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Legal Instruments (legal + instruments)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Law and Criminology60%

Selected Abstracts

Conservation of Brazilian Amphibians

CONSERVATION BIOLOGY, Issue 3 2005
DÉBORA L. SILVANO
The Brazilian Official List of Threatened Species and the results of a workshop for the Global Amphibian Assessment indicate that 26 species are threatened. The majority of these occur in the Atlantic Forest, one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. The main threat to amphibians is the destruction of their habitats through deforestation, conversion into agricultural land, mining, wildfires, and infrastructure development and urbanization. In Brazil little is known about other causes of amphibian decline observed worldwide, such as pesticides, infectious diseases, climate change, invasive species, or wildlife trade. Brazilian conservation policies include such important legal instruments as the Official List of Threatened Species and the selection of priority areas for conservation measures in all of Brazil's major biomes. Although there is little information on geographic distributions and the natural history and ecology of the large majority of the currently recognized species, a number of important regional studies for amphibian conservation are under way. New species are discovered each year. Resumen:,Brasil es el líder mundial en diversidad de anfibios, con 765 especies, la mayoría de las cuales han sido descritas en los últimos 40 años. La Lista Brasileña Oficial de Especies Amenazadas y los resultados de un taller para la Evaluación Global de Anfibios indican que 26 especies están amenazadas, la mayoría de ellas ocurre en el Bosque Atlántico, uno de los sitios de importancia para la biodiversidad global. La principal amenaza a los anfibios es la destrucción de sus hábitats por la deforestación, conversión a tierras agrícolas, minería, fuego no controlado, desarrollo de infraestructura y urbanización. En Brasil se conoce poco sobre otras causas de la declinación de anfibios observadas en todo el mundo, como pesticidas, enfermedades infecciosas, cambio climático, especies invasoras o comercio de vida silvestre. Las políticas Brasileñas de conservación incluyen importantes instrumentos legales como la Lista Oficial de Especies Amenazadas y la selección de áreas prioritarias para la conservación en todos lo biomas principales de Brasil. Existe escasa información sobre la distribución geográfica y la historia natural y ecología de la gran mayoría de las especies reconocidas actualmente, aunque se está desarrollando un importante número de estudios regionales para la conservación de anfibios. Cada año se descubren nuevas especies. [source]

Towards a Hierarchy of Legal Acts in the European Union?

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 6 2005
Procedures, Simplification of Legal Instruments
There is however a clear suggestion of such hierarchy in the sequence in which the newly created legal instruments are listed in Article I-33(1) and in the organisation of the subsequent Articles I-34 to I-37 of the European Constitution. In this contribution, the (lost) logic behind the Union's current set of legal instruments is analysed, followed by an examination of the reform of the system of legal instruments carried out in the European Constitution. Lastly, an attempt is made to answer the question as to whether this reform amounts to the establishment of a genuine hierarchy of legal acts in the Union. [source]

The Lambert Code: Can We Define Best Practice?

HIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2004
Michael Shattock
The article explores the proposals put forward in the Lambert Report for reforms in university governance. It compares the recommendation for a Code with the analogue Combined Code which regulates corporate governance in companies and draws a distinction between attempts, from the Cadbury Report in 1992 to the Higgs Review in 2003, to create board structures which will reduce the prospect of misgovernance, and the underlying aim of Lambert to improve university performance through governance change. It argues that analogies between university governing bodies and company boards are misleading and that university governing bodies, on their own, are almost by definition unable to fulfill the criteria of an ,effective board' laid down in the DTI Report on TransTec. It suggests that a Guide on Governance which encourages institutional self determination is a better basis for sustaining institutional autonomy, which is a key ingredient to encouraging high levels of performance, than a Government backed Code which risks reducing institutional diversity and cutting across existing legal instruments. It concludes that the proposed Code is a distraction from serious consideration of what factors encourage improved institutional performance. [source]

The Scope of Criminal Law and Criminal Sanctions: An Economic View and Policy Implications

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2008
Roger Bowles
This paper considers why some harm-generating activities are controlled by criminal law and criminal sanctions while others are subject to some other mechanism such as civil law, administrative law, regulation or the tax system. It looks at the question from the perspective of the law and economics approach. We seek to identify the comparative benefits of using the criminal law relative to other enforcement mechanisms and , more broadly , why certain specific behaviours are criminalized. The paper argues that an economic approach emphasizing the relative merits of alternative legal instruments for bringing about harm reduction can provide an explanation for a number of recent legal developments. It argues also that the willingness of legislators to combine the use of sanctions traditionally used in one area of the law with sanctions from other areas is more readily explicable in economic terms than in other terms. [source]