Law & Justice

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
  • (2007) Chan, Janet; Dixon, David
    Journal Article
    In 1997, the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service concluded that a state of `systemic and entrenched corruption' existed in the police organization. Major reforms were introduced in the wake of the Commission, including the appointment of a new Police Commissioner, organizational restructuring, a complete revamp of recruit education, as well as increased monitoring and accountability. The magnitude and scope of the Commission's reform programme was bold and ambitious by international standards. This article takes stock of the impact of the Commission 10 years after the publication of its Final Report. Drawing on interviews with key informants, official reports and other documentary sources, the article analyses the activities of the Commission, the intentions of its recommendations and the implementation and consequences of reform. The lessons of the NSW experience are salutary not only for understanding the vagaries of police reform, they also demonstrate the complex relationship between police organizations and the volatile political environments in which they increasingly need to operate.

  • (2005) Huang, Hui
    Journal Article
    This article is largely prompted by the two recently promulgated regulations governing takeovers in China. The goal of this article is to critically examine the legal takeover regime in China and to put forward proposals for reform. To outline the discussion, Part II describes the stock market, the takeover law, and the takeover activities in China. Two legislative goals, namely contestability of takeovers and shareholder protection, are set out in Part III. Under these principles, Part IV and Part V explore the issues of tender offer and anti takeover defenses, respectively. Specifically, Part IV focuses on information disclosure and other major rules relating to takeovers. It appears that these rules are in line with the international norm and acceptably workable in the context of China. Furthermore, Part V explores the serious problems that are associated with anti-takeover defenses. China's law seems to be both over inclusive and under inclusive in this respect. After an in depth comparative analysis of the legal regimes in the U.S., UK, and Australia, it is apparent that those regimes are not suitable for China's local conditions. Lastly, this article proposes a regime in which shareholders could veto the use of takeover defenses ex post, while requiring that certain defensive measures be decided ex ante. This proposal could well suit China's needs because it not only gives shareholders sufficient protection, but also preserves necessary flexibility for management to efficiently respond to truly undesirable tender offers.

  • (2006) Huang, Hui
    Journal Article
    The object of this article is to examine the recent legal reforms to the Company Law and the Securities Law of the People’s Republic of China. These reforms have made a number of substantial changes to these two laws, bringing them more closely into line with their counterparts in more developed economies. Despite many commendable achievements, these law reforms are however not without some problems. Nevertheless, it is argued here that the impact of these reforms on China’s economic development will be profound and that they will provide an excellent basis for further reforms in this area.

  • (2006) Huang, Hui
    Journal Article
    Determining the proper class of plaintiffs that might be allowed to sue an insider trader for damages has been a very difficult task. The article will first discuss the development of three main approaches to the issue, namely the privity approach, the contemporaneous trader approach and the nondisclosure-period trader approach. This is followed by a detailed discussion of who are the individual investors specifically harmed by insider trading, since the scope of potential plaintiffs is inherently related to the issues of causation and harm. It is recommended that the nondisclosure-period trader approach properly reflects the nature of harm caused by insider trading and eliminates the uncertainty of determining who qualifies as a plaintiff. Moreover, in order to avoid potential excessive damages due to the large number of plaintiffs under this approach, caps must be provided to limit the damages to some multiple of defendant’s illicit gains, depending on how far private suits are intended to serve a deterrent purpose.

  • (2005) Huang, Hui
    Journal Article
    The purpose of this article is to critically examine Chinas insider trading regulation, and based upon the results of such examination, set out reform proposals for China. With the benefit of overseas experience, in a relatively short period of time, China has made a remarkable achievement in setting up its insider trading regulatory regime. There are, however, some serious problems with the Chinese law, due to the uncritical implantation of the ideas from foreign sources. This is strikingly illustrated by the loopholes in the definition of insiders which are inherently related to the confusion around the underlying theory of insider trading liability. The article first broadly describes the background of the regulation of insider trading in China, and then offers a detailed discussion of its content. Based on this, a critique of Chinas insider trading regulation is carried out. It appears that China has hastily imported two conflicting insider trading theories, namely the equality of access theory and the fiduciary-duty-based theories which include the classical theory and the misappropriation theory. A careful analysis suggests that the equality of access theory is preferable to the fiduciary-duty-based theories, especially in the context of China. It is further submitted that the Australian information connection only approach to the definition of insiders is both theoretically justifiable and practically manageable, and thus should be introduced to reform Chinas insider trading regulation.

  • (2007) Luke, Garth; Cunneen, Chris
    Journal Article
    The purpose of this journal article is twofold. First, it provides a discussion of the use of recidivism as a measure of effectiveness of criminal justice interventions, and, secondly, there is discussion of an evaluation of a juvenile post-release support program. The article argues that there has been a significant growth in recidivist studies, particularly as a measure of effectiveness. However there has been less and less attention placed on the limitations of measures of recidivism, or the nature of extraneous factors that influence re-offending. We use an evaluation study we conducted of the Post Release Support Program (PRSP) for juvenile offenders in New South Wales to explore these issues further. One of the interesting points to the study was that, while the statistical results on re-offending were not conclusive, the qualitative interviews among staff and offenders were overwhelmingly positive about the program. For us this raises the question: what value do we place on recidivism in evaluating a program when qualitative outcome information appears more conclusive?

  • (2007) Huang, Hui
    Journal Article
    With China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (‘WTO’), the gradual opening of previously closed industry sectors to foreign investment and the continued strong growth of the Chinese economy, merger and acquisition (‘M&A’) activity has become an increasingly attractive alternative to greenfield investment to foreign investors. In the 1980s, the first wave of foreign direct investment (‘FDI’) in China mostly took the form of joint ventures, including equity joint venture enterprises (‘EJV’) and contractual joint venture enterprises (‘CJV’). A second wave followed in the 1990s in the form of wholly foreign-owned enterprises (‘WFOE’). Now a third wave – cross-border M&A – is gaining strength. Foreign investors are becoming more inclined to invest in China by merging or acquiring existing Chinese companies, particularly the leading players in the fields, because M&A transactions offer foreign investors immediate market access with minimal business risk and the acquired business can be converted to foreign-invested enterprises (‘FIE’) for favourable treatment. The increased pace of foreign M&A activity has contributed to restructuring of the foreign M&A regime in China. On 8 August 2006, six Chinese government agencies, led by the Ministry of Commerce (‘MOFCOM’) of the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’), jointly promulgated the Provisions on the Takeover of Domestic Enterprises by Foreign Investors (‘2006 Regulation’). This Regulation became effective on 8 September 2006, replacing the previous Tentative Provisions on the Takeover of Domestic Enterprises by Foreign Investors (‘2003 Tentative Regulation’), which were in force since 12 April 2003. The 2006 Regulation, taken together with several other instruments issued either before or after its promulgation, constitutes a systematic regulatory framework governing foreign M&A activity in China. This paper considers the central features of this newly introduced 2006 Regulation and then analyses the factors responsible for its adoption. This paper also examines the possible implications it will have for foreign M&A transactions in China, which includes a discussion on the problems with the enforcement of the 2006 Regulation and a proposal for improvement.

  • (2006) Huang, Hui
    Journal Article
    This article aims to examine the “possession versus use” debate in the context of insider trading from an international perspective. It appears that the debate has so far largely occurred in the US with little research examining the positions of other jurisdictions. This article therefore conducts a comparative analysis of the legal responses to the issue in various jurisdictions, including the US, the UK, Australia and Canada. Indeed, the US debate traditionally lists only two approaches, namely the use standard and the possession standard. In contrast, at the international level, the treatment of the issue can be more appropriately categorized into four different approaches, including the strict possession, the strict use, the modified use and the modified possession standards. After a careful analysis of these four standards, it is submitted that the modified possession standard is most appropriate.

  • (2009) Greenleaf, Graham
    Journal Article
    Many examples of innovation in relation to information goods involve works in which various parties have proprietary (copyright) interests, but also involve the public having rights to use those works in ways that involve some of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner. They involve copyright’s “public domain” in the expanded sense of all “public rights”: those aspects of copyright law and practice that are important in determining the ability of the public to use works without obtaining a licence on terms set (and changeable) by the copyright owner. The Creative Commons slogan “Some Rights Reserved” sums up rather well the way in which intellectual goods combine proprietary and non-proprietary elements. However, most examples of this broader public domain do not involve the use of Creative Commons licences. The theme of this article is what these examples have in common, how Australia’s copyright law and the institutions that support innovation have paid insufficient attention to what they have in common, and how – in Australia at least – we need to have a law reform review that will have these common elements (the copyright “public domain”) as its focus. Eight examples of where Australia’s copyright public domain is in need of reform are considered, as are some of the interconnections between them. Along the way, consideration is given to how the public domain in any particular country comprises both “global” and “national” elements, with examples of what makes Australia’s public domain distinctive.

  • (2010) Greenleaf, Graham; Mowbray, Andrew; Chung, Philip
    Journal Article
    The Commonwealth Legal Information Institute (CommonLII – www.commonlii.org – pronounced ‘Common-lee’), is a non-profit and free access website for legal information from all countries that are members of the Commonwealth and their territories (more than 60). CommonLII also covers a small number of significant non-Commonwealth countries and territories that have a legal system based on the common law. The main purpose of CommonLII is to provide a comparative law facility by which the laws of all common law countries can be searched and compared. In relation to case law, CommonLII assists in making the ideal of an international common law a reality, by providing the case law collection with the broadest geographical scope, and the only free access international citator (LawCite). In relation to legislation, CommonLII makes it easier to compare legislative developments in the same subject-areas across Commonwealth countries, and can therefore assist in the process of law reform, as well as increasing the transparency of each country’s legal system. CommonLII also makes it easier to find commentaries on the law from Commonwealth and common law countries, including law reform reports and some law journals. This paper explains CommonLII’s development since its launch in 2005 (its partners, scope and supporters; the range of content from each country; and technical features, illustrated by searches), emphasising the significance of the addition of the English Reports 1220-1873 and the LawCite international citator. It concludes with an outline of likely future developments due to funding provided for 2010-11 by the Australian Research Council, Commonwealth Secretariat and Australian Attorney-General’s Department.