The recent Supreme Court decision of Queensland v B [2008] 2 Qd R 562 has significant implications for the law that governs consent and abortions. The judgment purports to extend the ratio of Secretary, Department of Health and Community Services (NT) v JWB and SMB (1992) 175 CLR 218 (Marion's Case) and impose a requirement of court approval for terminations of pregnancy for minors who are not ...

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forever changed the face of electoral equality in the United States. Today, almost forty years later, the Act is considered one of the most pivotal pieces of federal legislation in our country’s history and the “most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted.” Congress has revisited various segments of the Act ave times since its enactment. A key 19...

For two decades, clinicians have been guided by an agreement about the appropriate use of artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH). In general, ANH has been seen as a medical treatment that patients or their surrogates may accept or refuse on the basis of the same considerations that guide all other treatment decisions: the potential benefits, risks, and discomfort of the treatment and the reli...

In this paper we show that the static conflict resolution strategy of XACML is not always sufficient to satisfy the policy needs of an organisation where multiple parties provide their own individual policies. Different conflict resolution strategies are often required for different situations. Thus combining one or more sets of policies into a single XACML ‘super policy’ that is evaluated by a...

Knowledge management in higher education is a set of organizational processes that support creating and transferring the knowledge in these institutions and allows for achieving organizational and university objectives. Therefore, for the proper management of organizational knowledge, appropriate tools are needed to be able to be aware of the effectiveness of knowledge management in organizatio...

This paper describes ongoing research into planning in an uncertain environment. In particular, it introduces U-Plan, a planning system that constructs quantitatively ranked plans given an incomplete description of the state of the world. U-Plan uses a Dempster­ Shafer interval to characterise uncertain and incomplete information about the state of the world. The planner takes as input what is ...