Author: NLM Correspondent

By Ana Revenga and Meagan Dooley Around the world, the lives of women and girls have improved dramatically over the past 50 years. Life expectancy has increased, fertility rates have fallen, two-thirds of countries have reached gender parity in primary education, and women now make up over half of all university graduates. Yet despite this progress, some elements of gender inequality remain incredibly sticky, resistant to change. Access to economic opportunities is one such domain. Women opt out of the labour force in many countries due to structural barriers, social norms, and child rearing responsibilities. When women do work, they…

By Kevin Munger TikTok, a social media platform targeted at young mobile phone users, was the second-most downloaded app in the world in 2019. It was the most downloaded app in July 2020. It’s also become a geopolitical football. Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok has been banned by India along with 58 other Chinese-owned apps in July in response to escalating border tensions between the two countries. The Trump administration issued an executive order banning TikTok and Chinese-owned messaging platform WeChat from engaging in transactions in the United States in August. The company sued the Trump administration in response to the ban. As a political scientist who studies social media, I’ve…

No figure from the 18th-century “age of revolution” had as extraordinary a life as Toussaint Louverture. He was born a slave in the 1740s, in one of the cruellest and deadliest environments humans have ever created: the French Caribbean colony then called Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), where rapacious white planters worked hundreds of thousands of captive people to death to feed Europe’s growing taste for sugar and coffee. In the early 1790s, Toussaint helped start the largest and most successful slave rebellion in history and then moulded the rebels into a remarkably effective army. In 1794 he agreed to join forces…

Now that many firms have implemented comprehensive home office security measures, lawyers must turn their attention to increasing efficiency while working remotely. By Gulam Zade After the transition to remote-work models in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, lawyers faced an uptick in security and privacy issues. Many home networks were not as secure as those in the office. Cyber criminals took advantage of fear and confusion surrounding the virus and deployed targeted phishing scams. Insecure passwords and the use of personal devices for work tasks put private data at high risk for exposure. Fortunately, now, months later, many law firms…

As non-equity ranks continue to grow across both sides of the Atlantic are firms losing sight of the need to maintain long term sustainability? By James Willer Changes in partnership structure is a well-established trend across the global legal market, impacting firms of all sizes. Central to this shift has been the rise of non-equity partners, now a recognizable industry staple. Over the last ten years, the number of non-equity partners across the Am Law 200 has increased by 36% from 17,086 to 23,166. On average, non-equity partners now represent a 44% share of the overall partnership at Am Law 200…

And a forthright judge speaks By Carmel Rickard As Kenya celebrated the 10th anniversary of its constitution, with virtual seminars, webinars and other discussions, one of the most serious challenges yet brought under the constitution is making its way through the courts. That problem is the failure of the country’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta, to appoint more than 40 judges nominated by the Judicial Service Commission. And, equally significant, his failure to abide by a court order that the judges be appointed. In February three Kenyan judges of the high court’s constitutional and human rights division delivered a damning judgment. The…

The era when the LSK paid for its colonial sins By Gilbert Munyumbu Understanding how the LSK attempted to restrain the Jomo Kenyatta regime from its excesses requires clarity in two main areas. First, we need to understand the general state of rule of law under the Kenyatta rule, and second, we must interrogate the Kenyatta government’s attitude towards systematic oversight and restraint, which come through both horizontal and vertical accountability, by tracing the relationship the government built with institutions emerging out of these two types of accountability. The interaction with the LSK itself would need to be relayed in…

In the months since the pandemic cratered the price of oil, the financial fallout has spread from drilling companies to refineries and oilfield maintenance companies. Now the crash has claimed another, more unlikely victim: The only system built to capture carbon emissions from a coal plant in the US, one of only two worldwide. The $1 billion system, known as Petra Nova, was built in 2017 to catch CO2 from one unit of a coal plant near Houston. That plant is one of the dirtiest in Texas, both in terms of climate and air quality impacts. Petra Nova was meant…

Aviation has yet to take full advantage of the potential of APIs, and lags behind others such as Telecoms and Fintech. The air transport industry has been profoundly altered over the past few months and will continue to do so amid the ongoing shifts from COVID-19. Airports are still unusually quiet in many places and many airlines fear they may not recover their losses from seeing thousands of planes grounded. The knock-on effect is already causing huge job losses with fears of greater future potential redundancies, including at major airlines, travel companies and ground handlers globally. While some holidaying passengers…

Data analytics can reduce mundane, manual tasks and enable global trade teams to focus on strategic planning to deliver tangible benefits to their companies. By Keith Haurie   Customs authorities around the world are embracing the use of big data and data analytics, a development that creates risk and opportunities for importers and exporters. Indeed, the World Customs Organization (WCO) has pushed this agenda for several years. In 2016, for example, the WCO’s International Customs Day carried the theme ’Digital Customs: Progressive Engagement’. Customs agencies were urged to adopt the latest technology, and WCO members were invited to use cloud computing, blockchain,…