A hostile tender offer is the most dramatic occurrence in corporate life. It pits incumbent management against the insurgent who claims to be getting rid of dead wood. The target shareholders usually incur large losses when management succeeds in defeating the offer and the target remains independent. An array of defensive measures have been used as embattled managers have fought to keep their seats. The validity and effectiveness of these measures depend largely on the regulatory scheme for tender offers in the particular jurisdiction and the legal duties of the directors.

The picture of pre-Protectorate and Protectorate land tenure that emerges from the reported judicial resolutions of land disputes in Zanzibar and the legislation introduced is that of overlapping interests in one and same parcel of land (such as planting banana trees on someone else's land), a charitable toleration of land occupation by persons who had little but their labour to subsist by (such as not having to pay rents on the Sultan's lands or waqf properties, or at least very little), mobility by way of settlement on unoccupied lands through negotiation or silent acquiescence without formalistic titles as a prerequisite, and a determination to protect land security for families or for the poor against Government taxes, private debt attachments or fragmentary inheritance rules (such as through waqf, perpetual trust). Alongside these elements were the commercial uses and dispositions of land, including outright sales and conditional sales for debts, and the assignment to trees of an economic value distinct from that of the land. Against this complex background the British Protectorate Government extended and consolidated its public land holdings, specifying how the land was to be used for what may be called the “aggregate economic welfare produced by … unequal distribution of resources”, regularizing the charging of rents, and gradually breaking down the security of waqf immovables. After the First World War, despite political stability, social instability relating to land tenure broke out and plagued the Protectorate to its end. There were major dispossessions from land resulting from the government's policy of protecting the landlord's right to charge rents and of allowing creditors to sell land for the purpose of recovering accumulated debts that could no longer be paid during economic depressions. The loss of access to land led to the loss of identification with the land.

The primary purpose of this article is to enrich the understanding of tort law in Ethiopia and Eritrea and how it affects the environment. Its standpoint is both positive and normative. Its secondary goal is to clarify the affinities, often hidden, between the issues raised by tort law in developing countries now and the same issues as they emerged in the Western tradition in the past. Methodologically, the article considers the interplay between two powerful tools of analysis: law and economics, and legal pluralism (as informed by the doctrine of legal stratification).

The struggle of Nigerian civil society for the establishment of a democratic polity, founded on the rule of law and the respect for the human and peoples’ rights of ordinary citizens of Nigeria, has been waged against the military governments that have ruled by force for the better part of its nearly three and a half decades of independent existence. During this struggle, there have been many cases of seizure of the passports of prominent opposition activists by members of the security agencies of the government. Such acts have generated much international condemnation of the government, as well as some judicial disapproval.

In antithesis to legislation on land tenure introduced through the Land Registration Act, 1959, premised on the notion in English common law that the right to allocate land was equivalent to exclusive ownership, “ownership” under customary tenure in Kenya was “essentially heterogeneous and divisible”. People differentiated by age, gender and wealth had bundles of rights defined, in Okoth-Ogendo's words, by “the status differentia which a particular category of membership in a production unit carries”. The complexity and elasticity of customary land law, Okoth-Ogendo demonstrates, derived from its separation of access rights from allocative rights, and the subjection of the latter “to the economic tasks required of the former”. This distinction and the ensuing visibility in legal discourse of both use rights and rights of allocation was critical, as Okoth-Ogendo indicates, in ensuring “the proprietary position” of women, the primary agriculturalists, in societies such as that of the Kikuyu, which are frequently classified as patrilineal.

The elections in South Africa are only a start in that nation's task of purging itself of the inheritance of white minority rule. However successfully the democratic process endows organs of state with legitimacy in international forums, by and of itself the fact of black enfranchisement will not change black attitudes to a legal system which for decades willingly implicated itself in the systematic oppression of the non-white majority.

In Mauritius, the Abolition of Death Penalty Act, 1995, provides for the total abolition of capital punishment. In its place, courts are now empowered to impose a sentence of penal servitude for life. Mauritius thus joins Namibia, Mozambique, The Gambia and Cape Verde as the only African countries to have abolished capital punishment by statute (although in 1995 the military government in The Gambia reinstated it). As noted in (1995) 39 J.A.L. 192, the Constitutional Court in South Africa has ruled the death sentence unconstitutional in S v. Makwanyane and Mchunu (now reported in 1995 (3) S.A. 391; 1995 (6) B.C.L.R. 665).

The Constitution of Uganda was adopted on 22 September, 1995, and full details of the document will appear in the next issue of the J.A.L. One of the most interesting institutions established is the Uganda Human Rights Commission. Composed of a Chairperson, who must be a judge of the High Court or qualified to hold that office, and not less than three other persons, the Commission will have wide-ranging investigative and promotional functions. However, it is the enforcement powers of the Commission that are unusual. Traditionally, national institutions (offices of the ombudsman and human rights commissions) have no enforcement powers and can only recommend corrective action. In recent years these powers have been enlarged. For example, in Ghana the Commissioner on Human Rights and Administrative Justice has the power to bring proceedings in a competent court for a remedy “to secure the termination of the offending action or conduct” (article 218(d)(iii) Constitution of Ghana).

In a bid to attract foreign investment, the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre Act, 1994, provided for the establishment of the Investment Promotion Centre to be responsible for the administration of investment activities in Ghana. This has been followed by the Free Zone Act, 1995. This establishes a Free Trade Board consisting ofthe Minister for Trade and Industry (as the chairperson) and eight other persons, four of whom must come from the private sector and two of whom must be women. The function of the Board is to oversee the establishment and operation of free zones. The Act provides for the establishment and development of free zones and free ports and the establishment of enterprises therein by corporations registered under the Companies Act, 1963, or a partnership registered under the Private Partnership Act, 1962. A free zone enterprise has the right to produce any type of goods and services for export except those that are environmentally hazardous.

The Code for the Protection of Children comprises 123 articles and sets out the rights of children. Amongst other things it prohibits their involvement in connection with armed conflicts, organized crime and designated forms of employment. It also provides for the provision of training for physically and mentally disturbed children and their integration into society as well as containing provisions for dealing with juvenile delinquents and their diversion from the criminal justice system.

The Constitutional Court in South Africa in In re Farieda Coetzee v. Government of the Republic of South Africa (unreported, 1995), has held unanimously that the power of a magistrates' court to issue an order to commit to prison a judgment debtor on account of a failure to satisfy a judgment debt violates the right to freedom contained in Chapter 3 of the Constitution. Applying the proviso in section 33 of the Constitution, the court accepted that the goal sought to be achieved, that is the provision of a mechanism for the enforcement of judgment debts, was a legitimate and reasonable governmental objective, but that ultimately the offending provisions in the Magistrates' Court Act were overly broad and thus outside the proviso in that they caught not only those who could pay but were refusing to do so, but also those who were genuinely unable to pay.