1,721,081 research outputs found
Introduction: The Brave New World of Private Law and Digital Assets
No full textThis chapter provides an overview of chapters contained in this edited this collection, entitled Private Law, Digital Assets, and Infrastructure. The book contains ten chapters, divided into four parts. Part I deals with the broader question of private law as it attempts to respond to digital assets. Parts II and III deal with specific issues that arise in the interplay between this new technology and the doctrinal categories of contract and fraud, respectively. Part IV deals with perhaps the most important issue in this field: the impact which AI and digital assets has on the environment. Each chapter makes a novel and cutting edge contribution to the ever expanding body of scholarship in this exciting field.Mark Giancaspro and P. T. Babi
Introduction: Bringing Religion to Life
No full textFirst Online: 20 July 2024This book is the second volume in our project that brings together writers who are interested in the connections between their religious affiliations and beliefs and their professional pursuits. Our first volume, published as Religion Matters: The Contemporary Relevance of Religion (Springer, 2020) sought to provide what we considered to be a much-needed perspective on the way in which religion operates within, and influences, the modern world.Rick Sarre and P. T. Babi
Private Law Is Both the Question and the Answer: Property, Contract, and Enduring Questions About the Legal Treatment of Digital Assets
No full textPublished online 01 January 2026As governments and legal systems attempt to address the adoption of new technologies of any kind, digital objects included, the development of law is often overlooked. More often than not, law plays a catch-up game, responding to change once it has happened and, far too often, once it is too late for the law to manage challenges that may emerge. It is important, then, that a legal system consider, to the extent possible, challenges posed by new technologies before they occur, and that it be ready to respond to them with innovative solutions. Here we identify just one aspect of necessary legal change, what we call the private law question. How, when forced to answer, will the private law respond to the changes being wrought by the emergence of digital assets and so ensure that it progresses logically and efficiently? The private law question is easily demonstrated by reference to two major classifications of private law: property and contract. The former asks when the law will recognise and enforce rights and entitlements concerning novel digital assets. The latter asks how the law of contract, which facilitates legal exchanges and imposes a mandatory minimum threshold of ‘legal sufficiency’, sees value in digital assets. In suggesting how these questions might be answered, this chapter contains three Parts. The first two summarise the core responses to both the property question and the contract question. The third draws two conclusions that follow from the analysis: (i) that what we see revealed in the emphasis, both in law and scholarship, on the property question is a legal form of the Matthew Effect—that the focus on one question necessarily impoverishes the development of answers to other important questions about the legal response to digital assets. And, (ii), we suggest that the answer to this legal Matthew Effect is to see the questions that we might ask—property, contract, and so forth—not as discrete questions, but as components of a larger, more holistic approach to law which, we argue, is contained within the concept of private law.P. T. Babie and Mark Giancaspr
Introduction: seeing further over the horizon - A world of limitless possibilities
Full text linkDale Stephens and Paul Babi
Protecting religious freedom under bills of rights: Australia as microcosm
No full textWhile the world undergoes a religious revival, the protection of religious freedom, particularly of minority religious groups, seems increasingly under threat. Most religious scholars report that religious liberty is ‘treading water at best, retreating at worst’. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, nearly 70 per cent of the world's 6.8 billion people live in countries with high restrictions on religion. Religious constraints take two forms: ‘official curbs on faith and … hostility that believers endure at the hands of fellow citizens’. All of this is troubling, especially in light of the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), one of the great international breakthroughs in the protection of human rights, came only in the last century. From any perspective, human rights, and especially religious freedom, appear to be under threat, making current both its international status and domestic protection through constitutional or other legislative means. While many do, not every democratic state provides the comprehensive protection for human rights including religious freedom — found at the international level. Australia's record, for instance, serves as a microcosm of the international debate about protecting religious freedom using constitutional or legislative instruments in an attempt to balance the collective, the community, the society, against the individual, the group, the minority. And the Australian experience demonstrates, perhaps most dramatically, the discordance that can exist between domestic and international protection.Paul Babie and Neville Rocho
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Law as change: engaging with the life and scholarship of Adrian Bradbrook
Full text linkIn 2011, Professor Adrian J Bradbrook retired from a distinguished scholarly career spanning over forty years. During this time, he made a significant contribution to teaching and scholarship not only in property law — specifically to leasehold tenancies law and easements and restrictive covenants — but also to energy law, especially the emerging and growing field of solar energy. This book brings together those people who worked closely with Bradbrook, each an expert in their own right, to honour a career by critically engaging with the contributions Bradbrook made to property and energy law. Each author has chosen a topic that both fits with their own cutting-edge research and explores the related contributions made by Bradbrook. Most unusually, this collection ranges widely across property law, energy law and human rights.Paul Babie and Paul Leadbete
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