The practice of collusion is illegal. Most capitalist countries have laws safeguarding competition. In the USA, anti-trust legislation prohibits monopolization, restraints of trade, and collusion among firms. The base of this legislation was laid 120 years ago with the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act (both 1914). The fundamental idea...

Mass murders in Dunblane, United Kingdom, and Port Arthur, Australia, provoked rapid responses from the governments of both countries. Major changes to Australian laws resulted in a controversial buy-back of longarms and tighter legislation. The Australian situation enables evaluation of the effect of a national buy-back, accompanied by tightened legislation in a country with relatively secure ...

Stand Your Ground Laws and Homicides The controversies surrounding Stand Your Ground laws have recently captured the nation’s attention. Since 2005, eighteen states have passed laws extending the right to self-defense with no duty to retreat to any place a person has a legal right to be, and several additional states are debating the adoption of similar legislation. Despite the implications tha...

The concept of privacy has rarely featured explicitly in Australian law and legal discourse. The modest prominence it currently enjoys is due mainly to the enactment and gradual extension in coverage of data protection legislation, most notably in the form of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). This is not to say that the interest in privacy remains unprotected by other elements of the law in Australia...

BACKGROUND Many areas of pharmaceutical legislation in the European Union (EU) are harmonised in order to promote the internal market and protect public health. Ideally, harmonisation leads to less fragmented regulation and cross-border complexities. This study, however, focuses on an increasingly harmonised legislative area that is subject to increases in requirements and complexities: the dis...

New legislative documents are published everyday in the Internet, comprising changes in the legislation: laws, decisions, resolutions, etc. Lexisla intends to offer access to this information through a single search application which crawls, analyses and segments the daily published legislative documents.

n the summer of 1998, the Wisconsin State legislature amended its child protection laws.' Under new child abuse provisions, Wisconsin judges can confine pregnant women who abuse alcohol or drugs for the duration of their pregnancies. South Dakota enacted similar legislation almost simultaneously. The South Dakota statute requires mandatory drug and alcohol treatment for pregnant women who abuse...

Legislators, designers of legal information systems, as well as citizens face often problems due to the interdependence of the laws and the growing number of references needed to interpret them. Quantifying this complexity is not an easy task. In this paper, we introduce the ”Legislation Network” as a novel approach to address related problems. We have collected an extensive data set of a more ...

Between 1997 and 2003, the share of workers subject to mental health parity laws greatly increased. But because of exemptions for self-insured firms and small firms, coverage is much lower than a simple tally of state mandates would suggest. Limits on the types of conditions covered further weaken these laws. This paper summarizes the extent and scope of state parity legislation in terms of the...

Substantial research has focused on stigmatized groups who are widely protected from discrimination under national legislation. In the current article, however, we focus our attention on those stigmatized groups who are relatively early in their quest for civil rights. In particular, we consider gay and lesbian individuals, and heavy individuals, for whom existing research is considerable enoug...