The Co-existence of Legal Systems in Quebec: « Free and Common Socage » in Canada's « pays de droit civil »

Bien que le système français de tenure seigneuriale au Québec ait mérité une attention toute particulière des historiens, l'histoire de la tenure anglaise de « franc et commun socage », introduite en 1774 et qui règne même aujourd'hui dans la zone dite des Cantons de l'Est, n'est pas moins singulière. Est-ce que dans l'Acte de Québec, après avoir établi à l'article 8 l'ancien droit français, on a voulu introduire tout le système anglais du droit des biens lorsqu'on a mentionné, à son article 9, que la concession des terres pourrait se faire selon la tenure anglaise ? Ou au contraire a-t-on voulu tout simplement exclure lapplication des incidents de la tenure française en faisant appel à l'équivalent anglais d'une tenure libre ? L'Acte constitutionnel de 1971 n'a pas résolu cette question, confiant cependant à la législature locale le soin d'adapter la tenure anglaise dans sa « nature » et dans ses « conséquences » aux conditions locales. Les autorités britanniques ont, semble-t-il, opté pour la première interprétation, puisqu'en 1825 une loi impériale édictait que le droit anglais des biens s’appliqueraient dans les cantons. La réaction locale, sous la forme de législation, en 1829, révèle l'équivoque ressentie par la population locale: après avoir validé pour le passé les transactions accomplies selon les formes françaises, la loi de 1829 établit pro futuro la validité des transactions immobilières selon les règles anglaises ou les formes françaises. Ce mélange de règles de fond et de forme anglaises et françaises — une véritable coexistence de systèmes juridiques sur un même territoire — semble avoir semé la confusion chez les justiciables et les hommes de loi durant les 25 années suivantes. Même dans le cas où la loi anglaise de 1825 a établi le droit anglais pour l'avenir, a-t-elle voulu déclarer aussi que le droit anglais existait dans le territoire québécois depuis 1774 ? Voilà une thèse qui pourrait se défendre d'après le sens grammatical de cette loi ainsi que celle de 1829. On semblait indécis au Québec sur cette question avant les décisions célèbres des années 1850 dans les arrêts Stuart v. Bowman et Wilcox v. Ce dernier a décidé enfin que le droit anglais des biens n'a pas pu être introduit dans les cantons avant 1825 et que toute interprétation contraire frise l'absurdité. Le jugement du juge en chef Lafontaine, aussi acceptable qu'il soit sur le plan politique, ne semble pas toutefois s'accorder avec le sens littéral des lois en question. Mais enfin que pouvait-on faire ? Une loi de 1857 de l'Assemblée législative a finalement opté pour l'application de lois canadiennes dans tout le territoire québécois et cette solution, après l'abolition de la tenure française en 1854, semble avoir été acceptée par ces mêmes milieux qui, dans les années précédentes, ont été agités par la question. L'uniformité de notre droit commun ayant été établie sur le sol québécois, la perspective d'une codification à la française s'ouvrait et devint réalité, comme on le sait, quelques années plus tard

Exploring complex vowels as phrase break correlates in a corpus of English speech with ProPOSEL, a prosody and POS English lexicon

Real-world knowledge of syntax is seen as integral to the machine learning task of phrase break prediction but there is a deficiency of a priori knowledge of prosody in both rule-based and data-driven classifiers. Speech recognition has established that pauses affect vowel duration in preceding words. Based on the observation that complex vowels occur at rhythmic junctures in poetry, we run significance tests on a sample of transcribed, contemporary British English speech and find a statistically significant correlation between complex vowels and phrase breaks. The experiment depends on automatic text annotation via ProPOSEL, a prosody and part-of-speech English lexicon. Copyright © 2009 ISCA

Developments in Legal Education at McGill, 1970-1980

In order to trace the developments in legal education at McGill during the last decade, it is first of all necessary to recall the principal initiatives which occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. These were, in chronological order, the creation of the Institute of Air & Space Law in 1951 and the offering of higher degrees in that speciality; the creation of the Institute of Comparative Law in 1965 to give particular focus to graduate work at McGill in fields other than air and space law; and the institution, in 1968, of a programme of undergraduate study leading to the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.), alongside the traditional Bachelor of Civil Law (B.C.L.). Both degrees were, at that time, set within the framework of a National Programme of legal education, that is to say an integrated curriculum in civil law and common law studies at the undergradate level

Perceptions of Psychological Coercion and Human Trafficking in the West Midlands of England: Beginning to Know the Unknown

Modern slavery is less overt than historical state-sanctioned slavery because psychological abuse is typically used to recruit and then control victims. The recent UK Draft Modern Slavery Bill, and current UK government anti-slavery strategy relies heavily on a shared understanding and public cooperation to tackle this crime. Yet, UK research investigating public understanding of modern slavery is elusive. We report community survey data from 682 residents of the Midlands of England, where modern slavery is known to occur, concerning their understanding of nonphysical coercion and human trafficking (one particular form of modern slavery). Analysis of quantitative data and themed categorization of qualitative data revealed a mismatch between theoretical frameworks and understanding of psychological coercion, and misconceptions concerning the nature of human trafficking. Many respondents did not understand psychological coercion, believed that human trafficking did not affect them, and confused trafficking with immigration. The public are one of the most influential interest groups, but only if well informed and motivated towards positive action. Our findings suggest the need for strategically targeted public knowledge exchange concerning this crime

Tools for Arabic Natural Language Processing: a case study in qalqalah prosody

In this paper, we focus on the prosodic effect of qalqalah or "vibration" applied to a subset of Arabic consonants under certain constraints during correct Qur'anic recitation or taǧwīd, using our Boundary-Annotated Qur’an dataset of 77430 words (Brierley et al 2012; Sawalha et al 2014). These qalqalah events are rule-governed and are signified orthographically in the Arabic script. Hence they can be given abstract definition in the form of regular expressions and thus located and collected automatically. High frequency qalqalah content words are also found to be statistically significant discriminators or keywords when comparing Meccan and Medinan chapters in the Qur'an using a state-of-the-art Visual Analytics toolkit: Semantic Pathways. Thus we hypothesise that qalqalah prosody is one way of highlighting salient items in the text. Finally, we implement Arabic transcription technology (Brierley et al under review; Sawalha et al forthcoming) to create a qalqalah pronunciation guide where each word is transcribed phonetically in IPA and mapped to its chapter-verse ID. This is funded research under the EPSRC "Working Together" theme

An empirical study of Arabic formulaic sequence extraction methods

This paper aims to implement what is referred to as the collocation of the Arabic keywords approach for extracting formulaic sequences (FSs) in the form of high frequency but semantically regular formulas that are not restricted to any syntactic construction or semantic domain. The study applies several distributional semantic models in order to automatically extract relevant FSs related to Arabic keywords. The data sets used in this experiment are rendered from a new developed corpus-based Arabic wordlist consisting of 5,189 lexical items which represent a variety of modern standard Arabic (MSA) genres and regions, the new wordlist being based on an overlapping frequency based on a comprehensive comparison of four large Arabic corpora with a total size of over 8 billion running words. Empirical n-best precision evaluation methods are used to determine the best association measures (AMs) for extracting high frequency and meaningful FSs. The gold standard reference FSs list was developed in previous studies and manually evaluated against well-established quantitative and qualitative criteria. The results demonstrate that the MI.log_f AM achieved the highest results in extracting significant FSs from the large MSA corpus, while the T-score association measure achieved the worst results

Automatically generated, phonemic Arabic-IPA pronunciation tiers for the boundary annotated Qur'an dataset for machine learning (version 2.0)

In this paper, we augment the Boundary Annotated Qur?an dataset published at LREC 2012 (Brierley et al 2012; Sawalha et al 2012a) with automatically generated phonemic transcriptions of Arabic words. We have developed and evaluated a comprehensive grapheme-phoneme mapping from Standard Arabic \ensuremath> IPA (Brierley et al under review), and implemented the mapping in Arabic transcription technology which achieves 100% accuracy as measured against two gold standards: one for Qur?anic or Classical Arabic, and one for Modern Standard Arabic (Sawalha et al [1]). Our mapping algorithm has also been used to generate a pronunciation guide for a subset of Qur?anic words with heightened prosody (Brierley et al 2014). This is funded research under the EPSRC " Working Together" theme

Limited professional guidance and literature are available to guide the safe use of neuromuscular block in infants

Aim Neuromuscular blocking agents (NMBAs) are used in a range of critical illnesses in neonates and infants, despite a lack of guidelines and professional standards. This study reviewed the current evidence base and ascertained UK practice regarding the continuous use of these agents in this age range. Methods We reviewed the literature and carried out a telephone questionnaire of all tertiary units in England and specialist children's hospital neonatal units in the UK. Results No best practice guidelines or general consensus statements were found, and the only randomised trial to feature an NMBA protocol expressed concerns about its use in such young babies. Of the 56 units contacted, 54 (96.4%) shared information. Only three of the 56 (5.4%) used intermittent boluses of NMBAs, 91.1% used NMBA infusions, 11 (19.6%) routinely used regular neuromuscular blocker pause to assess depth, and only one (1.8%) used peripheral nerve stimulation monitoring. All the units carried out clinical assessments, but only one (1.8%) had a written protocol. Conclusion There is a paucity of literature and professional standards to guide the safe use of NMBAs in infants. Of the 54 units who participated in the survey, only one had a protocol for using NMBAs in babies