Book review: India and the Islamic heartlands: an Eighteenth-Century world of circulation and exchange by Gagan D.S. Sood

Drawing on the chance discovery of a number of letters exchanged during the period, in India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange author Gagan D.S. Sood attempts to capture the lives of ordinary people to reconstruct the connective tissues of a world lived beyond the purview of the sovereign. While the nature of the source material occasionally limits the book’s scope of analysis, this work successfully weaves together an insightful narrative to draw attention to a neglected arena and period, finds Mithilesh Kumar Jha

The Death Knell and the Wild West: Two Dangers of Domestic Discovery in Foreign Adjudications

Under 28 U.S.C. § 1782(a), parties to foreign legal proceedings can obtain discovery orders from United States federal courts. In other words, if a foreign party needs physical evidence located in—or testimony from a person residing in—the United States to support their claim or defense, they can ask a district court to order the production of that evidence. For almost two decades, § 1782(a) practice has operated as a procedural Wild West. Judges routinely consider § 1782(a) applications ex parte—that is, without giving the parties subject to the resulting discovery orders a chance to oppose them—and grant those applications at a staggering rate: more than 90% of the time. In its June 2022 decision in ZF Automotive US, Inc. v. Luxshare, Ltd., the Supreme Court transformed § 1782 jurisprudence for the worse. The Court held that private arbitral tribunals do not fall under § 1782(a)’s scope and that, as a result, parties cannot obtain discovery for use in foreign private arbitration under the provision. This Note argues that, after ZF Automotive, § 1782(a) jurisprudence contains two dangers: (1) it subjects some parties to burdensome discovery orders with few procedural safeguards, and (2) it prevents parties who have chosen to arbitrate rather than litigate from obtaining discovery entirely. This Note contributes to existing scholarship by proposing structural changes that would improve § 1782(a) practice. Specifically, it argues that courts cannot root out the procedural flaws that plague § 1782(a), and that, consequently, Congress should enact a new and improved § 1782 to address these manifold problems

Information encountering re-encountered: A conceptual re-examination of serendipity in the context of information acquisition

Purpose In order to understand the totality, diversity and richness of human information behavior, increasing research attention has been paid to examining serendipity in the context of information acquisition. However, several issues have arisen as this research subfield has tried to find its feet; we have used different, inconsistent terminology to define this phenomenon (e.g. information encountering, accidental information discovery, incidental information acquisition), the scope of the phenomenon has not been clearly defined and its nature was not fully understood or fleshed-out. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, information encountering (IE) was proposed as the preferred term for serendipity in the context of information acquisition. Findings A reconceptualized definition and scope of IE was presented, a temporal model of IE and a refined model of IE that integrates the IE process with contextual factors and extends previous models of IE to include additional information acquisition activities pre- and postencounter. Originality/value By providing a more precise definition, clearer scope and richer theoretical description of the nature of IE, there was hope to make the phenomenon of serendipity in the context of information acquisition more accessible, encouraging future research consistency and thereby promoting deeper, more unified theoretical development

The Collision Between New Discovery Amendments and Expert Testimony Rules

The young litigator\u27s nightmare was always the same. He was in medieval Europe, ready to engage in a sword fight with the expert swordsman representing his arch rival. After countless hours of preparation, he felt confident that he would be able to hold his own against the swordsman. But when the swordsman drew his lengthy rapier from its sheath, the young attorney pulled only a short dagger from his scabbard. Realizing that he was doomed to defeat, he tossed his dagger into the air and ran from the scene with the laughter of the onlookers ringing in his ears. The young litigator needed no dream analyst to tell him the nightmare\u27s symbolism. He knew that the sword fight represented cross-examination and that his swordsman opponent was simply an expert witness. As hard as he practiced and studied and researched, he never felt comfortable crossexamining his opponent\u27s expert about the expert\u27s field of expertise. He might as well admit his failure now and become a tax attorney, he thought. Fear of expert witnesses can indeed be disabling. With the increase in litigation about complex business transactions, products liability, and professional malpractice, expert testimony continues to become more important. The modern litigator must learn to deal effectively with opposing experts or be faced with the embarrassment of his worst nightmares. Handling the opponent\u27s expert has become more difficult because the rules of evidence have been liberalized over the years, while the rules of discovery recently have been restricted

Reconsidering Res Judicata: A Comparative Perspective

We aimed to prospectively investigate the paternal antigen-induced cytokine secretion by peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) in response to hormone treatment in women undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and to examine the predictive value of the cytokine secretion profile in the outcome of IVF treatment, in a pilot study. Twenty-five women were included and IVF treatment was successful for six and unsuccessful for 19 women. Blood samples were collected before IVF treatment, on four occasions during IVF and four weeks after embryo transfer. The numbers of Th1-, Th2- and Th17-associated cytokine-secreting cells and cytokine levels in cell supernatants were analysed by enzyme-linked immunospot-forming (ELISpot), enzyme-linked immune-sorbent (ELISA) or Luminex assay. None of the cytokines (IFN-γ, IL-4, IL-5, IL-10, IL-12, IL-13, IL-17, TNF and GM-CSF) had any predictive value regarding IVF outcome. The majority of the cytokines reached their peak levels at ovum pick-up, suggesting an enhancing influence of the hormonal stimulation. Pregnancy was associated with a high number of IL-4-, IL-5- and IL-13-secreting cells four weeks after ET. In conclusion, the results do not support our hypothesis of a more pronounced peripheral Th1 and Th17 deviation towards paternal antigens in infertile women with an unsuccessful IVF outcome, although this is based on a small number of observations. A larger study is required to confirm this conclusion. Higher numbers of Th2-associated cytokine-secreting cells in pregnant women four weeks after ET do corroborate the hypothesis of a Th2 deviation during pregnancy

Discovering Scholarly Orphans Using ORCID

Archival efforts such as (C)LOCKSS and Portico are in place to ensure the longevity of traditional scholarly resources like journal articles. At the same time, researchers are depositing a broad variety of other scholarly artifacts into emerging online portals that are designed to support web-based scholarship. These web-native scholarly objects are largely neglected by current archival practices and hence they become scholarly orphans. We therefore argue for a novel paradigm that is tailored towards archiving these scholarly orphans. We are investigating the feasibility of using Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) as a supporting infrastructure for the process of discovery of web identities and scholarly orphans for active researchers. We analyze ORCID in terms of coverage of researchers, subjects, and location and assess the richness of its profiles in terms of web identities and scholarly artifacts. We find that ORCID currently lacks in all considered aspects and hence can only be considered in conjunction with other discovery sources. However, ORCID is growing fast so there is potential that it could achieve a satisfactory level of coverage and richness in the near future.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables accepted for publication at JCDL 201

Possibility of observing MSSM charged Higgs in association with a W boson at LHC

Possibility of observing associated production of charged Higgs and W boson in the framework of MSSM at LHC is studied. Both leptonic and hadronic decays of W boson are studied while the charged Higgs boson is considered to decay to a $\tau$ lepton and a neutrino. Therefore two search categories are defined based on the leptonic and hadronic final states, i.e. $\ell \tau+E^{miss}_{T}$ and $jj \tau+E^{miss}_{T}$ where $\ell=e$ or $\mu$ and $j$ is a light jet from $W$ decay. The discovery chance of the two categories is evaluated at an integrated luminosity of 300 \invfb at LHC. It is shown that both leptonic and hadronic final states have the chance of discovery at high \tanb. Finally $5\sigma$ and $3\sigma$ contours are provided for both search categories.Comment: 20 pages, 19 figure