Midstream energy companies find themselves between a rock and a hard place. The multimillion-dollar transportation and storage infrastructure provided by midstream companies is vital for the flow of ...oil and gas from upstream producers' wells to downstream consumers' gas pumps, yet-due to recent bankruptcy court opinions-upstream energy companies seem to possess all of the leverage. Despite being an indispensable middleman in the energy industry, midstream companies have few viable options to protect their costly infrastructure investments when their upstream counterparties declare bankruptcy. In some cases, upstream companies have walked away from the bankruptcy process paying pennies on the dollar to midstream companies for their infrastructure investments. This Note analyzes these financially onerous agreements between upstream and midstream energy companies, chronicling the caselaw that led to the current status quo and discussing what-if anything-midstream companies can do to make their investments more secure. Ultimately, the best option for midstream companies may be to "throw spaghetti at the wall" and see what sticks.
In this study, the author analyzes, based on the legislation, doctrine and case law relevant in the matter, the causes of ineffectiveness of the fiscal administrative acts, as well as their legal ...effects. In this sense, we started our approach with the individualization of the fiscal administrative acts in the light of their characteristic features, distinguishing them from the administrative acts of authority with a normative or individual character, from the technical-administrative operations and from the fiscal acts of enforcement. Further on, the author carries out a detailed analysis of the sanctions applicable to the fiscal administrative acts, which represent the main causes of the ineffectiveness of these acts, focusing our attention on the sanctions of non-existence and nullity in fiscal matters. Criticism of some deficient legal provisions are also formulated, accompanied by de lege ferenda proposals, as well as by de lege lata solutions that should respond to the controversial issues in the doctrine and the case law in the matter.
In 2014, the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China (SPC) handed down its decision on Sinochem International (Overseas) Pte Ltd v ThyssenKrupp Metallurgical Products GmbH1 (Sinochem ...Case), in which the SPC discussed the UNCITRAL Digest of Case Law on the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods (Digest) for the first time. The Sinochem Case deals with issues arising from an international sale of goods contract between a German seller and a Singaporean buyer. Two key issues that have been widely discussed and analysed by Chinese scholars and media are whether the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods2 (CISG) is the governing law and should be applied, and whether there is a fundamental breach committed by the German seller.3 This article does not aim to add more thoughts to those points, but intends to investigate the issue on what extrinsic materials can be used to interpret the CISG, which is closely intertwined with the second issue identified above. Part II. provides background information on the UNCITRAL, CISG, CLOUT, CISG Digest. Part III. outlines the use of extrinsic materials in the Sinochem Case by the SPC and identifies the criteria for the use extrinsic materials in the interpretation and application the CISG based on the approached adopted by the SPC. Part IV. analyses the potential of the applicability of other extrinsic materials in interpreting the CISG by the Chinese courts. Part V. examines the role of extrinsic materials in the interpretation of the CISG and other international treaties in Chinese cases In the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. Part VI. makes some closing remarks.
In South Africa, there have not been many cases where grandparents have approached the court to request contact with a grandchild. The question is whether, and if so, to what extent, have the courts ...considered mediation. Here, relevant cases are discussed. While it has become clear that mediation is preferable and should be encouraged rather man litigation in order to resolve contact disputes in the grandparent-child relationship, it is underutilized and does not happen often enough if mediation is not compelled. There have been calls for mandatory mediation to become part of family disputes for several decades, but it has also been argued that mediation cannot be compelled, as it is a voluntary process.
Case law retrieval is the task of locating truly relevant legal cases given an input query case. Unlike information retrieval for general texts, this task is more complex with two phases (
legal case ...retrieval
and
legal case entailment
) and much harder due to a number of reasons. First, both the query and candidate cases are long documents consisting of several paragraphs. This makes it difficult to model with representation learning that usually has restriction on input length. Second, the concept of
relevancy
in this domain is defined based on the legal relation that goes beyond the lexical or topical relevance. This is a real challenge because normal text matching will not work. Third, building a large and accurate legal case dataset requires a lot of effort and expertise. This is obviously an obstacle to creating enough data for training deep retrieval models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called
supporting model
that can deal with both phases. The underlying idea is the case–case supporting relation and the paragraph–paragraph as well as the decision-paragraph matching strategy. In addition, we propose a method to automatically create a large weak-labeling dataset to overcome the lack of data. The experiments showed that our solution has achieved the state-of-the-art results for both case retrieval and case entailment phases.
For the Romanian legal system, the case law does not have the quality of formal source of law. Nevertheless, the legal reality, also seen from a historical perspective, has demonstrated the essential ...role of the judicial practice in interpreting and enforcing the law, in constructing the argumentative practices, in clarifying the will of the legislator, and in discovering less obvious meanings of the legal norms, and last but not least to the unification of legal thinking and practice. Therefore the case law, together with the doctrine, is an important component of the Romanian legal system. Staring from these considerations, in this study we aim to emphasize a few aspects of constitutional case law. We are underlining its contribution to the emergence of the constitutionality control of laws in Romania. Under the influence of the Constitution of 1866, which did not regulate such a control in an institutional manner, the courts have assumed this competence by interpreting the law and by jurisprudential way. There are also presented and analyzed important contributions of the case law of the Constitutional Court, but also of the judiciary courts to the development of constitutionality control in our country. We support the idea that the case law currently plays an important role in the interpretation of the constitutional norms, including in terms of deepening the forms of constitutional control.
The present study illustrates a sensitive issue of the disciplinary procedure concerning civil servants, insufficiently debated in the speciality literature, namely the possibility of the titular of ...the disciplinary complaint to resort to the courts in order to refute the report by which the disciplinary investigation is finalized with a proposal to classify the complaint. The research is structured starting from the solution given to this issue by the courts themselves, in the few decisions that deal with the subject, a solution which the author attempts to combat in the light of the current legislation in force, insufficient in its turn, corroborated with the relevant approaches taken from the decisions of the Constitutional Court. Apart from the elements of novelty and originality of the analysis, it is distinguished by its applied character, knowing the ideas conveyed by the author being necessary not only for the civil servants involved in disciplinary conflicts - as defending parties or as members of the disciplinary commissions -, but also for the judges called upon to decide on the legality and grounds of the solutions for dismissal of the disciplinary complaints. The thesis of inadmissibility of the actions seeking the annulment of the dismissal solutions should be reconsidered, the author's opinion being that the commissions' reports can be included among the administrative acts (by express or tacit validation by the leader to whom they are presented) or in the refusal to perform an administrative operation, as a challengeable act under Article 8 (1) of the Law on administrative disputes No 554/2004. It is certain that concealing reports from the commission against any form of control is not only harmful (at least at moral level) to the titular of the complaint, but also abnormal, unjust and unlawful. In his analysis, the author identifies a series of arguments on which he builds his thesis about granting to the subject of the disciplinary complaint the right of access to courts, despite the orientation of the judicial precedent. As a conclusion, he believes that the normative provisions on the matter of disciplinary liability should be reinterpreted and revised, so that the reports of the disciplinary commissions for classifying disciplinary complaints against civil servants should no longer be exempt from judicial control.
When courts started publishing judgements, big data analysis (i.e. large-scale statistical analysis of case law and machine learning) within the legal domain became possible. By taking data from the ...European Court of Human Rights as an example, we investigate how natural language processing tools can be used to analyse texts of the court proceedings in order to automatically predict (future) judicial decisions. With an average accuracy of 75% in predicting the violation of 9 articles of the European Convention on Human Rights our (relatively simple) approach highlights the potential of machine learning approaches in the legal domain. We show, however, that predicting decisions for future cases based on the cases from the past negatively impacts performance (average accuracy range from 58 to 68%). Furthermore, we demonstrate that we can achieve a relatively high classification performance (average accuracy of 65%) when predicting outcomes based only on the surnames of the judges that try the case.
Introduction
A well-established principle is that informed consent is an obligatory requirement for any medical intervention; a patient’s decision-making capacity to consent is a requirement for ...legally valid consent. Some individuals may be unable to give valid informed consent due to their limited mental capacity. In such cases, laws permit substitute decision-making and involvement of the patient as far as possible (Art.6, Oviedo Convention). National laws of European countries allow persons with mental health problems to be deprived of their liberty and undergo involuntary treatment, namely treatment without a patient’s informed consent, in certain circumstances. Procedural safeguards must be secured, and a court must review its lawfulness (FRA, 2012). The legality of involuntary treatment is highly debated by various audiences (CRPD committee, CoE bodies). In Latvia and other countries, the requirement to assess a person’s decision-making capacity in the application of involuntary treatment is not required.
Objectives
This study was conducted to reveal the role of a person’s decision-making capacity to consent to the treatment of mental disorders in cases where involuntary treatment was approved by courts.
Methods
A retrospective case law study method was applied. Anonymised decisions of Latvian courts at www.manas.tiesas.lv in cases of involuntary treatment in Latvian adult psychiatric hospitals since 2010 were collected and analysed. The content of decisions concerning persons’ decision-making capacity and applicable legal regulations were studied.
Results
The case law revealed that the decision-making capacity had not been addressed regularly and in detail. Latvian law does not require an assessment of capacity, and as a result, the courts do also not require any data. Some elements of decision-making abilities, such as the limited ability to comprehend or process information, are mentioned in the decisions of courts.
Conclusions
There is a need to address the significance of decision-making capacity in the application of patients’ rights law in clinical and legal settings when involuntary treatment is suggested or applied. There is a need to amend the laws justifying the limitations of patients’ rights, particularly concerning involuntary treatment.
Acknowledgements
This paper has been prepared within the research project “Towards a human rights approach for mental health patients with a limited capacity: A legal, ethical and clinical perspective”, No. lzp-2020/1-0397 and the project “Strengthening of the capacity of doctoral studies at the University of Latvia within the framework of the new doctoral model, identification No.8.2.2.0/20/I/006”
Disclosure of Interest
None Declared
This article concerns recent developments in the field of liability claims for infringements of EU competition law. After overviewing topical matters, this contribution focuses on the Court of ...Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the continuing relevance of its case law to several basic questions that arise in damages cases. The evolving interpretation of primary law, and what is required to ensure its full effectiveness, still occupies a central position in the private enforcement of EU competition law. Moreover, principles such as effectiveness and equivalence constrain the discretion of Member States to lay out and apply supplementary remedial and procedural rules. The foregoing implies that, despite the apparent legislative harmonisation of damages claims in the EU, litigants and national courts should follow developments in the case law.
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