The Balance of Convertibility: Manipulating External Support in Civil War

Despite the pervasive trend in civil war of multiple sponsors backing rebels or the government, there is surprisingly minimal analysis on how the balance of support influences conflict duration. Building on the research of Sawyer et al. (2017), who find that the “fungibility” of external support leads to longer civil war, this thesis contributes a new scoring method for analyzing the balance of “fungible” (hereafter “convertible”) support among combatants (rebels versus government), discovering that a balance of convertibility contributes to shorter conflict. Convertible resources are those that combatants manipulate to enhance their warfighting capacity, such as funding, while troops or territory are less convertible since combatants can only use them in a specific context. A balance of convertible forces likely contributes to shorter conflict because both sides recognize the reduced likelihood of victory. Policymakers should thus carefully evaluate the support given to the opposition of the recipient they are backing

Pre-deployment Analysis of Smart Contracts -- A Survey

Smart contracts are programs that execute transactions involving independent parties and cryptocurrencies. As programs, smart contracts are susceptible to a wide range of errors and vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities can result in significant losses. Furthermore, by design, smart contract transactions are irreversible. This creates a need for methods to ensure the correctness and security of contracts pre-deployment. Recently there has been substantial research into such methods. The sheer volume of this research makes articulating state-of-the-art a substantial undertaking. To address this challenge, we present a systematic review of the literature. A key feature of our presentation is to factor out the relationship between vulnerabilities and methods through properties. Specifically, we enumerate and classify smart contract vulnerabilities and methods by the properties they address. The methods considered include static analysis as well as dynamic analysis methods and machine learning algorithms that analyze smart contracts before deployment. Several patterns about the strengths of different methods emerge through this classification process

Formal Methods for Secure Bitcoin Smart Contracts

The notion of smart contracts was introduced in 1997 by Nick Szabo, to describe agreements among mutually distrusting parties that can be automatically enforced without resorting to a trusted intermediary. Then, the idea was mostly forgotten due to the technical impossibility to implement it. The advent of distributed ledger technologies, pioneered by Bitcoin, provided a technical foundation to reshape and develop smart contracts. Since smart contracts handle the ownership of valuable assets, attackers may be tempted to exploit vulnerabilities in their implementation to steal or tamper with these assets. For instance, a series of vulnerabilities in Ethereum contracts have been exploited, causing money losses in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. Over the last years, a variety of smart contracts for Bitcoin have been proposed, both by the academic community and by that of developers. However, the heterogeneity in their treatment, the informal (often incomplete or imprecise) descriptions, and the use of poorly documented Bitcoin features, poses obstacles to the development of secure smart contracts. Using formal models and domain-specific languages to describe the behaviour of the underlying platform, and to model contracts, could help to overcome these security issues, by reducing the distance between the intended behaviour of a contract and the implementation. In this thesis, we propose a formal model of Bitcoin transactions, which is the foundation for a new process algebra for defining Bitcoin smart contracts. Furthermore, we present a toolchain for developing smart contracts in BitML, a domain-specific language based on the contributions of this thesis. Moreover, we propose a new extension to Bitcoin, called neighbourhood covenants, which extends its expressiveness as a smart contract platform. We then exploit neighbourhood covenants to implement fungible tokens on Bitcoin

Three Steps Towards More Effective Development Assistance

There are three steps New Zealand can take to make its bilateral development assistance more effective in reducing poverty. These steps are ‘easy’ because they are unilateral: they improve the effectiveness of development assistance without requiring changes in the politics or policies of developing countries. By far the most important of these three steps is to focus New Zealand’s bilateral aid on those poor countries that are democracies pursing policies of market-led growth. One of the major findings of recent research is that development aid only reinforces what is already there. New Zealand should accept the developing countries as it finds them and pick and choose so that it helps those already helping themselves.aid effectiveness, autocracy, democracy, development, New Zealand

Why Limits on Contributions to Super PACs Should Survive \u3ci\u3eCitizens United\u3c/i\u3e

Soon after the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC, the D.C. Circuit held all limits on contributions to super PACs unconstitutional. Its decision in SpeechNow.org v. FEC created a regime in which contributions to candidates are limited but in which contributions to less responsible groups urging votes for these candidates are unbounded. No legislator voted for this system of campaign financing, and the judgment that the Constitution requires it is astonishing. Forty-two years ago, Buckley v. Valeo held that Congress could limit contributions to candidates because these contributions are corrupting or create an appearance of corruption. According to the D.C. Circuit, however, Congress may not prohibit multi-million-dollar contributions to satellite campaigns because these contributions do not create even an appearance of corruption. The D.C. Circuit said that a single sentence of the Citizens United opinion compelled its result. It wrote, “In light of the Court’s holding as a matter of law that independent expenditures do not corrupt or create the appearance of corruption, contributions to groups that make only independent expenditures also cannot corrupt or create the appearance of corruption.” This Article contends that, contrary to the D.C. Circuit’s reasoning, contributions to super PACs can corrupt even when expenditures by these groups do not. Moreover, the statement that the D.C. Circuit took as its premise was dictum, and the Supreme Court did not mean this statement to be taken in the way the D.C. Circuit took it. The Supreme Court’s long-standing distinction between contribution limits and expenditure limits does not rest on the untenable proposition thatcandidates cannot be corrupted by funds paid to and spent on their behalf by others. Rather, Buckley noted five differences between contributions and expenditures. A review of these differences makes clear that contributions to super PACs cannot be distinguished from the contributions to candidates whose limitation the Court upheld. The ultimate question posed by Buckley is whether super PAC contributions create a sufficient appearance of corruption to justify their limitation. This Article reviews the statements of candidates of both parties in the 2016 presidential election, the views of Washington insiders, and public opinion polls. It shows that SpeechNow has sharpened class divisions and helped to tear America apart. The Justice Department did not seek Supreme Court review of the SpeechNow decision. In a statement that belongs on a historic list of wrong predictions, Attorney General Holder explained that the decision would “affect only a small subset of federally regulated contributions.” Although eight years have passed since SpeechNow, the Supreme Court has not decided whether the Constitution guarantees the right to give unlimited funds to super PACs. A final section of this Article describes the efforts of members of Congress and candidates for Congress to bring that question before the Court. The Federal Election Commission is opposing their efforts, offering arguments that, if accepted, would be likely to keep the Court from ever deciding the issue

A Statutory Approach to Partner Dissociation

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws has decided to revise the Uniform Partnership Act (U.P.A.). Therefore, the time is ripe for reexamination of this venerable uniform law. This Article will recommend reform of one of the most distinctive features of general partnership under the U.P.A.-the easy dissolvability of the partnership entity. Because I intend to propose specific statutory provisions rather than merely to describe the relevant policy considerations, Part II begins with an analysis of the role and general approach of the partnership statute. Part III defines the problem of permitting partner dissociation and identifies some possible statutory approaches, including transfer of interests, buyout, liquidation and dissolution. Part IV describes the U.P.A. dissolution provisions in the context of the alternative approaches to partner dissociation. Part V analyzes the costs and benefits of the various statutory approaches to partner dissociation identified in Part III. Part V concludes, in light of the costs of illiquidity, that the parties would prefer a standard form that provides for partner dissociation at will to one that does not. However, the power to dissociate at will should be designed to minimize such costs of high liquidity as opportunistic conduct by dissociating partners and as disruption of the going concern. Parts VI and VII discuss how the statute should deal with partner dissociation in the face of relevant provisions in the partnership agreement. Part VIII summarizes my findings in the form of proposed statutory provisions concerning partner dissociation. The proposed statute embodies a scalpel approach that better balances the costs and benefits of partner dissociation than does the U.P.A. dynamite approach of dissolution at will

Reframing Roe: Property over Privacy

Roe v. Wade has received much criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. These critiques diverge divisively but for one commonality. Specifically, commentators from both the pro- and anti-choice camps have expressed concern about the absence of an express constitutional right to privacy, upon which the Supreme Court in Roe based its finding of a fundamental right to abortion. This lack of express constitutional provision renders the Roe decision, and its resulting reproductive rights, vulnerable. Further, pro-choice advocates find fault with the privacy basis because it yields no positive rights to funding or governmental support for accessing abortion services. When based upon a right to privacy, the right to abortion is relegated to the land of negative rights. The negative right to privacy might provide some women with reproductive choice free from government intrusion, but for other women-those with limited resources-the so-called choice becomes nonexistent. This article investigates whether these two shortcomings-the absence of positive rights and the lack of express constitutional language-inherent in the right to privacy might be redressed by refraining Roe in the language of property, and specifically a woman\u27s property right in her uterus. Assuming arguendo the anti-choice tenet that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception, this article sets forth an argument that the fetus is an unwanted trespasser in the woman\u27s uterus whom the woman has a right to eject. Further, this article posits that this property-based notion of abortion might justify government funding for abortions based on a constitutional obligation to maintain a system designed to protect women\u27s uterine property, similar to states\u27 obligations to maintain a police force in order to protect other forms of private property, including the removal of trespassers. In short, this article provides a new basis for abortion rights that takes advantage of the long-standing traditional notions of property law and the right to exclude, as well as the public support that attaches to that right, manifested through anti-trespass systems. After establishing the property based argument, the article explores what might be gained, and what might be lost, by adopting such a premise for abortion rights and access. Among these considerations is whether the anti-trespass scheme might push the abortion discourse beyond the typical polarizing rhetoric surrounding both the pro-choice and anti-choice camps, thus generating space for forward movement and meaningful work

People as Part of Ecosystems

30 p. : ill. ; 28 cmhttps://scholar.law.colorado.edu/books_reports_studies/1049/thumbnail.jp