Nationality has been central to law's understanding of membership. Moreover, the formal legal relationship between the individual and the state is that of citizenship - or nationality. However, as this chapter argues, various forces in the international context, including globalisation and the contrasting phenomena of fragmentation, express tensions besetting traditional notions of state membership in an international framework.

This chapter begins by looking at some of the issues underpinning the larger question of the role of nationality in humanitarian law. It then explores those questions in the context of the former Yugoslavia and in particular through the judgment of the War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the case of Tadic. It argues that nationality should not necessarily be a determinative factor when applying humanitarian law.

Corporate social responsibility is back on the corporate law reform agenda. From an Australian perspective, the evidence for this is found in the simultaneous but separate inquiries that, at the time of writing this paper, are being conducted into this topic by the Australian Parliament's Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services, and by the Australian Government's Corporations and Markets Advisory Committee (CAMAC). These developments are supported by the many standards, guidelines, principles, and codes promulgated by non-government bodies, industry groups and other international organisations.

Cynics might dismiss these developments as part of a regular cycle of corporate law reform. After all, as we will see, this is not the first time that corporate social responsibility has appeared on the reform agenda. Others might suggest that, finally, this is an idea whose time has come. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which this renewed, and widespread, attention to corporate social responsibility is being reflected in the substance of our systems of corporate law. Is it possible, and meaningful, to talk of a 'new corporate law' in which the concerns of people other than shareholders (or, indeed, the non-financial concerns of shareholders) are to be given serious attention?

The plan of the paper is as follows. We begin with a brief survey of recent developments in different common law jurisdictions, with an emphasis on Australia, that have implications for the idea of corporate social responsibility. The focus here is not just on statutory developments, but also on the wider array of codes, guidelines and so on that were adverted to earlier. From this base, we then draw and elaborate upon two conclusions. The first is that the shareholder primacy model continues to exert a powerful, although sometimes misunderstood, effect on the capacity of legislators to respond to corporate social responsibility concerns. In particular, it has the potential to constrain the actions of directors in responding to those concerns, it constrains the power of shareholders to put these concerns in front of the board, and it constrains the capacity of non-shareholders to bring these concerns to the attention of company managers. The second conclusion is that much of the action regarding corporate social responsibility therefore occurs outside the parameters of the statutes, and it is in this sense that we can talk about a 'new corporate law': a system of corporate regulation that depends as much on (if not more on) non-statutory mechanisms and methods, which in many cases can have a more immediate impact on corporate operations. The final part of the paper examines some of these themes in more detail, by way of a 'case study' of the position of corporate employees. Whatever definition one takes of corporate social responsibility, it is undeniable that the financial and physical well-being of a company's employees must be a central concern. Recent corporate collapses and policy responses to them in Australia provide a stark illustration of the limited extent to which corporate law has been able to respond to the challenges of corporate social responsibility.

This article considers the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal (SCT) and the capacity of its decisions to be reviewed. While the constitutional position of the SCT is settled after the decision of the High Court in Attorney-General (Cth) v Breckler (1999) 197 CLR 83, its categorisation as a private body remains open to question. This being the case, the susceptibility of decisions of the SCT to review is compared with the equitable standards upon which trustee decisions are reviewable. Challenges to decisions of the SCT may not be possible under the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (Cth) but the quasi-private character of the SCT – a private body with a public function – presents scope for courts to hold that the SCT owes an equitable duty to those within its jurisdiction.

Starting from St Thomas Aquinas, the best known of the medieval commentators on the Seven Deadly Sins, the sin of gluttony has suffered from certain ambiguities. This chapter attempts to clarify the nature and the problematic of glutton, with particular reference to an aspect of contemporary significance: the treatment and consumption of animals. The author finds this treatment both scandalous, secretive, and emblematic of a much broader problem of the modern world – commodification. This, too, is a form of modern gluttony from which neither law nor philosophy is immune. In order to draw forth these connections between our approach to law, to knowledge, and to food, the author draws on recent fiction by Nobel laureate J M Coetzee, and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. He argues for a restructuring of how we think about ‘the lives of animals’ which will respond to the idea of gluttony in both its immediate sense and in its metaphorical extension. Perhaps our gluttonous appetites can be tamed, not by knowledge and not by justice, but by ethics.

Pakistan's Hudood (Islamic criminal) laws have been a source of controversy since their promulgation by the military regime of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in 1979. For their supporters, these laws are a welcome step towards the enforcement of shari'ah (Islamic law) and, as such, represent a logical and inevitable progression of those historic processes that had led to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. To their opponents, these laws represent gross violations of fundamental human rights and constitutional norms designed to uphold democratic participation in lawmaking and the equality of citizens irrespective of their religion or gender.

This paper will survey the contours of the controversies surrounding the Hudood laws, and seek to broaden the horizons of the debate surrounding these laws by incorporating an “Islamic critique” of these laws that has generally been lacking in the discourse. More importantly, the paper seeks to analyze the role that the Federal Shariat Court has played in substantively shaping the law, through a chronological analysis of the Court's decisions on the most contentious aspects of the Hudood laws: the conviction of rape victims for zina (consensual adultery/fornication) regarding as proof the pregnancy caused by the rape. This analysis will indicate the strengths of the Islamic critique and propose reforms that may offer a viable avenue for alleviating the hardships perpetrated in the application of the Hudood laws.

Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, we develop a detailed ethnography of a social space in a major law school, and explore its socialization of the students there. ‘Coffee House’ is a weekly social event sponsored by Canadian law firms offering free drink and food to the students present. We argue that this event and the actors involved profoundly change student identities and alter educational aspirations. Although the students themselves insist that ‘nothing is going on,’ our ethnography suggests that in ‘Coffee House’ identity is developed through performances, and in the accumulation of symbolic capital, until ultimately students come to feel their future career path is not a matter of choice, but destiny. We explore the important work of Bourdieu through this setting, but ultimately we resist his determinism, and suggest instead that, following the work of Butler, identity is a more complicated and fluid dynamic between space, repetition, and performance. It appears that a personal unconscious transformation amongst law students attending Coffee House is underway; yet opportunities to change the meaning of this space and these performances remain.

Over the past hundred years, the law of negligence has transformed itself, and in the process transformed our sense of the obligations we all owe to everybody around us – local governments for the services they provide, banks and professionals for the advice they give, drivers on the road, doctors in the surgery, homeowners for their guests or visitors, and even for the trespassers who might pay them a call. Yet what is now compendiously described as ‘the duty of care’ is in some ways an unusual obligation. It is not the outcome of an agreement founded on self-interest, like a contract. It is not a duty owed to the community as a whole and acted on by the State, like criminal law. It describes a personal responsibility we owe to others which has been placed upon us without our consent. It is a kind of debt that each of us owes to others although we never consciously accrued it. Thus it raises in a distinctly personal way one of the oldest questions of law itself: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ What does it mean to be responsible? This is not a question that is easier to answer for us than for Cain. In this article I argue that the idea of responsibility articulated in the law of negligence comes from what might be termed our literal response-ability: it implies a duty to respond to others stemming not from our abstract sameness to others, but rather from our particular difference from them. Responsibility is not a quid pro quo — it is asymmetrical, a duty to listen to the breath of others just in so far as their interests diverge from our own. The duty of care emerges not because we have a will (which the law of contract respects) or a body (which the criminal law protects) but because we have a soul.

Fiduciary obligations are imposed by the common law to ensure that a person occupying a societal role with a high potential for the manipulation of vulnerable persons exercises utmost good faith. Australian law has recognised that the doctor-patient relationship, while not wholly fiduciary, has fiduciary aspects. Amongst such duties are those prohibiting sexual or financial abuse of patients or disclosure without express authority of confidential information. One important consequence of attaching such fiduciary duties to the doctor-patient relationship is that the onus of proof falls not upon the vulnerable party (the patient), but upon the doctor (to disprove the allegation). Another is that consent cannot be pleaded as an absolute defence. In this article the authors advocate that the law should now accept that the fiduciary obligations of the doctor-patient relationship extend to creating a legal duty that any adverse health care event be promptly reported to the patient involved. The reasons for creating such a presumption, as well as its elements and exceptions, are explained.

Multilateral and bilateral trade agreements have become important vehicles by which US multinational corporations, through close collaboration with government officials, are striving, amongst other objectives, for increasingly stringent global intellectual property protection (GIPP), particularly over what they term “innovative” pharmaceuticals.

This chapter explores the evolution and structural dynamics of GIPP. It particularly considers the hypothesis that GIPP represents a corporate-driven ideology whose legitimacy in a democratic polity is undermined by its uncertain foundation in public health research and inadequate integration with norms of bioethics and health law, including international human rights.

This detailed analysis begins with consideration of the domestic evolution of GIPP from within the US patent system. This may reveal how many of its important structural features had their roots in a domestic profit-making ideology. The chapter then examines the critical initial globalization role of the US Trade Act 1974, particularly section 301. This permitted US industry to request an investigation by the US International Trade Commission of foreign nations whose practices allegedly caused it material injury. The Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is analyzed as a mature component of GIPP by which increased intellectual property rights [intellectual monopoly privileges] in particular over pharmaceuticals, were linked with strong trade sanctions. The sophisticated contribution to GIPP made by the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act 2003 (US) is then evaluated, particularly its prohibition of Federal Government medicine price setting and its requirement for a study of pharmaceutical price controls in other developed countries. In each case the extent to which GIPP attempted or failed to integrate its corporate-designed principles with basic norms of bioethics, public health law and international human rights is discussed.