This coda takes the form of a sample judgment that rewrites Baron and Others v Claytile (Pty) Limited and Another [2017] to tangibly illustrate the promise of Alter-Native Constitutionalism. Contrasted with the real-life judgment issued by the Constitutional Court, which relied on liberal approaches, the Alter-Native ‘judgment’ gives willing courts the necessary tools to enforce the ‘property’ rights of ‘non-owners’ and thus highlights the opportunities for equitable solutions the Court has missed, including in its real-life judgment. Emphasizing the importance of robustly applying Ubu-Ntu (rather than the insipid ‘ubuntu’ that scholars and the Court have substituted for it) and applying Ntu Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation developed earlier in the book, the opinion demonstrates existing possibilities for recognising shared rights and promoting housing as a relational, spatiotemporal ‘existence’. By reinterpreting constitutional and legislative provisions to respect indigenous onto-epistemological perspectives on land-as-housing, the Alter-Native opinion demonstrates a transformative approach to ‘property law’ that inherently critiques the Constitutional Court’s interpretation of the ‘property’ and ‘housing’ clauses largely to the exclusion of vernacular law. This Alter-Native opinion thus presents a literally embodied argument for the need for broadening restitution, addressing both enduring injustices and future possibilities over multiple generations.

This chapter characterizes the evolution and politicization of corporate regulation in Nigeria and crafts a theory of professional interest group politics in Nigeria. The chapter outlines how corporate regulation in Nigeria was politicized during the era of Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program. In particular, the drafting process of the Companies Decree of 1990 provided a previously unparalleled opportunity for independent manufacturing, services, professional, and labor organizations to contest the revision of the most fundamental provisions of Nigerian corporate law. Informed by this history, the chapter advances a novel theory of professional interest groups in Nigerian politics, which are industry-based organizations that seek to advance their policy objectives at the federal level. Drawing their membership from across traditional regional, ethnic, and class boundaries, they are internally hierarchical and their less-prominent members also benefit from the achievement of shared regulatory objectives. Nigerian professional interest groups exercise a tangible influence over federal policy and its implementation.

Rights are at home in law-courts. In popular understanding, they seem like attributes attached to individuals who are found in isolation. When carefully examined, however, they can be characterised as aspects of relations in the sight of a tribunal (which may, of course, be conscience or public opinion or God). They have their being, it might be said, within a field of vision - the version of reality that the tribunal sees - in which a right apparently located in one person must have a dissimilar correlate located in another. If, when the information that counts as fact in, a court is in principle willing to do X for A against B, it cannot simultaneously have the same willingness to do X for B against A. On the account definitively worked out by Wesley Hohfeld, my claim must have its correlate in someone else’s duty, but even the simplest privilege (my right against the world to take a walk into the park) has correlates in ‘no-rights’ attaching to the indefinite range of other individuals who might take legal action with a view to stopping me.

This chapter provides an introduction to the core concepts of US law, for those with an HCI background but not a legal background. The chapter covers the history of U.S. law, the basic constructs of the U.S. legal system, the core sources of legal rules: constitutions, statutues, regulations, and case law, differences between civil and criminal law, the differences between law and policy at the federal versus state level, searching for and using legal resources, and how to apply basic legal principles to HCI research.

If Edward I had died in the course of his conquest of Wales in the early 1280s, his successor would not have been the notorious Edward II, but King Alfonso I, born at Bayonne in 1273, and named after his godfather, the queen’s brother and king of Castile. In fact, Alfonso was to die a child in 1284, just as Edward’s first two sons had done, but the details of his life are a reminder that English kingship was not just – or even, at times, very – English. The kings of England, descended from Normans and Angevins in the male line, wished to be leading figures on the European stage, and they jealously defended lands, rights and connections across the continent, as well as in these islands.

At his coronation the monarch swore to preserve the peace of the kingdom, maintain the laws and customs of the realm and diligently do justice to his subjects. Upholding these tenets underpinned the successful exercise of kingship. Indeed, the quality of the king’s rule was frequently judged contemporaneously and historically by his record on justice. Yet, while the king did have personal input and was ultimately responsible for issuing legislative decrees and upholding law and order, operationally this was not something he could do on his own. The enormous task of day-to-day judicial administration was delegated to a mixture of trained judges, lawyers and royal officials, who worked alongside less specialised men of law, shire bureaucrats and a pool of borough merchants and county gentry. These assisted the crown by acting on a variety of local commissions and as constituency representatives in parliament.

Employees who have been dismissed may bring a claim under the common law for wrongful dismissal where the dismissal was a breach of contract. Compensation for wrongful dismissal is usually limited to compensation for a period of reasonable notice of dismissal. Statute provides minimum periods of notice that must be given. Compensation for failure to give proper notice can be avoided if the employer can demonstrate that the employee committed a repudiatory breach of contract. Claims for compensation for other kinds of breach of the terms of the contract may be available, but there can be no compensation for breach of the implied term of mutual trust and confidence in the context of dismissal. Nor can damages be obtained for breach of a contractualdisciplinary procedure; an employee can only obtain an injunction to require the employer to follow the correct procedure. In general, however, injunctions against dismissal are unavailable because of the breakdown of mutual trust and confidence between employer and employee.

Chapter 9 makes the case for critical changes in chilling effects law and doctrine based on the new understanding advanced in this book. The author argues, among other things, that judges should no longer remain skeptical of privacy chilling effects; that chilling effects doctrine should no longer privilege legal and regulatory forms of chilling effects over others; and that standing doctrine and other areas of law should also be reformed to accommodate this new understanding of chilling effects.

This chapter has several major themes. It begins by documenting how historians are rethinking the origins of the United States, emphasizing its contingent nature as a union of sovereign states rather than a nation, and the roots of that novel confederation in the complexities of the British imperial system. In that context, it then traces the fluidity and contingency of rights available to the citizens of the United States after the Revolution. Finally, it examines how, following the victory of the Jeffersonian coalition in 1800, those rights became structured and limited along racial lines, creating a “patchwork nation” of distinct racial orders.

While the UK may not have a single, codified constitution or Bill of Rights instrument, it nevertheless has a long history of rights protection under the common law and through various legislative enactments including, most notably, the Human Rights Act 1998 which gives effect in domestic law to the core rights enshrined in the ECHR. In this chapter, we examine how rights are protected (including their enforcement) in domestic law in the UK, paying particular attention to the principle of legality and the powers conferred on the courts under the Human Rights Act 1998. Common law rights continue to develop and evolve alongside the Human Rights Act and they still act as a vehicle to protect rights and fundamental values.

Many eighteenth-century theorists of common law attributed its legitimacy in part to its connection to a particular location and history. However, as Britain incorporated Scotland and expanded its imperial reach abroad, British governors often attempted to carry common-law practices to new locations. In his fiction and nonfiction, Sir Walter Scott advocates maintaining Scotland’s common-law system but worries that the very cultural and legal distinctiveness he demands for Scotland prevents Scots from receiving justice under British law. Portraying the consequences of the Norman conquest in Ivanhoe (1819) and internal and external colonialism in Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott demonstrates the difficulties of reconciling the role of custom in common law’s legitimacy with a centralizing imperial state. In both works, the victors’ biases toward their own law mean that history and historical fiction no longer suture past and present, and that law imposes tragedy as well as order.

This is the first of three chapters dealing in depth with directors’ duties, following the overview provided in Chapter 10. The duties are divided into two themes: duties of care, skill and diligence, and duties of loyalty and good faith. The focus in this chapter is on the duties of care, skill and diligence. These duties are imposed by the common law, equity and the Corporations Act. This chapter commences with the common law and equitable foundations of the duty of care, skill and diligence, and considers their adoption into statute and the current law. It examines the safe harbour provided by the business judgment rule, and recent discussion on the scope and application of that rule. This chapter examines the ability of directors to delegate their duties and to reasonably rely on the information or advice provided by certain types of persons. Finally, the chapter considers the requirements imposed on directors and officers as a company approaches insolvency. The chapters which follow then consider the duties of loyalty and good faith.

This chapter addresses the rights of company members to protect their own interests or those of the company. The chapter focuses on the rights of shareholders in a company limited by share capital, but the principles and rules discussed here apply equally to members of companies limited by guarantee. The legal protections and remedies discussed here can arise in a number of situations.

This chapter is concerned principally with the legal remedies that can be sought by minority shareholders. We will see that these are mainly found in the Corporations Act, but we begin by looking at the common law history behind the statutory provisions. Then we turn to the statute, the three main remedies being actions for oppression and unfairness, the statutory derivative action, and the winding up remedy. The chapter then looks at three other forms of legislative action: injunctive relief, access to company information, and the use of civil proceedings by ASIC.

This chapter details the fragmented nature of the last sixty years of Aboriginal land repossession across Australia, both in terms of the nature of the rights and the level of restitution. Exploring the limited and uneven national Aboriginal land rights picture in 2024, we argue for an appreciation of the federal dimension of land rights policymaking. Uneven land restitution has resulted not just from spatially varying degrees of land commodification and the differing trajectories of land rights movements, although these were crucial. We aim to demonstrate that shifting state–Commonwealth (or Federal) relations within the Australian federation – crosscut against differing support from states and Commonwealth governments over time, and differing Commonwealth Government attitudes to federalism – led to a spatially uneven set of legislative land rights regimes across Australia. To do so, we narrate the varied responses to the Aboriginal land rights movement across the country in the wake of the Woodward Royal Commission in 1973 with an eye to the federal dimension. We argue that while the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments from 1972 to 1991 all failed to legislate national land rights, they did so for very different reasons, leaving the land rights agenda to the states. Ultimately, it was the centralizing power of the High Court that brought about a national but inadequate and partial resolution to the Aboriginal land question. Finally, we provide a series of maps and tables describing the jurisdictional variation in rights and interests in land restored to Indigenous Peoples at present.

In Malaysia, three ethnic groups identify as “Indigenous Peoples”: the heterogeneous Peninsular Malaysia Orang Asli, natives of Sabah, and natives of Sarawak. Malaysia’s hybrid legal system confers differing constitutional, statutory, and common law rights and privileges to Indigenous Peoples, which present distinct yet shared experiences of their land rights. These Indigenous groups were granted differing levels of constitutional privileges during Malaysia’s constitutional formation, which resulted in divergent written laws for the protection and recognition of their customary lands and resources. These differing laws and histories have functioned to dispossess these communities of their traditional lands, territories, and resources in their own ways. The strategy of litigation has afforded Indigenous communities some recourse for gaps in the written law but common law development of such rights and the court process have equally proven to be a barrier in some cases. Although international commitments to the sustainable management of resources have increased possibilities for the inclusion of Indigenous communities in matters concerning their lands and resources, constitutionally-entrenched legal privileges have yet to translate to the effective protection and recognition of traditional Indigenous lands and resources in Malaysia.

This chapter begins by acknowledging punitive damages’ status as the paradigmatic proof of punishment’s place in the law of torts. A brief overview of current punitive damages practices around the world first shows that the place of punishment in tort law is no longer debated only by common law scholars. Then a detailed description of the understanding, scholarly treatment, and judicial availability of punitive damages focuses on two major common law jurisdictions (England and the United States) and various civil law legal traditions (mainly Latin America and Continental Europe). This map of the unique contours and idiosyncratic features of the scholarly debates and judicial availability of punitive damages of those jurisdictions reveals a common pattern that begs further inquiry: in most jurisdictions, the tendency is to frame the debate around the place of punishment in tort law such that the root problem becomes finding a way to circumvent the fundamental punitive quest instead of addressing it head-on.

The chapter explores the application of restraint of trade, a common law notion, to professional tennis, particularly as pertains to relations between agents and players. The chapter goes on to show the regulation of restraint of trade in the English common law and then applies its findings to sport law more generally. It goes on to identify restraints arising from national federations and state regulation, as well as those emerging from contractual relations between players and agents. The chapter then proceeds to apply the concept to professional tennis, particularly in respect of agency agreements with a focus on the Zverev case before the courts of England. The chapter also ponders whether restrictions in national team selections as well as bans imposed by transnational tennis stakeholders have the same or similar effect as the aforementioned restraints.

The first chapter explores the background to the 1600 Charter setting out the conditions for the establishment of the East India Company. Here I am interested in the rights of acquisition inherited from the exploratory age of the Tudor state rather than the more familiar story of its formal constitution. The language of charters granted to trading companies revealed something of the discursive complexity shaped by European powers striving to legitimize claims to overseas territory. England had few jurists of note and so the state drew partially and selectively on Roman and common law to foreground the precept of possession, not least because it conveniently rendered obsolete all challenges to the means of acquisition. The chartered companies of unprecedented size, capital and ambition which rose to power in the second half of the sixteenth century inherited this repertoire of legal pluralism but found in practice that the quest for conquest of overseas territory was compromised by geography and the existence of rival European powers with similar ambitions.