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Dwijen Rangnekar writes lead in The Hindu

'The lesson from the Supreme Court ruling on Gleevec is that pharmaceutical multinational corporations need to focus research on genuine innovations rather than on ways to evergreen their patents' This is a landmark judgement – followed by a range of actors; feeding into WTO/TRIPS issues and access to medicine globally.

For an earlier guest post from Dwijen see link below.

Lynas, the Law and the People: What’s Temporary and Permanent about “Licence”?

(Friday, 4 January 2013)

Abstract

The ongoing saga of the Lynas Rare Earth processing plant in Gebeng may be read in many different ways. It may be viewed as a conflict between the developmental priorities of the Malaysian government keen to enhance its export earning through Foreign Direct Investment arrangements and the environmental and health concerns of local and national sectors of the population weary of such ventures into hazardous industries. Or, it might be understood as a conflict between the commercial motivations of profit and economic opportunities of a multinational company (through its local subsidiary) and the values of environmental protection. Differently, we may read the conflict as one pertaining to issues of transparency and accountability, of technical best-practice and stringent enforcement of environmental regulations, of government policy-making and public participation. Variously, these many issues may be seen to underlie the still on-going legal challenge surrounding the grant of the Temporary Operation Licence to Lynas Malaysia Sdn. Bhd.

This presentation does not seek to repeat the legal arguments along the lines of conflict mentioned above. The focus of the talk will instead be twofold: first, to interrogate the ‘identity’ and meaning of the three social ‘institutions’ involved - Lynas, the law (and by implication the state), and the ‘people’ – as they emerge, find expression, and are discursively constructed in the conflict. Secondly, to explore the wider implications of the notion of ‘license’ that go beyond its limited scope in terms of the TOL dispute. What is revealed from this different reading of the story of Lynas, The Law, and The People, are more pressing questions regarding the nature of the geography and distribution of rights, responsibilities, privileges and risks associated with differentiated 'citizenship' in a globalised political economy, and on the varying consequences of the 'temporary' and the 'permanent', of located and dislocated temporality, that follow from the affirmations of 'licence', on the one hand, and the imposition of containments/bans, on the other. From this understanding of the present contexts of variegated 'citizenship', some preliminary (and perhaps provocative) thoughts might be put forward on the politics of encounter between the 'corporation' and the 'people' within globalised states.

Scholarships

糖心TV law School has a range of scholarships available for its LLM scholarships in Advanced Legal Studies; International Development Law and Human rights; International Economic Law and International Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation

For further information contact S.E.Prestleton@warwick.ac.uk or visit

Scholarship Closing Date: 31st March 2013

For more information see link below

and

Professor Gary Watt delivered the inaugural Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture at the  

Endowed by her friends and colleagues, the annual Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture pays tribute to Madam Justice Southin's many contributions to the development of the common law in British Columbia. It is to address either the Law of Equity or British Columbia legal history, and it alternates between the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria Law Faculties.

Professor Watt’s lecture was entitled:

Kimberley Brownlee

Kimberley was awarded a £37,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize. These prizes are designed to recognise and facilitate the work of outstanding young research scholars, who are making original and significant contributions to knowledge in their field with an international impact, and whose greatest achievements are expected to be still to come.

Kimberley Brownlee's research during her fellowship will focus on social human rights, and in particular the idea of a human right against social deprivation. The term ‘social deprivation’ refers to a persisting lack of minimally adequate opportunities for decent human contact and social inclusion. Social deprivation is a common experience in arenas of institutional segregation such as long-term medical quarantine and solitary confinement. It is also the most extreme variant of a more general, pervasive phenomenon of social isolation that includes people, many of whom are elderly or disabled, who are chronically, acutely lonely and unable to remedy their situation. This kind of deprivation is an important concern, particularly in western societies, given the individualistic bent of western culture, aging populations, and the ongoing use of isolating procedures in medicine, immigration, and criminal justice.

The book shows that civil disobedience is generally more defensible than private conscientious objection.

Part I explores the morality of conviction and conscience. Each of these concepts informs a distinct argument for civil disobedience. The conviction argument begins with the communicative principle of conscientiousness (CPC). According to the CPC, having a conscientious moral conviction means not just acting consistently with our beliefs and judging ourselves and others by a common moral standard. It also means not seeking to evade the consequences of our beliefs and being willing to communicate them to others. The conviction argument shows that, as a constrained, communicative practice, civil disobedience has a better claim than private objection does to the protections that liberal societies give to conscientious dissent. This view reverses the standard liberal picture which sees private 'conscientious' objection as a modest act of personal belief and civil disobedience as a strategic, undemocratic act whose costs are only sometimes worth bearing.

The conscience argument is narrower and shows that genuinely morally responsive civil disobedience honours the best of our moral responsibilities and is protected by a duty-based moral right of conscience.

Part II translates the conviction argument and conscience argument into two legal defences. The first is a demands-of-conviction defence. The second is a necessity defence. Both of these defences apply more readily to civil disobedience than to private disobedience. Part II also examines lawful punishment, showing that, even when punishment is justifiable, civil disobedients have a moral right not to be punished.

Oxford Legal Philosophy publishes the best new work in philosophically-oriented legal theory. It commissions and solicits monographs in all branches of the subject, including works on philosophical issues in all areas of public and private law, and in the national, transnational, and international realms; studies of the nature of law, legal institutions, and legal reasoning; treatments of problems in political morality as they bear on law; and explorations in the nature and development of legal philosophy itself. The series represents diverse traditions of thought but always with an emphasis on rigour and originality. It sets the standard in contemporary jurisprudence.

The Legal Regulation of Cohabitation examines hundreds of reported and unreported cases, as well as legislation, policy papers, debates in Parliament to show how the legal treatment of cohabiting couples has been transformed over the past four centuries – from punishment as fornicators in the seventeenth century to eventual acceptance as family in the late twentieth century.

Alongside this, drawing on thousands of newspaper reports and magazine articles, it charts how the language used to refer to cohabitation has changed over time – from the denunciatory phrases of the early part of the period, through the namelessness of cohabitation in the nineteenth century, wartime ‘unmarried wives’, the ‘living in sin’ of the mid-twentieth century, the ‘stable illicit unions’ of the Law Commission’s 1966 report on divorce, the ‘common-law wives’ of the 1970s, the ‘live-in lovers’ of the 1980s and early 1990s to the ‘partners’ of today.

These different terms both influenced and were influenced by policy debates and public perceptions of cohabitation. Law and language were also intertwined with the third key theme of the book – a reassessment of the incidence of cohabitation in past times. Having carried out innovative cohort studies of over 5,000 couples, the book provides new and more accurate evidence of the extent (or rather the rarity) of cohabitation in earlier centuries. For more information go to:

National Student Survey places 糖心TV Law 5th in the country

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Progressive Corporate Governance for the 21st Century is a wide ranging and ambitious study of why corporate governance is the shape that it is, and how it can be better. The book sets out the emergence of shareholder primacy orientated corporate governance using a study of historical developments in the United Kingdom and the United States. Talbot sees shareholder primacy as a political choice made by governments, not a ‘natural’ feature of the inevitable market. She describes the periods of progressive corporate governance which governments promoted in the middle of the 20th century using a close examination of the theories of the company which then prevailed. She critically examines the rise of neoliberal theories on the company and corporate governance and argues that they have had a negative and regressive impact on social and economic development. In examining contemporary corporate governance she shows how regulatory styles as informed and described by prevailing regulatory theories, enables neoliberal outcomes. She illustrates how United Kingdom-derived corporate governance codes have informed the corporate governance initiatives of European and global institutions. From this she argues that neoliberalism has re-entered ex command transition economies through those United Kingdom and OECD inspired corporate governance Codes over a decade after the earlier failed and destructive neoliberal prescriptions for transition had been rejected. Throughout, Talbot argues that shareholder primacy has socially regressive outcomes and firmly takes a stand against current initiatives to enhance shareholder voting in such issues as director remuneration. The book concludes with a series of proposals to recalibrate the power between those involved in company activity; shareholders, directors and employees so that the public company can begin to work for the public and not shareholders.

Together with colleagues in four other EU states, Professor Jackie Hodgson has been awarded a European Commission Action grant of €375,000 for the project: Protecting Young Suspects in Interrogations: A Study on Safeguards and Best Practice. The objective of this two year project is to strengthen the protection of young suspects during interrogation by the police in the EU. The project consists of a comparative empirical study of the different legal procedural safeguards in place in Belgium, England and Wales, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. Based on these findings, this will be followed by professional training and recommendations for minimum EU rules and best practice.

The study follows on from Professor Hodgson’s current EU funded project, an empirical study of the procedural rights of suspects in police detention in the EU, leading to best practice recommendations.

Jonathan Garton has been appointed a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee for its Inquiry on the Regulation of the Charitable Sector and the Charities Act 2006. Details of the Inquiry, which will consider the impact and implementation of the 2006 Act, can be found on the Committee's website ().