International wildlife law is concerned with the conservation of sentient species, but generally ignores the welfare of individual animals. It therefore does not reflect a recognition of the moral worth of animals and perpetuates the dichotomy between conservation and welfare. It is the primary goal of this article to ascertain how welfare concerns may be incorporated into international wildlife law in order to ensure that it takes cognizance of the moral worth of animals. The article advocates an injection of ethics, via a welfare-centric approach, into wildlife law in order to escape the dichotomy between conservation and welfare in relation to wild animals, and so to advance the progressive development of law that is conducive to wildlife protection rather than merely to its conservation.

This article analyzes the potential for legal transplant theory to strengthen the legal regimes that guarantee the right of access to environmental information in England and China. Guaranteed by the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, the right has a substantial impact on how individuals can act as environmental stewards. However, despite the framework provided by the Aarhus Convention, there are shortcomings in how these states guarantee the right when compared with the obligations set by the provisions of the Convention. The article applies Alan Watson’s legal transplant theory to the environmental information regimes in England and China and considers the likelihood of each jurisdiction sourcing legal reforms from the other. It also seeks to identify common trends shared by each jurisdiction and the impact of the Aarhus Convention on such transplants.

This article examines early attestations of verlan and related backward slangs in French in the nineteenth century. Its main contribution is the edition and analysis of the only known text, a letter, written with features of verlan before the twentieth century. This largely predates other attested forms of verlan. The principles underlying this early form of verlan are shown to be different from contemporary verlan, as is much other early evidence, though all forms have the syllable as their basic unit. The letter is evidence that backward slangs can originate in the education system as much as in the underworld of thieves.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are used in scientific research and a diverse range of other applications across the globe. They are also being used increasingly for scientific research in Antarctica and to a lesser extent by tourists visiting the world's last great frontier tourist destination. Their use in scientific research in Antarctica offers many benefits to science and if used responsibly may be less invasive than other research techniques, offering a rich source of new scientific data. For tourists, UAVs also offer unique aerial photographic perspectives on Antarctica — the ultimate holiday snap shot. Concerns have been raised about the safety of drone use in the harsh and unpredictable Antarctic conditions, as well as possible environmental impacts. This paper considers these issues and the emerging regulatory response to drone use in Antarctica focusing on the Antarctic Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Operator's Handbook, which provides guidelines to national Antarctic programmes on the use of UAVs in the Antarctic Treaty area, and the temporary ban on use of drones by tourists imposed by the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO). Both measures arguably constitute a good first response to this emerging issue, although more still needs to be done.

It is a remarkable fact that ancient Christianity did not establish a distinct legal system. The early Christians did not take over the Jewish law as the basis for the church. Rather, they accepted the administrative and legal context of the Roman Empire and developed their religious and ethical views within this framework. Consequently, unlike in Judaism and Islam, a “Christian law” was not established, even not after the acceptance of Christianity as the official religion in the Roman Empire or as Christianity became the prevailing religion in the Middle Ages and remained so into modern times. Nevertheless, Christianity developed its own perspective on legal and ethical matters. Distinctive for this view is the difference between the commitment to God's will on the one hand and the respect for human legal systems on the other. In other words, Christianity developed a perspective on the relationship of law and theology that can be described as the implementation of a double directive: Christians are bound to an ethos oriented towards God's will, but at the same time they accept the rules and authorities of this world. This view also means that God's commandments found in the scriptures of Israel are now interpreted in a new way. They are not regarded as ethical and ritual rules that would separate Christian communities from society. Rather, God's law, interpreted by Jesus Christ, serves as the guideline for a life of the Christian believers within the world of the Roman Empire. Both of these concepts—the acceptance of the legislation of the society and the commitment to God's will—can come into conflict with each other, as has often happened in Christian history. Already in early Christianity it was pointed out that obedience to God should prevail over human law.

As the first European to claim that he travelled to China and back, Marco Polo is a celebrated traveller who described the multicultural society of Eurasia in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries ad. However, his famed account, the Travels of Marco Polo, contains many unsolved mysteries which have generated discussion among historians, while an archaeological approach has been even less convincing because the material that may link to Marco Polo is very rare. A recent re-analysis of Chinese ceramics from a wide geographical area ranging from southern China to the Indian Ocean provides some archaeological support: it suggests that a Chinese porcelain jar housed in the Treasury of San Marco in Venice dates to the era of Marco Polo and is associated with his journey to China.

This essay was presented as the 2015 McDonald Distinguished Scholar Lecture at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University.

Crises are thresholds in human history, often marking substantial transformations in societies. Crises, however, are not instants in time. They start, unfold, and develop in a process that is often traumatic for social systems, with outcomes ranging from catastrophe to complete recovery. In this article, catastrophic models are employed to understand a non-catastrophic outcome: the complete recovery that nuragic Sardinia experienced after a long crisis, caused in the first place by unsustainable strategies of territorial expansion. Starting from the premises of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, it is argued that the transformation of nuragic society was the best way of avoiding the constraints that the social structure imposed on the perspective of a sustainable growth. The study is based on a geostatistical analysis of a large sample of settlements, and it attempts to quantify population growth ratios for the Late Bronze Age.

The paper focuses on the work of Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) in an attempt to make sense of the role played by Romantic Naturphilosophie in the development of natural history in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. It first focuses on the role played by Schelling and his Würzburg circle in the development of Oken's early views on natural history, then reconstructs Oken's mature programme for a reform of animal classification.

Crowd equity funding is a type of crowdfunding that allows companies to obtain seed or other capital through small equity investments from a large range of investors via an online portal. This form of finance has been viewed as a way to remedy the shortfall of capital for small and medium enterprises. As a result, a number of countries such as the US, Italy and New Zealand have promoted this form of finance. Accordingly, the paper first considers the reasons behind the rise of crowd equity funding on government agendas around the world. It then focuses on the Australian setting, by highlighting the different proposals that have been put forward to introduce legislation friendlier to crowd equity funding. The aim is to view the extent to which the proposed models provide the right balance between investor protection and entrepreneurship.

The existing legal definition of rape in England and Wales is gendered, only recognising men as offenders. The law also only recognises as victims of rape those who are penetrated by a penis, either vaginally, anally or orally. This therefore excludes the female perpetrator–male victim paradigm, and more specifically those cases where male victims are ‘forced to penetrate’ female perpetrators. This paper argues that consideration needs to be given to legally recognising and thus labelling forced-to-penetrate cases as rape. Applying a methodology that draws upon the lived experiences of male victims, it is argued that there are significant similarities between compelled-penetration cases and those cases legally recognised as rape, not only because they both involve non-consensual penile penetration, but because there are clear similarities in the aggressive strategies used by perpetrators and the subsequent harms experienced by victims.

The paper aims to provide a critique of Shared Parental Leave (SPL) in the UK from a gender equality perspective, namely to assess whether SPL is capable of enabling more men to take leave in order to act as the main carer for their child. Leave policies in Nordic countries, where the rate of take-up by fathers is high, are also examined. It argues that SPL is open to legal challenge by fathers who do not meet the eligibility criteria, as the SPL scheme as currently drafted breaches the terms of the EU Parental Leave Directive and is also discriminatory on grounds of sex. The paper concludes that SPL is flawed as a policy. Whilst the UK government argues for a more equal division of childcare between father and mother, it seems unwilling to challenge the expectation that mothers provide the primary care for young children. Thus SPL will only be successful if the policy is reformed to include a higher rate of pay and a period of leave reserved for fathers.