The focus of this paper is on the effectiveness of administration of the Endangered Fauna (Interim Protection) Act 1991 by the National Parks and Wildlife Service of NSW, Australia, between 1991 and 1995, particularly in regulating the effects on biodiversity of logging operations in NSW publicly owned native forests. A key mechanism of the Act was its requirement that those seeking to significantly modify the habitat of endangered fauna seek a licence to take or kill, and that they prepare a Fauna Impact Statement (FIS) justifying their activity. This historical and empirical study focuses on the licensing practices of the NPWS considering temporary licensing, licence variations and the use of authorities in place of licensing. This study presents previously unpublished data on the operation of the licensing system. 95% of the licences granted to the Forestry Commission were temporary licences. Thus the Forestry Commission held those licences without ever having been required to complete FIS and without the threat of public appeal against decisions to grant general licences. The paper examines the reasons for accommodatory approaches by regulators such as the NPWS, and finds that some of these factors were present in some instances of particular aspects of the implementation of the Act. These factors included lack of agency resources, imbalance of power and insecure basis of regulatory agency authority, avoidance of perceived economic dislocation, lack of public support, and the undermining effect of plans for new legislation. Examination of the history of operation of these EFIP Act provides an excellent vantage point from which to examine other biodiversity legislation. Australian biodiversity and ecosystems are unlikely to be protected by merely enacting legislation which bears the name "endangered species protection" if attention is not paid to the issue of implementation. The drafters of any new legislation need to consider how political pressure will tend to result in the misuse of specific provisions. The paper closes with a historical account of the circumstances surrounding the enactment of the EFIP Act, arising from the Corkill litigation over logging of Chaelundi State Forest.

This paper explores the concept of remedies in the context of Australian anti-discrimination legislation in the workplace. It highlights the paradox between the individualized nature of a complaint and the necessity for a complaint to establish membership of a class. This paradox has deterred tribunals and courts from devising class-based remedies for discriminatory harms.

Most legal expert systems attempt to implement complex models of legal reasoning. Yet the utility of a legal expert system lies not in the extent to which it simulates a lawyer's approach to a legal problem, but in the quality of its predictions and of its arguments. A complex model of legal reasoning is not necessary: a successful legal expert system can be based upon a simplified model of legal reasoning.

Some researchers have based their systems upon a jurisprudential approach to the law, yet lawyers are patently able to operate without any jurisprudential insight. A useful legal expert system should be capable of producing advice similar to that which one might get from a lawyer, so it should operate at the same pragmatic level of abstraction as does a lawyer-not at the more philosophical level of jurisprudence.

A legal expert system called SHYSTER has been developed to demonstrate that a useful legal expert system can be based upon a pragmatic approach to the law. SHYSTER has a simple representation structure which simplifies the problem of knowledge acquisition. Yet this structure is complex enough for SHYSTER to produce useful advice.

SHYSTER is a case-based legal expert system (although it has been designed so that it can be linked with a rule-based system to form a hybrid legal expert system). Its advice is based upon an examination of, and an argument about, the similarities and differences between cases. SHYSTER attempts to model the way in which lawyers argue with cases, but it does not attempt to model the way in which lawyers decide which cases to use in those arguments. Instead, it employs statistical techniques to quantify the similarity between cases. It decides which cases to use in argument, and what prediction it will make, on the basis of that similarity measure.

SHYSTER is of a general design: it provides advice in areas of case law that have been specified by a legal expert using a specification language. Four different, and disparate, areas of law have been specified for SHYSTER, and its operation has been tested in each of those legal domains.

Testing of SHYSTER in these four domains indicates that it is exceptionally good at predicting results, and fairly good at choosing cases with which to construct its arguments. SHYSTER demonstrates the viability of a pragmatic approach to legal expert system design.

This paper reports upon an empirical study of the place of law and legal duties in the governance of Australian public companies. A fuller discussion of the findings from this empirical research project is to be found in: Tomasic and Bottomley, Directing the Top 500: Corporate Governance and Accountability in Australian Companies, (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1993). The debate concerning the legal duties and obligations of management of corporations became quite heated in Australia following the corporate excesses of the 1980s. Many corporations exploited the looseness of the legal rules for the control of business; weak regulatory structures also operated to the disadvantage of shareholders and creditors. The study is based upon data derived from a series of interviews conducted with officers from the top 500 Australian listed public companies. Interviews were held with 95 public company directors and 55 advisers of public companies. The adviser group comprised leading corporate lawyers, liquidators, auditors and corporate regulators. Interviews took place in five Australian state capital cities and all interviews were undertaken personally by the principal investigators. This article examines perceptions of corporate citizenship held by directors and goes on to contrast these with actual corporate decision making in the context of the legal requirements placed upon directors of Australian companies. The article also examines the structure of Australian corporate decision making processes by the board of directors.

The two different categories of legal AI system are described, and legal analysis systems are chosen as objects of study. So-called judgment machines are discussed, but it is decided that research in legal AI systems would be best carried-out in the area of legal expert systems. A model of legal reasoning is adopted, and two different methods of legal knowledge representation are examined: rule-based systems and case-based systems. It is argued that a rule-based approach to legal expert systems is inadequate given the requirements of lawyers and the nature of legal reasoning about cases. A new, eclectic approach is proposed, incorporating both rule-based and case-based knowledge representation. It is claimed that such an approach can form the basis of an effective and useful legal expert system.