions Policies to reduce or abolish mechanical restraint do not appear to be effecting change. It is improbable that the variation in restraint within the four examined Pacific Rim countries is accountable for by psychopathology. Greater efforts at reporting, monitoring and carrying out interventions to achieve the stated aim of reducing restraint are urgently needed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 1283-1297
Author(s):  
Mike Thelwall ◽  
Pardeep Sud

Ongoing problems attracting women into many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects have many potential explanations. This article investigates whether the possible undercitation of women associates with lower proportions of, or increases in, women in a subject. It uses six million articles published in 1996–2012 across up to 331 fields in six mainly English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The proportion of female first- and last-authored articles in each year was calculated and 4,968 regressions were run to detect first-author gender advantages in field normalized article citations. The proportion of female first authors in each field correlated highly between countries and the female first-author citation advantages derived from the regressions correlated moderately to strongly between countries, so both are relatively field specific. There was a weak tendency in the United States and New Zealand for female citation advantages to be stronger in fields with fewer women, after excluding small fields, but there was no other association evidence. There was no evidence of female citation advantages or disadvantages to be a cause or effect of changes in the proportions of women in a field for any country. Inappropriate uses of career-level citations are a likelier source of gender inequities.


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