Volume 15, Issue 3 -

Since the unsuccessful experiment of the Rodotà Commission, Italy has become a laboratory in the intellectual construction and practical defense of the beni comuni (common goods or commons). The interaction between a deeply rooted network of social movements and the innovative legal thinking generated in the academia led to the great success of the 2011 Referendum on water as a common good and became the theoretical background of multitude occupations of abandoned spaces that took place in the past years. This paper is about these latter experiences, and on the way in which ideology, activism, and legal practice interact in order to obtain the recognition of the occupied spaces as sources of common utility, and therefore external to the public/private binomial and excluded from the logic of commodification.

This paper focuses on the possibility of adopting a restorative justice approach and introducing mediation in dealing with conflicts that arise in the health care system due to medical malpractice. It moves from the observation that the steep increase in reported criminal cases (mainly negligent bodily injuries and negligent homicide) involving physicians has encouraged the development of “defensive medicine.” This is a questionable practice by which physicians and surgeons hope to avoid criminal charges or civil actions resulting from their professional behavior. After presenting the available statistical data on medical malpractice and on “defensive medicine” in Italy, this paper will seek to evaluate whether the introduction of mediation – which is allowed by the Italian Act 67/2014 – can delay the adoption of an attitude of defensive medicine and, in a wider perspective, discusses whether restorative justice and mediation in the health care system are feasible and desirable.

This article explores the origin of private property in the Colombian legal system. The authors use Supreme Court case law from the twentieth century to analyze in-depth how wastelands ( baldíos ) come to be owned. Supreme Court decisions are organized and examined with respect to issues pertaining to appropriate modes of acquisition of wastelands, either occupation and labor or state grant, and the rules of evidence to prove whether the owner of a specific plot is the state, the titleholder or the settler ( colono ). This article demonstrates the difficult task of establishing simple clear rules to determine the ownership over tracts of land categorized as wastelands through the examination of the ambiguities of legislation and of the contradictory Supreme Court’s rule of law. It also identifies the areas of contention, contestation and contradiction in the regulation of this matter and highlights how litigants, settlers, titleholders and Supreme Court Justices are part of a constant struggle to define the particular meaning of ownership over wastelands.

The primary purpose of this research is to determine whether the institutional design of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) in Latin America and the Caribbean meets the criteria of independence and professionalism established in the principles of the Lima and Mexico Declarations of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) as a condition for the development of an efficient external governmental audit whose results may provide input for improved performance by audited bodies for the benefit of society. In accordance with the descriptive variables defined for this paper and in function of the information sources consulted, we were able to establish that the institutional design of the regional SAIs fulfil these principles. Nevertheless, because this conclusion is based on an analysis of the constitutional and legal norms that regulate SAIs and the documents generated by SAIs, such as auditing guidelines and manuals, management reports and audit reports, we cannot say that this effectively means that SAIs meet the parameters of independence and professionalism intended by the INTOSAI. Instead, political, institutional and communication challenges have arisen that must be overcome to move from formal compliance to real application.

The contemporary period is characterized by intense scholarly, legal and socio-political debates about the conceptual framework, which ought to guide state responses to unmitigated violence resulting from protracted armed conflicts across the globe. The prevalence of military interventionist discourse in the media and governmental organizations necessitates further reflection on the international community’s legal obligations not only with respect to putting an end to violence, but holding aggressors of armed perpetrations individually accountable for political unrest, economic destabilization and loss of life as well as responsible for the reestablishment of social and political order on the ground, which are to ensure human security in the process of post-conflict nation-building. The analysis of two recent conflicts in Kosovo and Iraq will provide a critical foundation for the examination of international bodies’ and state actors’, such as the United Nations (in the case of Kosovo) and of the United States (in the case of Iraq), implementation of legal mechanisms by which the jus post bellum principles can be made useful for, both, (i) the purposes of providing justifications for war and (ii) post-conflict restoration of order. In addition, relevant connections will be examined between the principles guiding humanitarian interventions and just war narratives, which make military intermediations publically palpable. The study and conclusions drawn may prove especially pertinent to a continuing diplomatic stalemate with regard to armed conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, renewed tensions in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and various micro-insurgencies in Somalia, Libya or Mali.