9 research outputs found
The Concept of Trials in Absentia in International Criminal Law and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon: An Overview
Trials in absentia have always been quite a contentious source of controversies in international criminal law, especially given the nature of crimes that result into these trials and given the question regarding what can be an acceptable standard of legal due process that ought to be adhered to in course of such trials. Throughout this paper, the author has sought to present an overview of the concept as it is prevalent in the current domestic and international legal scenarios. An effort has also been made to portray the range and acceptability of the arguments that are advanced by the proponents and detractors of the notion of accepting this category of trials as a matter of course to combat international and domestic crimes. The varying approaches of common law and civil law jurisdictions vis-à -vis this subject-matter has also been examined, together with the practices prevalent in renowned international tribunals such as International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [hereinafter referred to as “ICTY”], the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda [hereinafter referred to as “ICTR”] and the International Criminal Court [hereinafter referred to as “ICC”]. Finally, the author has looked into the manner in which the question of the validity of such trials has once again come to the forefront owing to its acceptance by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon
Corporate Social Responsibility in India: The Saga Continues
In course of this paper, the authors have sought to trace the various contours of the manner in which the concept of corporate social responsibility has evolved in India, culminating into its inclusion into the governing legislations for companies. The apparent shift of the CSR regime from being a voluntary one to a mandatory one involving sanctions for non-compliance via the latest legislative amendments has also been commented upon. After having discussed the key legislative provisions that govern CSR spending by companies by India, the paper goes on to highlight some of the legislative amendments relating to CSR and the potential impact thereof, including relaxations provided to start-up companies, the mandatory transfer of unspent CSR funds to escrow funds and eventually to public funds centrally controlled by the government, the additional compliance monitoring authority granted to the government, and the penal provisions for non-compliance. The paper finally refers to the draft Companies (Amendment) Bill, 2020 and its possible effect on the CSR regime in India that is looking more and more like corporate taxation with these new amendments
Semantic Segmentation of Legal Documents via Rhetorical Roles
Legal documents are unstructured, use legal jargon, and have considerable
length, making them difficult to process automatically via conventional text
processing techniques. A legal document processing system would benefit
substantially if the documents could be segmented into coherent information
units. This paper proposes a new corpus of legal documents annotated (with the
help of legal experts) with a set of 13 semantically coherent units labels
(referred to as Rhetorical Roles), e.g., facts, arguments, statute, issue,
precedent, ruling, and ratio. We perform a thorough analysis of the corpus and
the annotations. For automatically segmenting the legal documents, we
experiment with the task of rhetorical role prediction: given a document,
predict the text segments corresponding to various roles. Using the created
corpus, we experiment extensively with various deep learning-based baseline
models for the task. Further, we develop a multitask learning (MTL) based deep
model with document rhetorical role label shift as an auxiliary task for
segmenting a legal document. The proposed model shows superior performance over
the existing models. We also experiment with model performance in the case of
domain transfer and model distillation techniques to see the model performance
in limited data conditions.Comment: 19 pages, Accepted at Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop,
EMNLP 202
LeDA: a system for legal data annotation
This paper presents LeDA, a system for Legal Data Annotation. The system offers the functionality of annotating and categorising text spans representing legal concepts that capture the topic of a document, and also supports a meta-annotator to adjudicate the ground truth created by different annotators. Notably, our system supports a dynamic update of the ontology by enabling the creation of new legal concepts. Currently employed to annotate key legal concepts, LeDA aims to construct concept-based semantic representations for tasks such as similar case retrieval, and judgment prediction
SemEval 2023 Task 6: LegalEval -- Understanding Legal Texts
In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially.
There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and
automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of
Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at
SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles
Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically
coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying
relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction
with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the
outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction.
In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted
systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the
baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper
describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.Comment: 13 Pages (9 Pages + References), Accepted at SemEval 202
Evolution of corporate governance in India and its impact on the growth of the financial market: An empirical analysis (1995-2014)
Purpose
The past few decades have seen a gradual convergence in corporate governance norms the world over, entailing a discernible shift towards shareholder primacy models. It holds particularly true of developing countries, many of which have steadily amended corporate governance norms to enhance the scope of shareholder rights. This is usually justified through the rationale that increasing protection for foreign investors and shareholders would mean greater investment in capital market and overall financial market development. In India, the shift coincides with a series of fundamental economic and financial policy reforms initiated in the 1990s: collectively and loosely referred to as “liberalisation”, this process marks a paradigm-shift from a tightly controlled welfare economy to one considerably more laissez-faire in its orientation. A fallout of which was that the need to attract and sustain foreign investments acquired an unprecedented significance. The purpose of this paper is to help the readers understand in this larger context the corporate law reform initiatives in India, particularly those pertaining to shareholder rights and allied issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that enhanced shareholder protection leads to greater levels of investments, and financial developments generally. It then uses regression analysis to detect if the change in corporate governance, making it more shareholder-friendly, has had any effect on growth in financial market. It is divided into two broad parts. The first tracks the evolution of corporate governance norms in India. A robust qualitative and quantitative analysis is used to determine the tilt towards a shareholder primacy regime that Indian corporate governance regime now displays. The second chapter deals with the regression analysis where the outcome variable is financial market growth, and explanatory variable is the change in the governance regime with relevant control variables.
Findings
The authors find that change in shareholder primacy corporate governance has little effect on financial market growth in India. The authors would suggest that instead of changing the law in books, more emphasis should be given to implement those regulations and increase the overall rule of law.
Originality/value
This is the first time that such a wide-scale study has been conducted in India, using Bayesian methods. It ought to be of immense value to professionals and academics both