Regulation of Fresh Water Uses

2021 ◽  
pp. 8-68
Author(s):  
Laurence Boisson de Chazournes

Chapter 2 traces the evolution of fresh water regulation. It identifies the various uses of fresh water that have been subject to legal rules, including boundary delimitation along international watercourses, navigation, fishing, irrigation, energy production, other industrial uses, and recreational purposes. Areas where conflicts of uses arise are also highlighted, and the way in which these are sometimes resolved by the law is explained, with an emphasis on the importance of human needs and the notion of minimum flow. The major treaties that purport to govern international watercourses, such as the UN Watercourses Convention of 1997, which entered into force in 2014, as well as other sources of fresh water and their accompanying legal regimes, are similarly presented.

Author(s):  
McCaffrey Stephen C

This book is an authoritative guide to the rules of international law governing the navigational and non-navigational uses of international rivers, lakes, and groundwater. The continued growth of the world’s population places increasing demands on Earth’s finite supplies of fresh water. Because two or more States share many of the world’s most important drainage basins, competition for increasingly scarce fresh water resources will only increase. Agreements between the States sharing international watercourses are negotiated, and disputes over shared water are resolved, against the backdrop of the rules of international law governing the use of this precious resource. The basic legal rules governing the use of shared freshwater for purposes other than navigation are reflected in the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. This book devotes a chapter to the 1997 Convention but also examines the factual and legal context in which the Convention should be understood, considers the more important rules of the Convention in some depth, and discusses specific issues that could not be addressed in a framework instrument of that kind. It reviews the major cases and controversies concerning international watercourses as a background against which to consider the basic substantive and procedural rights and obligations of States in the field. This new edition covers the implications of the 1997 Convention coming into force in August 2014, and the compatibility of the 1997 and 1992 Conventions.


Author(s):  
Brian H. Bix

A persistent question in modern legal philosophy is whether or how (human-created) legal rules and legal systems can produce moral obligations for citizens. Contemporary theorists have sought answers to this problem in the ideas of conventions, coordination problems, and plans. Some theorists argue that the law—that all legal rules—create general and at-least-presumptive moral obligations; others argue that the law, at best, occasionally triggers pre-existing moral obligations—some legal rules creating moral obligations for some people. This chapter explores the issue of how and when law creates moral obligations, and also considers a more recent approach to the nature of law which has raised doubts regarding whether the law is in fact artifactual in the way most theorists (and most citizens) believe.


2021 ◽  
pp. 187-228
Author(s):  
Laurence Boisson de Chazournes

Human needs have permeated the law applicable to fresh water through a variety of avenues. This development has added new contours to existing rules and principles. It has also led to the emergence of new rules and principles that concern individuals and non-state actors in the protection and management of fresh water. Over and above a mere cognizance of human needs, there has in recent years been a recognition of a human right to water and sanitation. Moreover, public participation and access to remedies have become particularly important in light of increasing economic activity that may affect, for example, access to clean water. Further still, the regulation of fresh water and protection of water-related infrastructure in armed conflict has broadened and deepened in recent years.


Author(s):  
Wachara Fungwacharakorn ◽  
Ken Satoh

Since the legal rules cannot be perfect, we have proposed a work called Legal Debugging for handling counterintuitive consequences caused by imperfection of the law. Legal debugging consists of two steps. Firstly, legal debugging interacts with a judge as an oracle that gives the intended interpretation of the law and collaboratively figures out a legal rule called a culprit, which determines as a root cause of counterintuitive consequences. Secondly, the legal debugging determines possible resolutions for a culprit . The way we have proposed to resolve a culprit is to use extra facts that have not been considered in the legal rules to describe the exceptional situation of the case. Nevertheless, the result of the resolution is usually considered as too specific and no generalizations of the resolution are provided. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a rule generalization step into Legal Debugging. Specifically, we have reorganized Legal Debugging into four steps, namely a culprit detection, an exception invention, a fact-based induction, and a rule-based induction. During these four steps, a new introduced rule is specific at first then becomes more generalized. This new step allows a user to use existing legal concepts from the background knowledge for revising and generalizing legal rules.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-253
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Stefanowicz

This article undertakes to show the way that has led to the statutory decriminalization of euthanasia-related murder and assisted suicide in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It presents the evolution of the views held by Dutch society on the euthanasia related practice, in the consequence of which death on demand has become legal after less than thirty years. Due attention is paid to the role of organs of public authority in these changes, with a particular emphasis put on the role of the Dutch Parliament – the States General. Because of scarcity of space and limited length of the article, the change in the attitudes toward euthanasia, which has taken place in the Netherlands, is presented in a synthetic way – from the first discussions on admissibility of a euthanasia-related murder carried out in the 1970s, through the practice of killing patients at their request, which was against the law at that time, but with years began more and more acceptable, up to the statutory decriminalization of euthanasia by the Dutch Parliament, made with the support of the majority of society.


TAJDID ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Husni Husni

This article studies the concept of Ihsan (good deed) in the thought of ulama mufassirs (Muslim scholars interpretering the Qur’an). The result of the study being carried out by the writer is that the concept of ihsan being too narrowly interpreted, proves that it has wide interpretation in the thought of muffasirs. If so far among society the concept of ihsan has been narrowly interpreted on the good deed or doing good deed, so according to mufassirs, the concept means: (1) carrying out all obligations, (2) being patient to receive all the obligation and anything forbidden by God, (3) being obedient and always perfects his obedience in quality as well as in the way, (4) forgiving, (5) being sincere, (6) realizing the existence of God, (7) emphasizing the esoteric aspect rather than exoteric world, (8) knowledge, (9) being firm in the truthfulness, (10) havng understanding about the true teachings of God, (11) having good comprehension about the law appropriately applied among the Islamic society. The wide meaning of this concept because this concept is really expressed by the Koran in context. This article tries to attach the concept of Ihsan in several meanings about the education world


Author(s):  
Eva Steiner

This chapter examines the French law of tort. Although French law takes a broad approach to civil liability, when looking more closely at the way in which French judges have dealt with claims in tort, it becomes apparent that the need to avoid extending the scope of civil liability to an unlimited extent has also been present in French law. Indeed, in order to achieve desirable results, French judges have on many occasions used their discretion to interpret restrictively the elastic concepts of fault, damage, and causation. Hence, they end up dismissing claims which, for policy reasons, would have created unjust results or would have opened the gates to a flood of new claims. Thus, even though French judges do not admit to it openly in their judgments, they are influenced as regards the matter of deciding the limits of liability by general policy considerations, especially the ‘floodgates arguments’ which their English counterparts also readily understand.


Global Jurist ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossella Esther Cerchia

Abstract In today’s society, a dense network of laws and regulations presides the actions of all people. And it is so extensive that any number of activities – including the formation of contracts – is capable of breaking the law. This is why it is even more important, nowadays, to reconsider the issue of contracts that violate legal rules. The trend in favor of flexible remedies reveals that the rigidity of the more traditional solutions might not be the best choice in this day and age.


Author(s):  
Simon Deakin ◽  
David Gindis ◽  
Geoffrey M. Hodgson

Abstract In his recent book on Property, Power and Politics, Jean-Philippe Robé makes a strong case for the need to understand the legal foundations of modern capitalism. He also insists that it is important to distinguish between firms and corporations. We agree. But Robé criticizes our definition of firms in terms of legally recognized capacities on the grounds that it does not take the distinction seriously enough. He argues that firms are not legally recognized as such, as the law only knows corporations. This argument, which is capable of different interpretations, leads to the bizarre result that corporations are not firms. Using etymological and other evidence, we show that firms are treated as legally constituted business entities in both common parlance and legal discourse. The way the law defines firms and corporations, while the product of a discourse which is in many ways distinct from everyday language, has such profound implications for the way firms operate in practice that no institutional theory of the firm worthy of the name can afford to ignore it.


Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Zeliang Zhang ◽  
Kang Xiaohan ◽  
Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid ◽  
Hiroyuki Iida

The notion of comfort with respect to rides, such as roller coasters, is typically addressed from the perspective of a physical ride, where the convenience of transportation is redefined to minimize risk and maximize thrill. As a popular form of entertainment, roller coasters sit at the nexus of rides and games, providing a suitable environment to measure both mental and physical experiences of rider comfort. In this paper, the way risk and comfort affect such experiences is investigated, and the connection between play comfort and ride comfort is explored. A roller coaster ride simulation is adopted as the target environment for this research, which combines the feeling of being thrill and comfort simultaneously. At the same time, this paper also expands research on roller coaster rides while bridging the rides and games via the analogy of the law of physics, a concept currently known as motion in mind. This study’s contribution involves a roller coaster ride model, which provides an extended understanding of the relationship between physical performance and the mental experience relative to the concept of motion in mind while establishing critical criteria for a comfortable experience of both the ride and play.


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