"This report represents the first stage of the Victorian Law Reform Commission's review of civil justice. The report identifies areas for future law reform and contains recommendations about reducing the cost and complexity of civil trials."--Provided by publisher.

For planners, officials, and citizens seeking to employ the principles of new urbanism to development in their community, Codifying New Urbanism, by the Congress for the New Urbanism, examines the various ways to do so by modifying their land development regulations. Heavily illustrated and in full color, this report describes new urbanist essentials, the steps to putting new urbanism to work in your community, and the successes of 12 communities who have followed the approaches described in the report. It also contains an extensive interview with a practitioner about his experience in championing and implementing new urbanism. Finally, it contains a survey of communities using new urbanism.

This volume investigates what role colonial communities and diaspora have had in shaping the Portuguese empire and its heritage, exploring topics such as Portuguese migration to Africa, the Ismaili and the Swiss presence in Mozambique, the Goanese in East Africa, the Chinese in Brazil, and the history of the African presence in Portugal.

The book, Economic Empowerment of Women in the Islamic World, discusses the economic, social, and political rights and status of women in Islam, which is theoretically given by the Islamic Jurisprudence (Shariah law). The chapters in this volume will address historical practices in comparison to the status of women in the contemporary Muslim world. Men and women in Islam, regardless of their age, social class, and education, are equal as citizens and individuals, but not identical in their rights and responsibilities. It can be observed from Islamic history that in the early age of Islam, women were given full confidence, trust, and high responsibilities in leadership, educational guidance, and decision-making.This volume will try to clarify the confusion in the status of the women in Islam that is presented by the media, as it is assumed that theoretical Islamic empowerment of women bears little relation to the real conditions of women in modern Muslim societies. It has been widely claimed in the media that Muslim women suffer more than men in Muslim societies and communities in terms of insecurity, domestic abuse, and low access to education and medical care. It is also stated in the press and media that absence of good governance also results in gender inequality and violation of the rights of Muslim women.This volume also aims to provide the solutions for the empowerment of women in the Islamic world. We assumed that without good governance, the status of women is not likely to improve. Muslim women have the potential to play a fundamental role in curbing corruption, social ills, violence, and crime in the Muslim world. This volume will make the case that in order to achieve stability and prosperity, the government must ensure a platform for women to participate in decision-making and hence benefit from the rights they are accorded in Islam.By covering a range of perspectives on the economic lives of Muslim women around the world, it hopes to shed light on the problems faced and to offer possible solutions to the empowerment of women in the Islamic world.

Aceh has become best known in our times for its twin disasters—the worst earthquake and tsunami of modern times in December 2004, and a long-running separatist conflict that rent Indonesia for most of its independent history. Although this book emerged from the process of recovery from those traumas, it turns the spotlight on a more positive and neglected claim Aceh has on our attention, as the Southeast Asian maritime state that most successfully and creatively maintained its independent place in the world until 1874. Like Burma, Siam and Vietnam, all better protected by geography, Aceh has its own story to tell of a unique culture struggling for survival through the European colonial era. Unfortunately the sources for this story are scattered, since Aceh’s own records have not well survived the ravages of climate, civil war and eventual foreign conquest. To recover its cosmopolitan history an unparalleled range of sources and skills had to be brought together. Aceh’s central role in the creation of Malay literature out of Arabic, Persian, Indian and Indonesian elements had to be explored with reference to texts surviving in a dozen world libraries (Teuku Iskandar, Amirul Hadi). The rich archeological record, neglected through the long years of conflict, had again to be brought into play (Daniel Perret), and the extensive relations of the Aceh sultanate with the Ottoman Empire (Ismail Göksoy and Ismail Kadı, Andrew Peacock & Annabel Gallop), Portugal (Jorge Alves), England (Annabel Gallop), and the Netherlands (Sher Banu and Jean Taylor) had to be explored, chiefly in European archives by experts in these respective fields. The result of this combined work in this volume is the most comprehensive picture so far of sources for the history of Aceh.