The dynamics of drinking and driving can be adequately described using the fraction of accidents involving drivers who had been drinking. Evaluating drunk driving legislation using this measure implicitly controls for unobservable “general risk” influences on traffic safety, reducing bias and variability in estimates of laws’ effects, especially in the early studies that influence lawmakers mos...

This Article will detail how the UK has responded to the greater risks posed by illegal online content by successively extending the reach of the substantive criminal laws and by taking preventative measures. It will focus on the example of laws on obscene content on the internet and associated online behaviour and in particular on the 'grooming' offences, the law on extreme pornography and vir...

Since their adoption in 1892, the insanity laws in the Criminal Code of Canada have utilized a modified M'Naughton rule. The Department of Justice began work in the 1970s to update these laws. In 1983, soon after the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was proclaimed, the case of Regina v. Swain provided the impetus for this change. In 1990 the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the old la...

Cyberbullying, in its different forms, is common among children and adolescents and is facilitated by the increased use of technology. The consequences of cyberbullying could be severe, especially on mental health, potentially leading to suicide in extreme cases. Although parents, schools and online social networking sites are encouraged to provide a safe online environment, little is known abo...

Legislation and regulations are expressed in natural language. Machine-readable forms of the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translation to a logic. The paper considers the latter form, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a machine-readable logic, sentences ...

The term eugenics was first coined by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in 1883. The eugenic movement gained public popularity across Europe and North America at the end of the Victorian era, fuelled by the concept of 'social Darwinism' and public fear of a decline in the number of ideal citizens. The origins of eugenic legislation can be found in the USA's immigration acts of the early 1880's. ...

This paper re-examines the effectiveness of Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) and Administrative License Revocation (ALR) laws in reducing traffic fatalities. Using difference-in-differences estimators of U.S. state-level data with standard errors corrected for autocorrelation, we find no evidence that lowering BAC limits to 0.08 grams/decaliter has reduced fatality rates, either in total or in alcoh...

Japanese life expectancy increased by about 13.7 years during the first decade after World War II, despite the country's post-war poverty. Although it is known that medical progress explains part of this increase, roles of non-medical factors have not been systematically studied. This study hypothesizes that non-medical factors, in addition to medical factors, are associated with the rapid incr...

Over recent years there has been a great deal of discussion concerning the appropriate role of the state in the regulation of private lives. Nowhere is this discussion more obvious than in the area of homosexual law reform. At times, in both Queensland and Tasmania, an acrimonious public debate has occurred as a result of attempts to reform the laws relating to homosexual behaviour. Queensland ...

The objective of this review study is to promote the dissemination of the legislation in force in Argentina for the protection of the rights of persons with conditions that might cause disability. Articles of bills and laws that protect the rights of these families are reviewed, so that health care providers assisting them have better access to them. Argentina has a wide range of laws and regul...