Events

Further to providing a picture of the international recovery of child support before the 2007 Hague Child Support Convention and presenting an overview of the 2007 Hague Child Support Convention, Mr. Lortie will highlight the practical challenges in this area of the law such as the increasing number of divorces and the resulting number of child support cases, the budget crises experienced by many States and the role of States in providing welfare, social security payments in lieu of the child support that should normally be provided by the parents. Against this background, Mr. Lortie will present opportunities for domestic law reforms in relation to the recovery of child support with respect to matters such as: effective access to procedures (e.g., administrative versus court-based systems); the location of the debtor; the establishment of parentage; the determination of the amount of maintenance to be paid; the swift recognition, enforceability and effective enforcement of decisions; information technology; and, questions of applicable law.

De plus de pays ouvrent le mariage aux personnes de même sexe. Face l’ampleur des problèmes posés et aux oppositions radicales qui séparent désormais les Etats européens, praticiens et chercheurs ont été amenés à repenser une partie des mécanismes du droit international privé et à imaginer des solutions nouvelles, inspirées notamment de la théorie de la reconnaissance. Même si la Cour EDH des droits de l’homme (arrêt Schalk et Kopf c. Autriche) et la CJUE font preuve d’une grande prudence, pourrait s’affirmer peu à peu un véritable principe de libre circulation des mariages homosexuels (et au delà des situations familiales) valablement créés à l’étranger, dans le prolongement des arrêts Wagner c. Luxembourg et Négrépontis-Giannisise c. Grèce de la Cour EDH et de des arrêts Garcia Avello et Sayn-Wittgenstein de la CJUE.

Mediation plays an ever more important role in the resolution of disputes around the world. While attention to mediation continues to grow both within and outside of the Asia-Pacific region, scholarship and research on the impact of mediation on legal systems and legal cultures remains sparse. Before a meaningful comparison of the role that mediation plays in different legal systems can be advanced, some fundamental questions need to be answered. Although Asian cultures traditionally favour harmony and reconciliation over litigation and adjudication, this broad generalization requires careful analysis of regional diversity and its underlying reasons, as will be demonstrated by the study presented in this lecture. Differences in understanding are likely to be at their greatest when parties from different jurisdictions interact through the mediation process. Even where parties are from jurisdictions with similar laws, cultural differences may lead to significantly different views of what constitutes appropriate or effective mediation practice. This lecture presents a comparative study of the mediation practice in some selected jurisdictions, including Australia, Austria, Canada, China (Mainland), Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong SAR, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea,...

Laws of nation states and laws of logic: The law of every existing legal system is local to time, place, and country. That proposition is central to Legal Positivist legal theories that are so familiar to jurists (professors and students) at this august institution who are so robustly aware of Hans Kelsen's seminal jurisprudence. That proposition is also acknowledged by any plausible "natural law" theory of law. Logic has been well and powerfully characterized, in the work of great philosophical logicians as diverse and influential as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Gottlob Frege, as the discipline that articulates universal "laws of thought," local to neither time nor place nor country nor person. In this presentation I shall describe a method of analysis, the Logocratic Method, that provides an explanation of both law and logic that captures the locality of law and the universality of logic. I shall explain how the Logocratic Method enables, enhances, and empowers critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of legal arguments, which are at the heart of all local legal analysis. In providing this explanation, I...

Gunnar HEINSOHN, Professor emeritus of the University Bremen, is a historian, sociologist and economist, who elaborated — together with Otto STEIGER — a specic theory of modern economics, namely the theory of ownership-based economics. This theory deals with a symptomatic lacune of mainstream economics — this being the absence of any theoretical explanation of money and interest in mainstream economics — and focuses on legal institutions such as rights in rem (ownership) and contracts (credit agreements) to explain the origins of money and modern business cycles. The key elements of mainstream economics, such as the pretense of universalism and the assumption of a homo oeconomicus and his self-interest driven rationality, are amongst those building blocks of contemporary economics which are in the focus of HEINSOHN‘s (and STEIGER‘s) critique. At the ocassion of his visit to Vienna, Professor HEINSOHN will present an introduction to his theory of ownershipbased economics. The tools developed by way of this introduction will be used to engage in a description and analysis of the current systemic crisis of the globalized economy.

The system of property rights in the current Russian legal framework as well as in the proposed Draft Amendments to the Civil Code (which will be adopted in 2014) are analyzed from a comparative law perspective. The lecture will focus on both the conceptual framework of property rights in the Russian legal system as well as on practical issues in regard to judicial protection, acquisition and limitation of ownership and other real rights. In addition, the social and economic implications of the concept of property will be discussed. In a systematic analysis, property rights according to the Continental European tradition are contrasted with concepts and notions of Common Law. In this context, the problems of eventual legal transplantation are thoroughly assessed. The examination of the immanent reforms of the Russian Civil Code reveals principles of the European legal tradition, stimulates critical thinking and contributes considerably to the development of professional skills.

Central-local relationship is an important constitutional issue which every nation, whether big or small, needs to deal with. It is usually prescribed for by the constitution of the nation. The formation of the central-local relationship in a specic nation often has its historical reasons. In nations adopting a federal system, such as the United States of America, Australia and India, local governments, especially state or provincial governments, are the basis for the establishment of federal government, which is the central government. In nations adopting a unitary system, such as the United Kingdom (“the UK”) and China, the purpose to set up local governments is to administer the state aairs more eciently. In many nations, either federal or unitary, all local governments have the same kind of relationship with the central government. That means all local governments have exactly the same degree of autonomy and jurisdiction. In some other nations, however, due to their dierent historical development, dierent local governments may have dierent kinds of relationship with the central government. China is a unitary nation adopting the people’s congress system as...

This lecture by a distinguished practicing attorney and professor of law addresses the issues that arise in the United States when the constitutional right of a free press collides with a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights to a fair trial, to a fair and impartial jury, and to due process of law. In the American criminal justice system, an accused criminal defendant is innocent until proven guilty at trial. To this end, he enjoys a panoply of unalienable constitutional rights that the courts jealously guard at each stage of the proceedings. Equally, every American school child knows that freedom of the press -- the constitutional freedom to publish without let or hindrance -- is protected by the courts to the utmost possible extent. These rights may collide in any number of ways. When they do, it falls to the judiciary to balance the press’s constitutional right to publish -- which is correlative to the public’s right to know -- with the constitutional protections given to everyone accused of a crime, no matter how heinous. One of the most difficult factual scenarios...

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction ("Abduction Convention") 1980 came into force in December 1983. A central objective of the conventions concluded under the auspices of the Hague Conference on Private International Law is to harmonize the law governing topics involving international elements. The more widely ratified the Convention, the greater the extent to which this objective appears to be realized. In this respect, the Abduction Convention can perhaps be seen as the most successful of all the Hague Conventions, with 92 Member States (as of April 2014). However, true harmonization also requires uniformity in interpretation and implementation of the Convention . This lecture will discuss some of the disparities in the way in which the Abduction Convention has been applied in different Members States over the last thirty years; consider possible reasons for those disparities and make suggestions as to how to promote greater uniformity. The lecture will concentrate on the differing interpretations given to key concepts in the Convention by courts in different jurisdictions and different approaches to the applicability of the exceptions...