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This chapter discusses fundamental or structural changes affecting the relationship of participants in a firm, such as charter amendments, mergers, reincorporations, or share issuances, and how corporate law mitigates the opportunism that can accompany such changes. Jurisdictions differ in their assessment of which situations require a statutory protection mechanism, and the legal strategies to address them. Strategies include: judicial review; double-majority or supermajority requirements; majority-of-the minority requirements; and exit rights. Across all jurisdictions, the law tends to allocate the decision right to the shareholders, thus reversing the board’s power to take independent decisions. Most fundamental changes discussed involve either a management-shareholder conflict or a majority-minority shareholder problem. For charter amendments, most jurisdictions provide for an ex post decision right strategy to ratify the amendment, although there are differences across jurisdictions, taking into account shareholder structure and prevailing agency conflicts. The issuance of new shares can be seen as a course of action that may dilute minority shareholders’ stake; this is frequently addressed by preemptive rights.

This chapter attempts to shed some light on the rule-exception scheme through the lens of the doctrine of fundamental change of circumstances in international law. In classical international law, the doctrine was considered either as non-existent, or under the guise of private law analogies or specially construed for the purposes of international law. The extent of the ‘exception’ to the ordinary law wrought by the clause was different in the context of these three versions: nought in the first case, related to specific treaties in the second, related to the entire legal order in the third. With the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) codification of 1969, the reach of the doctrine was reduced to an extremely narrowly tailored treaty-exception. Since then, the doctrine has rarely been invoked—even more rarely with success—in international litigation. The inroad of that exception has thus been progressively narrowed, if not extinguished.

Patient safety has been evolving and changing since its conception, and this evolution will inevitably continue as it competes for attention with other social problems and as healthcare struggles with conflicts among increasing workloads, performance and production pressures, technological innovation, and increasingly limited human and economic resources. Patient safety is, at present, a reform movement becalmed, captured by the industry it set out to reform. The authors see four possible futures: congealing into bureaucracy (already in progress), rebranding as something else (similar to quality improvement rebranding itself as patient safety), simply dying out, or fundamental reform. Fundamental reform is unfortunately the least likely possibility. It will require healthcare to relinquish its dominant position in patient safety and to develop substantive, equal partnerships with safety sciences.

This chapter explores whether the outbreak of armed conflict could result in the termination or suspension of investment treaties. It critically inspects the International Law Commission’s codification project on the effects of armed conflicts on treaties, and argues that certain types of conflicts could result in the suspension of certain investment treaty provisions when warranted by security concerns. In addition, it considers the doctrines of supervening impossibility to perform and fundamental change of circumstances, and argues that the former, in particular, could justify the suspension of an investment treaty provision. However, such disruptions to treaty operation are limited to the most severe armed conflicts of the highest magnitude.

In both style and substance, Jeb Bush offered Florida new leadership and a new direction. During the course of his campaigns against Democrats Lawton Chiles and Buddy MacKay, Bush announced that he would dramatically reduce the role and scope of government, lower taxes, reform education, and introduce competition into all aspects of government. He was in every way a new Republican who felt the private sector did everything better than government and that government had consistently failed the American people. His leadership represented a fundamental change from what Floridians had experienced under Askew, Graham, and Chiles. Bush led Florida with a firm and dominant hand, and he was aided by a strong Republican state party that gave him credit for securing a Republican majority in Florida politics. In contrast to his Democratic predecessors, Bush enjoyed the near unanimous support of his party for his political agenda.

Development plans play a vital part in the system for the control of development. They constitute the main backcloth against which applications for planning permission are determined and decisions are made on whether or not to issue an enforcement notice to terminate unauthorized development. The strength of the development plan system is that it ensures that there is both a rational and a consistent basis for making those decisions.

Until fairly recently there was no standard form prescribed for the making of an application for planning permission. Each local planning authority could provide its own form for doing so. This led to a variation in the amount of information required by each authority, and was a concern for large-scale developers, such as volume house builders, where development projects could involve applications being made to many different local planning authorities.