Pleadable brieves and jurisdiction in heritage in later medieval Scotland.

Despite the scarcity of source material and the difficulty of interpreting such evidence as exists, it is clear that the development of royal justice led to the emergence of a unified common law in medieval Scotland. This was achieved although no structure of central courts like that of England emerged until the fifteenth century. Instead royal justice was administered by courts based in the localities such as those of the sheriff and the burghs, or by courts such as those of the justiciar which went on circuit through the kingdom. Within this structure there operated from the thirteenth century a rule that actions concerning the recovery of land from intruders had to be raised by pleadable brieves. There were various types of such writs; the relevant ones were the brieves of dissasine and mortancestor, pleadable in the justiciar's court, and the brieve of right, pleadable in the sheriff and burgh courts. It appears that round these brieves there developed a considerable body of law, and at least some of them remained in use until the sixteenth century. It is against this background that the exclusion of the developing 'central' courts of the fifteenth century from cases concerning fee and heritage, or landownership, must be considered. These courts developed as a method of handling the judicial functions of parliament and the king's council. To begin with these functions were confined to the supervision and correction of the ordinary courts of the common law, but by the mid-fifteenth century the jurisdiction of council in particular as an alternative forum was established in most areas other than that of fee and heritage. This limitation, it is argued, continued because the common.law still required that pleadable brieves (which were not addressed to either parliament or council) be used to commence actions of that kind. Only when the pleadable brieves had fallen into desuetude in the first half of the sixteenth century did the council come to have jurisdiction in fee and heritage

Data Mining to Uncover Heterogeneous Water Use Behaviors From Smart Meter Data

Knowledge on the determinants and patterns of water demand for different consumers supports the design of customized demand management strategies. Smart meters coupled with big data analytics tools create a unique opportunity to support such strategies. Yet, at present, the information content of smart meter data is not fully mined and usually needs to be complemented with water fixture inventory and survey data to achieve detailed customer segmentation based on end use water usage. In this paper, we developed a data‐driven approach that extracts information on heterogeneous water end use routines, main end use components, and temporal characteristics, only via data mining existing smart meter readings at the scale of individual households. We tested our approach on data from 327 households in Australia, each monitored with smart meters logging water use readings every 5 s. As part of the approach, we first disaggregated the household‐level water use time series into different end uses via Autoflow. We then adapted a customer segmentation based on eigenbehavior analysis to discriminate among heterogeneous water end use routines and identify clusters of consumers presenting similar routines. Results revealed three main water end use profile clusters, each characterized by a primary end use: shower, clothes washing, and irrigation. Time‐of‐use and intensity‐of‐use differences exist within each class, as well as different characteristics of regularity and periodicity over time. Our customer segmentation analysis approach provides utilities with a concise snapshot of recurrent water use routines from smart meter data and can be used to support customized demand management strategies.TU Berlin, Open-Access-Mittel - 201

An Abstract Interpretation for ML Equality Kinds

The definition of Standard ML provides a form of generic equality which is inferred for certain types, called equality types, on which it is possible to define an equality relation in ML. However, the standard definition is incomplete in the sense that there are interesting and useful types which are not inferred to be equality types but for which an equality relation can be defined in ML in a uniform manner. In this paper, a refinement of the Standard ML system of equality types is introduced and is proven sound and complete with respect to the existence of a definable equality. The technique used here is based on an abstract interpretation of ML operators as monotone functions over a three point lattice. It is shown how the equality relation can be defined (as an ML program) from the definition of a type with our equality property. Finally, a sound, efficient algorithm for inferring the equality property which corrects the limitations of the standard definition in all cases of practical interest is demonstrated

Delict, Contract, and the Bill of Rights: A Perspective from the United Kingdom

Work carried out at the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology LawThe article offers a comparative approach to the impact of South Africa's Bill of Rights on the law of delict and contract in the United Kingdom

Reform of archival legislation: a Scots perspective 2006

A comparative approach of archival legislation between Scotland and Ireland

Searching for Privacy in a Mixed Jurisdiction

The article examines the individual’s right to privacy, with particular reference to its protection against actors other than the State. The English model is provided by the Common Law on breach of confidence; the Civilian one by the development of the actio iniuriarum in line with its development in other mixed jurisdictions such as South Africa and, less prominently, Louisiana. Of critical importance is the stimulus to legal development provided by human rights jurisprudence, lately made directly relevant to Scots law by the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA)