Palm tree justice? The role of comparative law in the South Pacific

Emerging from a colonial past, Pacific island states have legal systems which are patchy and often incoherent. This article examines the role of judges in the field of family law and how, through creative use of comparative legal thinking, they contribute to the development of the law in countries where the state is slow to reform outdated and often inadequate legislation

A bundle of sticks in my garden

The English law of property is often described as a ‘bundle of sticks’ in which each ‘stick’ represents a particular right. Gardens challenge these rights and wreak havoc on the ‘bundle of sticks’. This paper looks at the twenty-first century manifestations of community engagement with ground and explores how ‘gardening’ is undermining concepts of ownership, possession and management of land and how the fence between what is private and what is public is being encroached and challenged by community and individual initiatives to cultivate. The garden in this paper is therefore a place of questioning and redefining traditional legal concepts, but it also reflects contemporary concerns which go beyond the confines of the garden and the boundaries of the law. At the same time however, the garden represents a continuum between past struggles and ideals and future hopes, and so the cultivators of today are located in a continuing evolution of law, land and people. By considering the various ways in which people are engaging with land outside of the usual private land/person context and their motives for doing so, this paper places present gardening in its historic context and analyses the challenges that various forms of gardening pose for established legal principles. In particular this paper asks if present gardening demands a re-examination of property law and a re-evaluation of what is understood as ‘property’ if the ‘bundle of sticks’ is unpacked

'That plant is my ancestor'. The significance of intellectual property on food security in developing countries

The global significance of intellectual property laws is familiar to most of those interested in this area of law. What might be less familiar is the impact of intellectual property on the issue of food security in developing countries. This paper considers the consequences of factors such as TRIPS plus compliance imposed on recent entrants to the World Trade Organisation, the role of UPOV and impact of protecting plant breeders' rights on food security in developing countries. In particular the paper focusses on examples drawn from the Pacific where island countries are not only considering WTO membership or have recently signed up to this and incurred consequent IP obligations, but where food security is increasingly under pressure due to climate change, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity shifts in agricultural practice and knowledge transfer, changing socio-economic patterns and the consequences of the global economic crisis. This is also a region where Western models of IP, although prevalent as introduced and imposed concepts, fit uneasily with forms and practices of indigenous traditional knowledge and practice which may be better suited to ensuring sustainability of food crops than the present thrust of IP laws

Scots law: a system in search of a family?

Presented as a paper at the Irish Association of Comparative Law, this article looks at the classification of legal systems into families and examines where, among the many different models, Scots law fits in

Perceptual Grouping and Distance Estimates in Typical and Atypical Development: Comparing Performance across Perception, Drawing and Construction Tasks

Perceptual grouping is a pre-attentive process which serves to group local elements into global wholes, based on shared properties. One effect of perceptual grouping is to distort the ability to estimate the distance between two elements. In this study, biases in distance estimates, caused by four types of perceptual grouping, were measured across three tasks, a perception, a drawing and a construction task in both typical development (TD; Experiment 1) and in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, perceptual grouping distorted distance estimates across all three tasks. Interestingly, the effect of grouping by luminance was in the opposite direction to the effects of the remaining grouping types. We relate this to differences in the ability to inhibit perceptual grouping effects on distance estimates. Additive distorting influences were also observed in the drawing and the construction task, which are explained in terms of the points of reference employed in each task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the above distortion effects are also observed in WS. Given the known deficit in the ability to use perceptual grouping in WS, this suggests a dissociation between the pre-attentive influence of and the attentive deployment of perceptual grouping in WS. The typical distortion in relation to drawing and construction points towards the presence of some typical location coding strategies in WS. The performance of the WS group differed from the TD participants on two counts. First, the pattern of overall distance estimates (averaged across interior and exterior distances) across the four perceptual grouping types, differed between groups. Second, the distorting influence of perceptual grouping was strongest for grouping by shape similarity in WS, which contrasts to a strength in grouping by proximity observed in the TD participants

Drawing the line: drawing and construction strategies for simple and complex figures in Williams Syndrome and typical development

In the typical population, a series of drawing strategies have been outlined, which progressively emerge during childhood. Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder, produce drawings that lack cohesion, yet drawing strategies in this group have hitherto not been investigated. In this study, WS and typically developing (TD) groups drew and constructed (from pre-drawn lines and shapes) a series of intersecting and embedded figures. Participants with WS made use of the same strategies as the TD group for simple intersecting figures, though were less likely to use a typical strategy for more complex figures that contained many spatial relations. When replicating embedded shapes, the WS group used typical drawing strategies less frequently than the TD group, despite attempting to initiate a strategy that is observed in TD children. Results suggested that individuals with WS show a particular difficulty with replicating figures that include multiple spatial relations. The impact of figure complexity and task demands on performance are discussed

Item and error analysis on Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices in Williams Syndrome

Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) is a standardised test that is commonly used to obtain a non-verbal reasoning score for children. As the RCPM involves the matching of a target to a pattern it is also considered to be a visuo-spatial perception task. RCPM is therefore frequently used in studies in Williams Syndrome (WS), in order to match WS participants to a control group or as a single measure to predict performance on a test-condition in developmental trajectory analyses. However, little is known about the performance of participants with WS on the RCPM. The current study compared the type of errors and the difficulty of each item for 53 participants with WS to 53 typically developing children who were individually matched on the total raw score for RCPM. Results showed that the participants with WS made the same proportion of error types and that the proportion of error types changed similarly to those of typically developing controls over development. Furthermore, the differential item difficulty between the two groups was highly similar. It is therefore argued that, although participants with WS are delayed on RCPM, their performance is not atypical which suggests that RCPM performance is supported by typical mechanisms. The RCPM is therefore a useful tool to match WS to control groups or to construct developmental trajectories