Volume 15 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

This article assesses the significance of social partnership in the regulation of employment relations. It is pointed out that the legal regulation of employment relations in Lithuania lacks stability, and the hypothesis is raised that this situation has been partly determined by the vanishing, negligible role of social partnership. The presumption is put forward that the regulation of employment relations can result in an effective and sustainable balance between the interests of employees and employers only if the possibilities of social partnership are used to their full extent and an optimal balance is achieved between contractual law-making and state law-making. The Lithuanian social partnership model is defined as gravitating from quasipartnership towards real social partnership; therefore, ways are still being sought as to how to strengthen the impact of social partnership on the regulation of employment relations by means of legislation and the use of soft law. To reveal the impact of social partnership on the regulation of employment relations in Lithuania, the article identifies and assesses the key indicators revealing the influence of social partnership on the regulation of employment relations and examines the positive legal regulation related to social partnership.

The criminalisation of stalking through a specific law is a clear tendency in the EU. At the end of 2021, a new relevant provision in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Lithuania was introduced (Art. 148-1). It incorporates the latest EU legal developments in this field. The new norm determines a wide scope of eligibility and an inclusive concept of stalking to work as an umbrella charge that tackles the whole tactics of stalking. However, the new provision has serious shortcomings that are related to more lenient outcomes for the perpetrator, systemic incompatibility, the generic nature of the law, and consequences-specific construction. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to make urgent amendments to achieve the primary goal of criminalising stalking, i.e., better responding to victims’ experiences.

The referendum experiences of each state vary according to their democratic background, development, and welfare level. Accordingly, it becomes hard to adopt a uniformed approach towards the issue and necessitates questioning the democratic value of each practice within itself. Although a referendum is a tool for reflecting the people’s will, it may not necessarily take place in every case. Constituent referendums differ from other types of referendums in that the constituent power is not bound by any rule of law. In view of this, the democratic value of the constituent referendum has been chosen to be examined in this article, rather than the democratic value of referendums in general.

This article focuses on the relationship between the constituent referendum and democracy as a basis and questions whether constituent referendums are indeed a genuine tool of democratic constitution-making and whether they are sufficient to secure democratic legitimacy for the constitutions. Despite the fact that at first glance, constituent referendums tend to have their sights on a democratic goal, the practices reveal that the outcome is not necessarily in accordance with the intended goal. Particularly, the adoption of the 1961 and 1982 Turkish Constitutions has shown that this method is not sufficient in terms of ensuring democratic legitimacy. Therefore, the issue has been evaluated specifically in relation to the constituent referendums that ensured the adoption of the 1961 and 1982 Turkish Constitutions.

In this study, the relationship between the constituent referendum and the constitutionmaking process is discussed in a theory-oriented manner in the first three sections, and two important case analyses selected from Turkish constitutional law are included in the following sections. As a consequence, it has been concluded that constituent referendums, when held in antidemocratic settings, are incapable of ensuring democratic legitimacy for constitutions and thus are not necessarily a genuine instrument of democratic constitution-making.

The article aims to provide an overview of the interrelationships between public knowledge, attitudes, and practical behaviours in the context of a global pandemic and the risk management measures used by the government. By reviewing some of the key trends in crisis management in Lithuania, it seeks to explore the response of society. The aim of the paper is to analyse the interrelationship among subjective public informativeness, attitudes, and behaviours according to different socio-demographic aspects. To meet the main objective of the paper, a representative public survey (N-804) on attitudes towards COVID-19 was conducted (at the end of 2020). The survey sought to explore individual self-protection measures, attitudes towards the dangerousness of the virus, the measures used by the government to combat the pandemic, and prevalent stereotypes and their implications on personal behaviour. The paper discusses the indicators, which are divided into separate blocks, on the basis of which the responses of the study participants are summed up and evaluated on a three-level (good, average, poor) rating scale, followed by correlation analyses on various socio-demographic parameters. The survey revealed that a higher proportion of Lithuanian society behaved responsibly, even being moderately informed and characterised by diverse attitudes.

While considerable efforts are being made to consolidate and implement the principle of gender equality, the gender pay gap remains a real problem. One of the reasons for this gap is the traditional role of women in caring for children and other relatives. By devoting a significant part of their time to the unpaid care function, women have fewer opportunities to participate in employment relationships. This leads to women’s poorer financial situation, limited career opportunities, and a higher risk of poverty in old age. Therefore, both at the EU and national level, there has been a search for optimal ways to enable female caregivers to remain in the labour market and ensure their income levels. This article provides an overview of the situation of female caregivers and the legal measures taken by Lithuania and Estonia (both EU Member States) to improve the situation of women performing unpaid care functions in labour relationships.

For Aristotle, “the essence what is equitable is that it is an amendment of the law, in those points where is fails through the generality of its language”. The application of legal rules produces appropriate (just) results in the majority of cases, but not in all. When its application would lead to injustice, a legal rule can be defeated by equity.

The idea of epieikeia (equity) sheds light on the modern discussion about the nature of legal rules, the distinction between rules and principles, and mechanisms of adjudication.

This idea is also relevant in the tax law domain. In this area, the dominant theoretical position is legal formalism, with its focus on (strictly conceived) legal rules in legislation and in the application of the law. The Aristotelian reflection on epieikeia poses challenges to this traditional view: legal rules are deficient, and thus, as demonstrated, so is the formalistic approach to tax law. In particular, the equitable resolution of a tax dispute can be achieved through alternative dispute resolution methods: on the basis of a consensus between a taxpayer and a tax authority that is not strictly based on a legal rule.

This paper analyses the concept of accessibility of legal aid for children in conflict with the law, searching for its essential elements in international standards and national practices. By analysing the comparative empirical data on legal regulation in different European jurisdictions, the authors of the paper discuss what it means for legal aid to be accessible to children and what could be done to strengthen it. The paper argues that the goal of improving access to legal aid for children in conflict with the law should be approached from various directions, including the provision of information on legal aid in a child-friendly and age-appropriate manner, the strengthening of children’s legal education, the dissemination of child-friendly materials, and the training and specialisation of legal aid lawyers and other professionals.