The Ethical Foundations of American Judicial Independence

When one thinks of the independence of the American judiciary, the mind focuses first on federal courts. There have been many pivotal cases in which independent judges stood against the tides of public opinion or the power of the legislative and executive branches. State judges may be less independent than their federal counterparts. Elections are frequently decided not by qualifications (about which the voting public often knows little) but by advertising. Campaign contributions that buy advertising undermine judicial independence by clouding the exercise of judicial judgment with considerations related to financial obligation. Also, state judges typically must win re-appointment or reelection on a relatively frequent basis, sometimes every four or six years. With the shadow of the next campaign looming, it can be hard to focus on doing what is right under the law and the facts, rather than doing what is popular. One factor easily overlooked, but quite significant, is the judicial ethical norms that have developed in the United States. These norms shape the conduct of American judges on a daily basis and give concrete meaning to the idea that judges should be free from undue or inappropriate pressures when performing the duties of office

Can Local Governments Be Effective? Case Studies of Post-independence Ghana

Many African nations use both statutory and customary laws in governing their countries. This suggests an apparent mix of formal and informal rules. For example, the 1992 Constitution of Ghana did not abrogate customary law, but protects chieftaincy, a corollary of customary law. The situation becomes even more complicated within a democratizing country attempting to decentralize and allow for greater local autonomy. It also creates a struggle for space between state and chieftaincy, which naturally ensues in areas that may intentionally not be codified, such as succession rules and traditional land management. This fray has sometimes sparked violent disagreements and conflicts, with a likely spillover into national politics. These conflicts can compromise effective local government if they are not successfully resolved. Without formal laws that provide mechanisms to combine formal and informal rules, the customary laws will always be parallel with the formal rules rather than a mix. I placed Ghana within the larger context of sub-Saharan Africa to investigate this notion of parallel operation of formal and informal rules. From interviewing 55 key elites, and through opinions of 60 focus group discussants that I sampled over three districts (counties) in Ghana, I show that it is only when there is a high level of government interference and a low level of acceptance of institutional bargaining that violent conflicts emerge requiring successful conflict resolution strategies. This necessitates a refinement of the existing theory that contends that conflict occurs when there is an interpenetration of formal and informal rules. Parallel operation of formal rules comes about in chief selection process when state actors and institutions (formal) marginalize the traditional process (informal). This is a result of lack of a history of institutional bargaining and no mediation processes. It appears formal rules are differentially accepted by local political and traditional elites, more so in traditional land management than succession rules. The parallelism seen in formal and informal rules is potently expressed in dual systems of governance, where the chieftaincy institution is strong, and "Little Man politics" - mimicry of "Big Man" politics at the local level is prevalent in local government

Automated Extraction of Fragments of Bayesian Networks from Textual Sources

Mining large amounts of unstructured data for extracting meaningful, accurate, and actionable information, is at the core of a variety of research disciplines including computer science, mathematical and statistical modelling, as well as knowledge engineering. In particular, the ability to model complex scenarios based on unstructured datasets is an important step towards an integrated and accurate knowledge extraction approach. This would provide a significant insight in any decision making process driven by Big Data analysis activities. However, there are multiple challenges that need to be fully addressed in order to achieve this, especially when large and unstructured data sets are considered. In this article we propose and analyse a novel method to extract and build fragments of Bayesian networks (BNs) from unstructured large data sources. The results of our analysis show the potential of our approach, and highlight its accuracy and efficiency. More specifically, when compared with existing approaches, our method addresses specific challenges posed by the automated extraction of BNs with extensive applications to unstructured and highly dynamic data sources. The aim of this work is to advance the current state-of-the-art approaches to the automated extraction of BNs from unstructured datasets, which provide a versatile and powerful modelling framework to facilitate knowledge discovery in complex decision scenarios

Quantum causal models, faithfulness and retrocausality

Wood and Spekkens (2015) argue that any causal model explaining the EPRB correlations and satisfying no-signalling must also violate the assumption that the model faithfully reproduces the statistical dependences and independences---a so-called "fine-tuning" of the causal parameters; this includes, in particular, retrocausal explanations of the EPRB correlations. I consider this analysis with a view to enumerating the possible responses an advocate of retrocausal explanations might propose. I focus on the response of N\"{a}ger (2015), who argues that the central ideas of causal explanations can be saved if one accepts the possibility of a stable fine-tuning of the causal parameters. I argue that, in light of this view, a violation of faithfulness does not necessarily rule out retrocausal explanations of the EPRB correlations, although it certainly constrains such explanations. I conclude by considering some possible consequences of this type of response for retrocausal explanations

Entanglement and Relativity

In this paper we survey, in an elementary fashion, some of the questions that arise when one considers how entanglement and relativity are related via the notion of non-locality. We begin by reviewing the role of entangled states in Bell inequality violation and question whether the associated notions of non-locality lead to problems with relativity. The use of entanglement and wavefunction collapse in Einstein's famous incompleteness argument is then considered, before we go on to see how the issue of non-locality is transformed if one considers quantum mechanics without collapse to be a complete theory, as in the Everett interpretation. The opportunity is taken to consider whether teleportation and dense coding might constitute a source of non-locality within the Everett interpretation.Comment: 18 pages, uses amsmath, amsfonts, natbib and fancyheadings packages. Typos corrected and additional referenc

An observation on Carnapʼs Continuum and stochastic independencies

We characterize those identities and independencies which hold for all probability functions on a unary language satisfying the Principle of Atom Exchangeability. We then show that if this is strengthen to the requirement that Johnson's Sufficientness Principle holds, thus giving Carnap's Continuum of inductive methods for languages with at least two predicates, then new and somewhat inexplicable identities and independencies emerge, the latter even in the case of Carnap's Continuum for the language with just a single predicate

Correspondence between Thermal and Quantum Vacuum Transitions around Horizons

Recently, there are comparable revised interests in bubble nucleation seeded by black holes. However, it is debated in the literature that whether one shall interpret a static bounce solution in the Euclidean Schwarzschild spacetime (with periodic Euclidean Schwarzschild time) as describing a false vacuum decay at zero temperature or at finite temperature. In this paper, we show a correspondence that the static bounce solution describes either a thermal transition of vacuum in the static region outside of a Schwarzschild black hole or a quantum transition in a maximally extended Kruskal-Szekeres spacetime, corresponding to the viewpoint of the external static observers or the freely falling observers, respectively. The Matsubara modes in the thermal interpretation can be mapped to the circular harmonic modes from an $O(2)$ symmetry in the tunneling interpretation. The complementary tunneling interpretation must be given in the Kruskal-Szekeres spacetime because of the so-called thermofield dynamics. This correspondence is general for bubble nucleation around horizons. We propose a new paradox related to black holes as a consequence of this correspondence.Comment: 26 pages; v2: typos corrected; v3: references added, discussion on AdS black holes added, to match the published version; v4(v5): Ref [37] updated, footnote [10] added v6: two typos correcte

Money, Politics, and Impartial Justice

A centuries-old controversy asks whether judicial elections are inconsistent with impartial justice. The debate is especially important because more than 90 percent of the United States\u27 judicial business is handled by state courts, and approximately nine in ten of all state court judges face the voters in some type of election. Using a stunning new data set of virtually all state supreme court decisions from 1995 to 1998, this paper provides empirical evidence that elected state supreme court judges routinely adjust their rulings to attract votes and campaign money. I find that judges who must be reelected by Republican voters, especially in partisan elections, tend to decide cases in accord with standard Republican policy: they are more likely to vote for businesses over individuals, for employers in labor disputes, for doctors and hospitals in medical malpractice cases, for businesses in products liability cases and tort cases generally, and against criminals in criminal appeals. Judicial behavior is correspondingly liberal for judges facing reelection by Democrats. Moreover, I find evidence that judges change their rulings when the political preferences of the voters change. In addition, my analysis finds a strong relationship between campaign contributions and judges\u27 rulings. Contributions from pro-business groups, pro-labor groups, doctor groups, insurance companies, and lawyer groups increase the probability that judges will vote for the litigants favored by those interest groups. The results suggest that recent trends in judicial elections-elections becoming more contested, competitive, and expensive-may have upset the delicate balance between judicial independence and accountability. I discuss various policy solutions for reforming states\u27 systems