An Opportunity Lost: The United Kingdom\u27s Failed Reform of Defamation Law

The Defamation Act 1996 is the first major piece of libel legislation in Britain since the Defamation Act 1952. The British Parliament passed the Act in response to the ease with which libel plaintiffs can establish liability and in response to huge damage awards. In passing the Act, Parliament attempted to shift the balance of defamation law away from protecting the reputational interest of plaintiffs and toward protecting free discussion and open criticism. However, the Act merely fine-tunes current law. The Act reduces the limitations period for defamation suits, introduces procedural reforms to simplify and reduce libel suits and permits Members of Parliament to waive their Parliamentary privilege if necessary to bring their own defamation claims. Yet the Act fails to adequately reform English law to provide greater freedom of speech protection. For example, unlike other jurisdictions, English law does not recognize some form of public figure defense. By failing to substantively reduce the ease of defamation suits, Parliament lost the opportunity to provide greater protection of speech

Vilhelm Lundstedt’s ‘Legal Machinery’ and the Demise of Juristic Practice

This article aims to contribute to the academic debate on the general crisis faced by law schools and the legal professions by discussing why juristic practice is a matter of experience rather than knowledge. Through a critical contextualisation of Vilhelm Lundstedt’s thought under processes of globalisation and transnationalism, it is argued that the demise of the jurist’s function is related to law’s scientification as brought about by the metaphysical construction of reality. The suggested roadmap will in turn reveal that the current voiding of juristic practice and its teaching is part of the crisis regarding what makes us human

Taking a little off the top : nanorod array morphology and growth studied by focused ion beam tomography

The high surface area, large aspect ratio, and porous nature of nanorod arrays make them excellent foundation materials for many devices. Of the many synthesis techniques for forming nanorods, glancing angle deposition (GLAD) offers one of the more straightforward and flexible methods for ensuring control of alignment, porosity, and architecture of the nanorods. Here we demonstrate the first use of a dual-beam (focused ion beam (FIB) combined with scanning electron microscopy (SEM)) instrument to section and image the internal morphology of a nanorod array fabricated using the GLAD technique. We have used the FIB-SEM to reconstruct the 3D composition of TiO 2 nanorods, allowing us to visualize for the first time the core structures of many potential devices. We have also been able to probe the relationship between critical parameters such as diameter (w\u304 act), internanorod spacing (v\u304 act), center-to-center spacing (c\u304 act), and nanorod population density (d act) and the depth of the nanocolumn (t) for a single homogeneous structure. A continuous data set was obtained from a single 5-\u3bcm-thick GLAD film, avoiding the artifacts arising from the analysis of the top surfaces of multiple samples of varying thicknesses. An analysis of the acquired sectioned data has allowed us to determine that the critical nanocolumn parameters follow a power-law scaling trend with w\u304 act=9.4t 0.35 nm, v\u304 act = 15.2t 0.25 nm, c\u304 act=24.8t 0.31 nm, and d act=3402t -0.65 columns \u3bcm -2. Using the FIB/SEM images acquired for the TiO 2 nanorods, we have also investigated the evolution of individual nanocolumns and have observed that bifurcation and branching play a significant role in the extinction or survival of these nanorods. These findings will allow for the optimization of nanorod properties for device applications. Also, the FIB sectioning and reconstruction process developed here will permit for the investigation of nanorod arrays formed from a range of synthesis techniques and materials.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye