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This chapter is about the relations between the national legal system and the ‘other’—especially from the creation of the modern nation state in the early nineteenth century and up to current times. Comparative law in the twentieth century was dominated by the concept of ‘valid law’, functionalism, legal positivism and legal realism. The parameters of time and space within law were minimalized. The German law emigrés from Nazi Germany to England and the United States played a special role for the relation to comparative law, and several of these scholars played a great role for the post-war development of comparative law. Critical theories and post-colonialism have developed new legal discourses on culture and identity, and have increased interest not only in history but also in differences between legal cultures—and thus an increasing interest in comparative legal history.

This chapter is about abortion law in Latin America. Latin America abortion law is often categorized as seriously restricted. And this is so, partially. Abortion is criminalized if it does not fit in the legal indications (e.g. health risk, rape) contemplated. However, the region is in a process of examining some of their laws and implementation. The chapter argues that we should go beyond the more classic discussion in comparative constitutional law and engage in constitutional discussions in which we check thoroughly the persistent criminalization of abortion in most of the world, and the (health) regulations on abortion that put doctors, not women, at the centre and hinder access to safe abortion. If the law recognizes an abortion right to women, thus, it needs to deliver regulations that fit that purpose. The second part of the chapter analyses these regulations, as they burden women’s rights and overstep constitutional governmental discretion to regulate this practice.

This article discusses critical debate about individual control over the beginnings of life that has sprawled across the fields of academic law, philosophy, politics, religion, the life sciences, and the self-christened field of bioethics from the 1960s up to the present. The subject has formed in and around a cascade of popular pressures; biomedical advances; legislative, judicial, and public policy initiatives; media attention; and the boiling politics in which, at least in the United States, the whole series of enterprises has been bathed. The present undertaking will train on the law. It covers contraception in the United States, abortion law and policy in the United States, and contraception and abortion in Europe and the United Kingdom.

This chapter examines issues surrounding the right of access to and limits on evidence dossiers in civil law systems. It first provides an overview of the general aims pursued by the law in regulating the parties’ right of access to the investigative file before discussing supranational sources, such as the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the case law of the European Court on Human Rights (ECtHR). In particular, it explores how the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and certain directives adopted by the European Union on the right to information by defendants and by victims has influenced the criminal procedures of EU Member States. It also analyzes disclosure at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and concludes by explaining how civil law systems have changed in recent years, what their common features and shortcomings are, and how they could be improved.

This chapter discusses how Canadian constitutional issues come before the courts. Its primary focus is on litigation arising under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Since the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter in 1982, traditional legal process doctrines, such as standing, intervention, costs, and reference opinions have seen significant expansion. Though initially cautious, Canadian courts have recognized that the ability to initiate constitutional claims is integral to the principle of legality. The mechanisms by which constitutional issues are judicially reviewed, and decisions regarding who may participate and how such litigation may be supported, are crucial determinants of substantive constitutionalism in Canada.

This article discusses the process of empirical research on access to justice, explaining the procedure from data collection to analysis. Research into access to justice finds ways to render civil justice to citizens equitably. Reliable, non-anecdotal data is a prerequisite for useful empirical research into access to justice. Three international initiatives illustrate the reflection of access to justice in research projects. They are, the World Bank's Justice for the Poor Program, UNDP Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, and the Tilburg Microjustice Initiative. The most comprehensive empirical projects on access to justice are those sponsored at the national or sub-national level. Non-governmental drivers of broad-based data collection are other legal actors. This article discusses examples of data collection and evaluation in countries where research has generated data on civil justice. Finally, this article discusses barriers to access to justice, which cause exclusion.

This article examines the five forms of payment for healthcare that are common in the United States: out-of-pocket, charity, direct public provision, public health insurance, and private health insurance (including employer-sponsored insurance). After discussing the history of each of the five approaches, the article considers their advantages and disadvantages as well as their current status. It examines next the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Although the Affordable Care Act focuses primarily on expanding public health insurance and public financing for private health insurance, it incorporates all five approaches to financing care. Finally this chapter considers why the United States retains this patchwork of different forms of coverage rather than adopting a single coherent system of health care finance and discusses the likely future of the American approach.

This chapter describes the main features of European healthcare systems. The chapter identifies key characteristics of these systems: the organisation, financing, and delivery of health services, and the main actors. It then questions what the systems cover, who are eligible to receive healthcare, when patients receive healthcare, and the physician’s duty to provide care. In addition to highlighting the applicable regulatory framework, this chapter also describes some general trends.

Access to justice in Latin America has undergone substantial changes in the recent history of the region. With few exceptions, these changes accompanied the process of political transition to democracy. These changes range from the incorporation of new procedural instruments, through the constitutionalization of rights and new designs of the justice system, and even by the creation of alternative forms of conflict resolution and incorporation of principles inspired by international treaties, such as the reasonable duration of the process. This chapter presents an overview of the main institutional transformations in Latin American countries that have had an impact on access to justice. Although most of the examples refer to the Brazilian case, the studies about the region show that similar process has happened in other Latin American countries.

This chapter examines the issue of access to healthcare, with particular emphasis on the five dimensions of the model proposed by Roy Penchansky and J. William Thomas: availability, accessibility, accommodation, affordability, and acceptability. It also discusses the constitutional powers of states and the federal government with respect to health, along with relevant health law. It outlines the three categories of law governing access to physicians and hospitals: direct obligations of physicians and hospitals to provide free care to the indigent; federal programs to provide health insurance or health services to vulnerable populations; and laws that affect the delivery of care based on the patient’s physical characteristics and immigration status. The chapter concludes by considering the United States’s failure to realize the human rights aspect of health in international treaties and suggesting that the country’s efforts when it comes to access to physicians and hospitals leave much to be desired.

This chapter examines the procedures for acceding to and withdrawing from the European Union. It is argued that, while determined by (Member) states’ decisions, accession and withdrawal are also driven by EU institutions, and by the canons of the EU legal order. Indeed, more than simply governing the entry into, and the exit from the Union, the two procedures fulfil a specific function in relation to its objective of an ‘ever closer union amongst the peoples of Europe’. As such, they are fully embedded in the system of the treaties, and form an integral part of the evolving EU constitutional structure they underpin.

This chapter explores some legal and literary ramifications of “accident” in British law and society from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. This period saw changes in common law and legislation relating to accidents, including the emergence of negligence as a distinct tort and statutory provisions for employer liability and workplace compensation. The chapter turns on the institution of the deodand, a common-law rule that allowed inquest juries to assess liability for accidental deaths caused by non-humans. After such entities began to include industrial machines, the deodand was abolished by Parliament in 1846. Examining legal-historical cases and norms alongside literary-cultural representations, the chapter claims that the deodand’s disappearance, and concurrent transition to fault liability regimes, marked a loss in the understanding of accident. If the nineteenth-century emergence of modern accident law tended to simplify accidents into surrogates for human interaction, the deodand qua institution grasped how reckoning with accidents demands an alertness to human entanglement with non-human causality. Literary representations of vehicular accidents afford a glimpse of what was coming to be lost in this changing legal-cultural dispensation. From Thomas De Quincey to Thomas Hardy to E. M. Forster, the complex non-human, material, and affective dimensions of accident dissipate into the background, where they continue to supply narrative and formal motivation even as they leave human obligations and institutions in the light.

This chapter investigates why accidents are rarely construed as matters of security and considers the case for giving greater recognition to accidental insecurity in international law and politics. Accidents are far removed from the conventional conceptualization of security politics and yet represent a much bigger threat to most people’s lives than those most typical security concerns: war and terrorism. The average citizen of the world is actually far less threatened by military action from another State or a foreign non-State actor than they are in ways rarely labelled as matters of security. The chapter looks at transport accidents, structural accidents, workplace accidents, and personal accidents. Since the 1990s, both academic and ‘real world’ political discourse has increasingly granted security status to non-military issues in ‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ the agenda of international political priorities. However, security ‘wideners’ and even many human security advocates, while acknowledging that diseases, crime, environmental change, and natural disasters can sometimes be matters of security, are often still reluctant to grant this status to accidents. This reluctance seems to boil down to two objections: (i) there are no military or power politics dimensions inherent in accidents; (ii) accidents are not deliberate attacks on countries or people.

This chapter focuses on accountability and its political, legal, and financial aspects. Drawing on Mark Bovens’ conception of accountability that addresses the relationship between an actor and a forum, it examines how political, legal, and financial accountability apply to the European Union institutions as well as to the Member States. More specifically, it discusses the nature of the political, legal and financial accountability that rests, or should rest, on the Member States in their capacity as contracting parties to the EU. The chapter also considers three principal dimensions that shape discourse on political accountability, along with the relevance of Member States’ political accountability in relation to substantive Treaty provisions and compliance with EU legislation. After analysing the foundational precepts of EU legal accountability, including the amenability of EU institutions to judicial review and access to judicial review by aggrieved individuals, the chapter concludes by outlining the foundational precepts of EU financial accountability.

This chapter examines the issue of accountability in relation to international organizations (IOs). The research questions deserving most intense theoretical and empirical attention are, first, who should be accountable to whom and, second, to what extent they actually are. It outlines some approaches to answering these questions; highlights the most promising one; and sketches the contours of a possible solution to a major problem that plagues that approach. The chapter shows that the selection and design of IOs plays a special role in overall assessments of accountability. The most persuasive answer to the first question remains some version of the principle that everyone who is affected by a political decision should be able to influence that decision. Even under conditions of global interconnectedness, this does not mean that everyone should have a say on any decisions taken anywhere else: decision-makers should be accountable to specific constituencies in proportion to the power they wield over those constituencies.

Key debates in administrative law often play out within the contours of ‘accountability’. This chapter suggests that the concept of accountability is normatively and analytically useful in comparative administrative law, provided that there is clarity as to the level of abstraction at which the term is used. The chapter proposes a three-tier approach to the concept of accountability—accountability as a political ideal (‘level 1 accountability’), as a specific set of normative commitments (‘level 2 accountability’), and as an empirical phenomenon (‘level 3 accountability’). It argues that the usefulness (and contestability) of comparative approaches will vary as one moves from one tier to the next. Next, it discusses three case studies that illustrate specific institutional manifestations of accountability and demonstrate how the operation of accountability differ based on the background constitutional structure. Finally, the chapter presents certain key challenges to accountability that implicate different tiers of accountability.

This chapter summarizes recent developments in intermediary liability theory with special emphasis on the emergence of voluntary measures and private ordering. Looking at the legal liability rules always tells only half of a story. Legal rules are often only basic expectations which are further developed through market transactions, business decisions, and political pressure. Therefore, the real responsibility landscape is equally determined by a mixture of voluntary agreements, self-regulation, corporate social responsibility, and ad hoc deal-making. Accountability schemes can differ significantly, ranging from legal entitlements to request assistance in enforcement to entirely voluntary private-ordering schemes. This chapter provides a mapping of these basic approaches in order to illustrate the richness and trade-offs associated with such measures. Miscellaneous policy and enforcement tools, such as monitoring and filtering, graduated response, payment blockades and follow-the-money strategies, private denial of service (DNS) content regulation, and online search manipulation, are discussed to complement the typical legal liability view of the regulation of intermediaries. The discussion of these enforcement strategies will be framed within the investigation of notions such as market and private ordering, corporate social responsibility, assistance in enforcement of a innocent third party made accountable although not liable and public deal-making.

This chapter addresses the relationship between AI systems and the concept of accountability. To understand accountability in the context of AI systems, one must begin by examining the various ways the term is used and the variety of concepts to which it is meant to refer. Accountability is often associated with transparency, the principle that systems and processes should be accessible to those affected through an understanding of their structure or function. For a computer system, this often means disclosure about the system’s existence, nature, and scope; scrutiny of its underlying data and reasoning approaches; and connection of the operative rules implemented by the system to the governing norms of its context. Transparency is a useful tool in the governance of computer systems, but only insofar as it serves accountability. There are other mechanisms available for building computer systems that support accountability of their creators and operators. Ultimately, accountability requires establishing answerability relationships that serve the interests of those affected by AI systems.

This chapter highlights the accountability of international organizations in refugee and migration law. It sets out the general responsibility regime as it applies to international organizations with special reference to refugee protection. Several international organizations are pertinent: most prominently UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), but also the EU through Frontex, its European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders, and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Refugee protection also involves several different settings, from the running of refugee camps and the guarding of borders to the handling of individual asylum applications. In general, the chapter demonstrates that responsibility is highly elusive.

This chapter examines the functions of corporate accounting and financial reporting around the world, with particular emphasis on how local realities that explain persistent diversity often pose a barrier to aspirations for a universal system. It first charts the history and progress of contemporary efforts to move accounting from its diverse local roots to a unified global stage before turning to a discussion of the varying functions of accounting and reporting laws around the world. It then looks at aspects of accounting that are affected by national variation, including securities regulation, corporate governance, and corporate finance. Finally, the chapter explains how related forces contribute to persistent divergence in financial reporting.