Introduction The material in this section provides a foundational overview of the Canadian Legal system. It is structured into four topic areas which are discussed in varying detail below: [I] Foundations of the Canadian Legal System: The Constitution; [II] Legitimacy of the Canadian Legal System and Constitution; [III] Sources of Law; [IV] The Common Law System in Operation. A number of readin...

This paper discusses the use of computational linguistic technology to extract definitions from a large corpus of German court decisions. We present a corpus-based survey of definition structures used in this kind of text. We then evaluate the results of a definition extraction system that uses patterns identified in this survey to extract from dependency parsed text. We show how an automatical...

This paper analyses changes in the legal protection of shareholder and creditor rights in 24 transition economies from 1990 to 1998. It documents differences in the initial conditions and a tendency towards convergence of formal legal rules as the result of extensive legal reforms. Convergence seems to be primarily the result of foreign technical assistance programmes as well as of harmonisatio...

Germany is one of few countries in which the monetary compensation for inventors is not only determined by negotiations between employer and employee inventor, but also by relatively precise legal provisions.. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of the German Employees’ Invention Act (GEIA) and discuss which incentives or disincentives it creates. We rely on qualitative evidence from ...

Germany is one of few countries in which the monetary compensation for inventors is not only determined by negotiations between employer and employee-inventor, but also by relatively precise legal provisions. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of the German Employees’ Inventions Act (GEIA) and discuss which incentives it creates. We rely on responses from a recent survey of 3,350 Ge...

Arti cial intelligence has contributed fundamentally to our understanding of reasoning and communication processes, and especially their limits. These insights have deep implications for issues in jurisprudence which depend on a model of `correct' reasoning and argumentation, such as theories of the separation of powers and judicial discretion. Some of these implications are explored in this pa...

Legally binding elections require retention of specified election data such as balloting material. This applies to paper-based as well as electronic elections. However, in Germany legal requirements on retention in e-voting have not been issued so far. Based on the German legal framework for governmental as well as non-governmental paper-based elections, we give recommendations on long-term ret...

in iran, department of forensic psychiatry is one of the special units of legal medicine organization concerned with individuals who demonstrate psychological and psychiatric problems. the duties of forensic psychiatrists in the department are, performing psychiatric examinations and determining mental competence of two major groups of referrals: individuals who are involved in a legal problem ...