The promise and peril of paralegal aid

Strengthening the rule of law and promoting access to justice in developing countries have been longstanding international policy objectives. However, the standard policy tools, such as technical assistance and material aid, are routinely criticized for failing to achieve their objectives. The rare exception is paralegal aid, which is almost universally lauded by policymakers and scholars as effective in promoting the rule of law and access to justice. This belief, however, rests on a very limited empirical foundation regarding what paralegal programs accomplish and under what theory they operate. This paper critically examines the conventional wisdom surrounding paralegal initiatives through case studies of two successful paralegal programs in post-conflict Timor-Leste that are broadly representative of the type of initiatives commonly implemented in developing countries. These programs did improve access to justice services, bolster choice between dispute resolution forums, and increase local knowledge of progressive norms on human rights and women’s rights. Yet, as this article shows, even successful programs can expect to achieve only incremental gains in promoting the rule of law because advances largely depend on alignment with the priorities of powerful state and non-state actors, donors, program implementers, and paralegals themselves. To date, the literature has not acknowledged these limitations. This article addresses this gap by demonstrating that paralegal aid faces multiple challenges that mean paralegals cannot necessarily transcend or modify deep seated norms and power structures. These issues include principal agent-problems due to the extensive delegation required, internal limitations resulting from paralegals’ limited authority and independence, and external constraints from state and non-state justice actors. Paralegal programs also face program design, implementation, and sustainability challenges. Consequently, scholars, practitioners, and policymakers need to adopt a more balanced view of paralegal aid

Detection and resolution of normative conflicts in multi-agent systems : a literature survey

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OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Contract Formation through Preemptive Normative Conflict Resolution

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A group learning management method for intelligent tutoring systems

In this paper we propose a group management specification and execution method that seeks a compromise between simple course design and complex adaptive group interaction. This is achieved through an authoring method that proposes predefined scenarios to the author. These scenarios already include complex learning interaction protocols in which student and group models use and update are automatically included. The method adopts ontologies to represent domain and student models, and object Petri nets to specify the group interaction protocols. During execution, the method is supported by a multi-agent architecture

Constraint rule-based programming of norms for electronic institutions

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Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications