news 2018

Two legal scholars from the University of Birmingham's Law School have argued for the repeal of the 8th Amendment - Ireland's law preventing abortion taking place. In their new book, 'Repealing the 8th: Reforming Irish Abortion Law', Professor Fiona de Londras and Máiréad Enright propose new legislation to make abortion care lawfully accessible should constitutional change be approved in the Irish referendum.

Research news The volume of digital data produced and stored by companies is growing. Cloud technology offers a convenient solution: IT service providers offer storage space or software which enables data to be saved remotely. But how can companies be sure that their data is protected against unauthorized access or deletion? Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have studied this issue and developed a model which allows service providers to be checked and certified reliably.

Discrimination law has limited capacity to address the gender pay gap, writes legal expert Alice Orchiston. If women discover they are earning less than their male counterparts for the same jobs, their legal avenues for pursuing equal pay are limited. It's difficult to prove and costly to litigate. The federal Sex Discrimination Act makes it unlawful for an employer to provide less favourable terms and conditions of employment to an employee "because of" that employee's sex.

Topological effects, such as those found in crystals whose surfaces conduct electricity while their bulk does not, have been an exciting topic of physics research in recent years and were the subject of the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has found novel topological phenomena in a different class of systems - open systems, where energy or material can enter or be emitted, as opposed to closed systems with no such exchange with the outside.