Global Law and the Environment

This Article explores three areas in which globalization is profoundly affecting the development of a global environmental law. First, countries increasingly are borrowing law and regulatory innovations from one another to respond to common environmental problems. Although this is not an entirely new phenomenon, it is occurring at an unprecedented pace. Second, lawsuits seeking to hold companies liable for environmental harm they have caused outside their home countries are raising new questions concerning the appropriate venue for such transnational liability litigation and the standards courts should apply for enforcement of foreign judgments. Third, nongovernmental organizations are playing an increasingly important role in influencing corporate behavior by promoting greater informational disclosure and transparency to mobilize informed consumers

Remedies for Foreign Citizens Subjected to Outsourced Pollution: A Case Study of American Big Oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon

The term “globalization” generally carries a positive connotation, invoking images of progress and international unity. “Technology” similarly enjoys a reputation of enabling human advancement and improving sustenance, shelter, education, and overall quality of life. Both promote the development of the other and their success has become intertwined. Development of the oil industry is one newsworthy example of the coming together of technology and globalization as nations rush to discover, extract, and refine oil wherever possible and sell the fuel to their own citizens or export it to other nations. Oil is also an example of dangers generally not associated with technology and globalization. The hazards of oil spills and waste for human and environmental health are highly publicized and difficult to doubt. As the oil industry has become globalized, so have the dangers to which it leads. The focus of this paper is one such danger: the disproportionate impact the exploitation of land for oil production by U.S. companies has had on the indigenous people of Ecuador

An Exploration Of Historical Methods For Information Systems Research

This paper reports on the use of historical methods in a recent information systems doctoral research project. The paper concentrates on the use of the methodology rather than the findings themselves. The use of historical methods is rare in information systems and this paper outlines the valuable insights it can bring for researchers. Historical methods involve the collection of both primary and secondary sources of data, which are then analysed to establish relationships between cause and effect. The aim of the research project was to study the changing nature of hard information technology based networks and soft people based networks in two regions of New Zealand over a twenty year period. Historical methods enable the researcher to examine the way in which such factors develop over time. The most well known work on historical methods in information systems was carried out by Mason, McKenney & Copeland. Their seven step approach to using historical methods is explained and applied to the research problem. This research builds on their work by introducing three new aspects: firstly historical methods are applied in a regional context; secondly a conceptual framework is used for analysis, and thirdly data collection is carried out using regional newspapers

Limiting Liability Through Bankruptcy

The purpose of this Article is to expose that function of bankruptcy law that distinguished it from English and Colonial insolvency law, and to determine the scope of and need for bankruptcy law to perform that function in contemporary society. I posit that the distinguishing character of bankruptcy law was, and continues to be, its ability to serve as a temporal asset partitioning device. By asset partition, I mean the ability of a structure to sequester the assets of an owner of an enterprise from the reach of the creditors of that enterprise, or the assets of the enterprise from the reach of the creditors of the firm\u27s owners.1 In short, bankruptcy law is a limited liability device. It achieves this quality through the operation of the discharge it affords to debtors falling within its protective hedge. Bankruptcy law\u27s ability to act as a limited liability device is what rendered it very useful, if not indispensable, to commercial existence before the 19th century. It is also this quality that makes bankruptcy law essential in certain contemporary circumstances, but superfluous, and perhaps pernicious, in others