Confidential Relationships

This book focuses the collective attention of psychotherapists, the legal community, social scientists, and ethicists on the moral, legal, and clinical problems of confidentiality in psychotherapeutic practice. By providing timely and important interdisciplinary contributions, the book opens the way to understanding, if not resolving, the conflicting interests and values at stake in the debate on confidentiality.

This book focuses the collective attention of psychotherapists, the legal community, social scientists, and ethicists on the moral, legal, and clinical problems of confidentiality in psychotherapeutic practice. By providing timely and important interdisciplinary contributions, the book opens the way to understanding, if not resolving, the conflicting interests and values at stake in the debate on confidentiality.

Handling personal and often sensitive information is central to daily practice in social and health services. However, the increasing emphasis on multi-disciplinary and inter-agency working required for effective, joined-up services presents new challenges and dilemmas in preserving citizens' rights to privacy. This book examines key philosophical, ethical and legal issues in the area of privacy and confidentiality and explores their implications for policy and practice. ,Offering a range of analytical frameworks the book focuses on different practice areas, including health and social care, children's services and criminal justice. The contributors from disciplines including law, philosophy, anthropology and the personal service professions bring their direct personal experience of working to create new systems and practices in a turbulent policy environment. The book provides a synoptic multi-disciplinary view of this increasingly challenging area where technological development, civil liberties, surveillance, health and welfare become inexorably intertwined. The book will be of key interest to professionals, managers, policy makers and academics in the health and personal social services. Students of social work, probation, medicine, nursing and professions allied to medicine will find a common multidisciplinary framework for their respective professional concerns to protect the interests and promote the wellbeing of clients, their families and the wider community.

For business investors in China, the legal handling of trade secrets is often crucial. However, initiatives are often complicated by a patchwork trade secrets protection system – pieced together haphazardly over the last two decades and drawing on disparate elements of competition law, contract law, employment law, and criminal law – that diverges in significant ways from global standards and corresponding regimes in other countries. Now at last interested parties can benefit richly from a thorough and practical approach to the subject. This detailed analysis of China’s trade secrets law provides in-depth information and guidance on such important factors as the following: the current framework of China’s trade secrets law, its past development and its ongoing trends; legal comparison of China’s trade secrets law with various international, regional, and national schemes; what constitutes trade secrets infringement in China and what remedies are available; and the legal interaction in China between employment relations and trade secrets protection. The author pays close attention to judicial practice and precedent in the areas of civil remedies, criminal punishment, and administrative penalties. She also offers insightful proposals formulated to align China’s trade secrets law more efficiently with prevailing global standards and generally improve the mechanisms for its implementation. Corporate counsel and international lawyers concerned with intellectual property rights or labour law in China will greatly appreciate the knowledgeable guidance this book affords. They will gain a deeply informed perspective that allows them to avoid infringement, to battle it effectively if occasion arises, and to plan dispute resolution strategies for contingencies involving trade secrets protection in China.

Journalists and Confidential Sources explores the fraught and widespread reliance by journalists on anonymous sources, whistleblowers, and others to whom they owe an obligation of confidentiality. It examines the difficulties afflicting such relationships; analyses the deteriorating "right to know" and freedom of expression frameworks; and explores solutions and reforms. The book discusses key Australian and international source protection ethics rules, statutes, court cases, law enforcement actions, and case studies. It highlights weakness in journalists’ professional practice codes governing confidentiality obligations; discusses inadequate journalistic appreciation of the importance of establishing clear terms and conditions underpinning confidentiality obligations; and identifies shortcomings in the law governing source protection. The book argues that despite source protection being widely recognised as an important ideal, source protection is under sustained assault, thereby undermining public access to information, and democracy itself. The work focusses on Australia but takes into account source protection in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. This timely contribution to the global discussion on the subject will greatly interest journalists, scholars, educators, and students especially in the areas of media law and policy, journalism, media and communication studies, and public relations; the legal fraternity; and anyone who communicates with journalists.

This volume is the first in a new series of Studies on the Frontiers of International Law. The term ‘frontier’ is traditionally associated with proximity to a boundary or a demarcation line. But it is also a connecting point, i.e., a passage or channel between spaces that are usually considered as separate entities. The Series aims to explore the visible and imaginary boundaries of scholarship in International Law. It is designed to test the existing table of contents, vocabulary and limits of ‘Public International Law’, to investigate lines and linkages between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and to re-map or re-think some of its conceptual boundaries. The current volume is written in this spirit. It deals with the tension between unity and diversification which has gained a central place in the debate under the label of ‘fragmentation’. It explores the meaning, articulation and risks of this phenomenon in a specific area: International Criminal Justice. It brings together established and fresh voices who analyse different sites and contestations of this concept, as well as its context and specific manifestations in the interpretation and application of International Criminal Law. The volume thereby connects discourse on ‘fragmentation’ with broader inquiry on the merits and discontents of legal pluralism in ‘Public International Law’.

Handling personal and often sensitive information is central to daily practice in social and health services. However, the increasing emphasis on multi-disciplinary and inter-agency working required for effective, joined-up services presents new challenges and dilemmas in preserving citizens' rights to privacy. This book examines key philosophical, ethical and legal issues in the area of privacy and confidentiality and explores their implications for policy and practice. ,Offering a range of analytical frameworks the book focuses on different practice areas, including health and social care, children's services and criminal justice. The contributors from disciplines including law, philosophy, anthropology and the personal service professions bring their direct personal experience of working to create new systems and practices in a turbulent policy environment. The book provides a synoptic multi-disciplinary view of this increasingly challenging area where technological development, civil liberties, surveillance, health and welfare become inexorably intertwined. The book will be of key interest to professionals, managers, policy makers and academics in the health and personal social services. Students of social work, probation, medicine, nursing and professions allied to medicine will find a common multidisciplinary framework for their respective professional concerns to protect the interests and promote the wellbeing of clients, their families and the wider community.

This clearly written and well-focused volume combines concise decisions of the primary areas of communication law with the foundational case decisions in those domains. Thus, in one volume, students of communication law, constitutional law, political science, and related fields find both the key rulings that define each area of law and a detailed summary of the legal concepts, doctrines, and policies so vital to understanding the rulings within their legal context. The text forgoes the tendency to provide encyclopedic treatment of all the relevant cases and focuses instead on the two or three cases most vital to an accurate and informed understanding of the current state of each field of communication law. The chapters provide readers with the most salient concepts and the necessary depth to understand the law while permitting most reading time to be directed to the law itself. Full-text rulings allow readers to immerse themselves in the law itself--to develop a feel for its complexity, its flexibility, and its language. Useful as a quick reference to the landmark rulings and the jurisprudence of communication law, this book also serves well as the primary text in related undergraduate courses or as a supplemental text in graduate classes in the field.