A Legal Excursion into the Consequences and Effects of the Doctrine of Ultra Vires in Nigerian Corporate Governance

There is a statutory limit to the contractual and transactional powers and capacity of a company. This is enveloped in the ultra vires doctrine conundrum that sets out the limits and scope of the powers of an incorporated company and delimits the remainder of acts executed by the company in excess of such delineated powers as beyond the limits of the powers of the company. There are a number of effects of this corporate power-delimiting rule and consequential opinionated controversies. This paper seeks to take a legal cursory look and an appraising excursion into the effects and consequences of the doctrine in Nigerian corporate law practice and examines the purports of the sustained relevance of the doctrine as an integral power-specificity construct of Nigerian companies and their Directors. It concludes that the effect of the doctrine seems to be considerably whittled down by statutory intervention and calls for a comprehensive reform of the attendant enabling legislations

Recursive internetwork architecture, investigating RINA as an alternative to TCP/IP (IRATI)

Driven by the requirements of the emerging applications and networks, the Internet has become an architectural patchwork of growing complexity which strains to cope with the changes. Moore’s law prevented us from recognising that the problem does not hide in the high demands of today’s applications but lies in the flaws of the Internet’s original design. The Internet needs to move beyond TCP/IP to prosper in the long term, TCP/IP has outlived its usefulness. The Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) is a new Internetwork architecture whose fundamental principle is that networking is only interprocess communication (IPC). RINA reconstructs the overall structure of the Internet, forming a model that comprises a single repeating layer, the DIF (Distributed IPC Facility), which is the minimal set of components required to allow distributed IPC between application processes. RINA supports inherently and without the need of extra mechanisms mobility, multi-homing and Quality of Service, provides a secure and configurable environment, motivates for a more competitive marketplace and allows for a seamless adoption. RINA is the best choice for the next generation networks due to its sound theory, simplicity and the features it enables. IRATI’s goal is to achieve further exploration of this new architecture. IRATI will advance the state of the art of RINA towards an architecture reference model and specifcations that are closer to enable implementations deployable in production scenarios. The design and implemention of a RINA prototype on top of Ethernet will permit the experimentation and evaluation of RINA in comparison to TCP/IP. IRATI will use the OFELIA testbed to carry on its experimental activities. Both projects will benefit from the collaboration. IRATI will gain access to a large-scale testbed with a controlled network while OFELIA will get a unique use-case to validate the facility: experimentation of a non-IP based Internet

Maritime Delimitation in the Black Sea (Romania v. Ukraine)

The complex relationship between psychic structures, social norms, and aesthetic representations is a challenge for every analysis of the historical manifestations of human desire. This book provides an understanding of this relation by an assessment of the linguistic and artistic configurations of desire in European literature over the year

The Geographical Scope of the EU's Climate Change Responsibilities

It is increasingly common for the EU to include extraterritorial GHG emissions within controversial and on more than one occasion the EU has been forced to back down. With this in mind, this paper asks how far the EU’s climate change responsibilities ought to extend geographically. In answering this question, the paper draws a distinction between first-order and second-order climate responsibilities, acknowledges the importance of the internationally agreed ‘system boundary’ guidelines adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and seeks to learn lessons from the consequentialist approach that was favoured by the EU in giving broad geographical scope to its decision to include extraterritorial aviation emissions within the scope of its emissions trading scheme

The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: motivations, challenges, and applications

Abstract In response to growing demand for ecosystem-level risk assessment in biodiversity conservation, and rapid proliferation of locally tailored protocols, the IUCN recently endorsed new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment. Four qualities were sought in the design of the IUCN criteria: generality; precision; realism; and simplicity. Drawing from extensive global consultation, we explore trade-offs among these qualities when dealing with key challenges, including ecosystem classification, measuring ecosystem dynamics, degradation and collapse, and setting decision thresholds to delimit ordinal categories of threat. Experience from countries with national lists of threatened ecosystems demonstrates well-balanced trade-offs in current and potential applications of Red Lists of Ecosystems in legislation, policy, environmental management and education. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems should be judged by whether it achieves conservation ends and improves natural resource management, whether its limitations are outweighed by its benefits, and whether it performs better than alternative methods. Future development of the Red List of Ecosystems will benefit from the history of the Red List of Threatened Species which was trialed and adjusted iteratively over 50 years from rudimentary beginnings. We anticipate the Red List of Ecosystems will promote policy focus on conservation outcomes in situ across whole landscapes and seascapes