The public health challenges of moving dangerous substances across jurisdictions have led to a renewed international focus on the importance of the health perspective in the Basel Convention on Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. This paper systematically reviews the health dimensions of the Basel Convention and the ways in which the Convention can be strengthened. It analyses the limits of the health objective of the Convention in promoting public health and the environment and the potential for optimising it. The paper argues that an examination of the Convention's substantive, procedural, and institutional and implementation mechanisms highlights its failure to fully achieve its potential for health protection. Parties to the Convention have initiated measures to address this issue, but the design and functioning of the Convention itself constrain the full achievement of health goals, which in turn undermines the protection of human health and the environment. To optimise the health promotion, the author argues for an adaptive governance framework by bolstering the governance mechanisms of the Convention and the Secretariat, strengthening health cooperation between international health agencies and improving domestic implementation of the Convention by its Member States.

This paper seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the role of policy-based reasoning in the determination of duty of care questions. In order to do this, the first part explores the distinction between considerations of interpersonal justice and considerations of community welfare in the determination of duty questions. While imperfect, the distinction illuminates the nature of the factors taken into account by courts in determining duty of care questions and has practical as well as theoretical implications. The second part of the paper analyses the respective roles of interpersonal justice considerations and community welfare considerations in a sample of first instance and intermediate appellate cases from England and Canada. That study suggests that community welfare considerations play a far less significant role in determining duty cases at the first instance and intermediate appellate level than at the ultimate appellate level. Analysis of the cases also reveals significant differences between the English and Canadian courts in their approaches to the interpersonal justice and community welfare aspects of duty of care questions.

This paper interrogates the predisposition in favour of informal, low-intervention control styles of enforcement advocated by the ‘better regulation’ movement, and which resonates throughout the Hampton Report recommendations which are currently being implemented in the UK. It focuses on three practices that reflect the trend towards diverting regulatory enforcement action away from the courts in favour of reliance on formal administrative sanctioning powers ranging from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’: the use of negotiated penalty settlements, the acceptance of administrative undertakings (‘enforcement undertakings’) and the provision of firm-specific compliance advice by regulators. Each practice is explored through various analytical lenses which enable the underlying constitutional tensions to be identified and interrogated. In so doing, it demonstrates how the emphasis on bargaining, negotiation and discussions between regulators and those they are responsible for regulating advocated by the UK better regulation movement may antagonise several constitutional values, including transparency, accountability, due process and participation, as well as several values associated with formal conceptions of the rule of law. On the other hand, resort to negotiation and discussion in regulatory enforcement can generate important benefits, largely in facilitating the timely, creative and cost-effective resolution of enforcement disputes while avoiding the formality, delay and hostility associated with formal court adjudication. This ‘clash of logics’ can be traced to inherent differences between bargaining, on the one hand, and adjudication on the other. Bargaining and adjudication represent two quite different and distinct forms of ordering through which disputes can be resolved, and it is these differences that lie at the foundation of their respective virtues and shortcomings when employed to resolve disputes concerning regulatory violations.

In a recent study, the influential theorist of higher education Ronald Barnett suggests that one way for academics to address the pressures on their professional lives is to embrace a multidimensional concept of working time. Drawing on the analysis of space by the French philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvre, Barnett advocates conceiving academic practice as a continuum of interrelated strands rather than a set of discrete packages of activity subject to bureaucratic domination. This paper examines whether this approach can reassert agency on the part of academics and provide a site for resistance to the obsession on the part of managers and policy makers with outputs and the quantification of working hours. It sets Barnett's analysis in the context of other empirical studies in higher education literature on the management and allocation of workloads, particularly on tensions arising from conflicting demands of research and teaching. It also examines synergies between Barnett and other scholarship on the professional lives of law academics on the part of Bradney, Collier and Cownie. The paper concludes that a Lefebvrean analysis of how time and space are constituted by human activity provides a rigorous theoretical framework within which to reconstitute the coherence in academic practice which is sought by many in higher education.

Legal academics and practitioners have engaged in intense elaboration and defence of differing perspectives about the appropriate standard of corporate conduct, and unresolved debates surrounding this contemporary legal issue have proved intractable. The classical scholarship has become ghettoised in self-supporting ecosystems of inflexible exchange. Of necessity, a new conceptual approach has been proposed to address in an affirmative fashion the inevitable penumbra of uncertainty and institutional indeterminacy of corporate law, specifically in regard to stipulating an appropriate standard of corporate behaviour for the myriad of organisational activity. This is the Equitable Maximisation and Viability principle (EMV). This paper focuses on providing for some meaningful enforceable standards that ensure the principle is not precatory. Before this can be undertaken, it considers in a systematic and comprehensive manner corollary questions as to whether substantive private enforcement procedures can, and should, be used to monitor and challenge directors’ decision making. These insights allow the paper to open up the enforcement issue. The principal part of the paper identifies and examines various alternative ways of enforcing the principle and then argues for the use of one credible mechanism.

The business case for corporate environmental responsibility is the claim that behaving responsibly makes financial sense. It is impossible to exaggerate the contemporary significance of this claim, not least in legitimising environmental concerns in the corporate sphere. However, the business case is not without significant empirical and normative limitations, as is illustrated by the corporate environmental problem of supermarket waste. This paper evaluates enlightened shareholder value under s 172 of the Companies Act 2006 in light of such business case limitations. It suggests that s 172, by procedurally mandating the business case for corporate environmental responsibility, is a retrograde step which envisions not enlightened, but rather environmentally unenlightened, shareholders.

One of the concepts central to the ‘reconceiving’ of the ‘regulatory state’ during ‘the age of regulatory reform’ which we might trace back to the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s, has been that of the ‘hybrid’ form of economic organisation. Rejection of command-and-control regulation led, in the public sector, to the adoption of ‘marketmimicking’, a technique that claimed to replace the hierarchical direction of planning with the mobilisation of self-interest in ‘quasi-markets’, thereby merging ‘economic’ incentivisation with the ‘political’ stipulation of the markets' outcomes. In the private sector, institutions that had long been recognised to sit between contract and the company, of which the franchise had been the most thoroughly analysed within contract law, began to be regarded as ‘networks’.