International Idealism Meets Domestic-Criminal-Procedure Realism

Though international criminal justice has flourished over the last two decades, scholars have neglected institutional design and procedure questions. International-criminal-procedure scholarship has developed in isolation from its domestic counterpart but could learn much realism from it. Given its current focus on atrocities like genocide, international criminal law\u27s main purpose should be not only to inflict retribution but also to restore wounded communities by bringing the truth to light. The international justice system needs more ideological balance, stable career paths, and civil-service expertise. It should also draw on the American experience of federalism to cultivate cooperation with national authorities and select fewer cases for international prosecution. Revised plea bargaining and sentencing rules could learn from American experience and pitfalls, husbanding scarce resources and minimizing haggling, yet still buying needed cooperation. Finally, in blending adversarial and inquisitorial systems, international criminal justice has jettisoned too many safeguards of either one. It should reform discovery, speedy-trial rules, witness preparation, cross-examination, and victims\u27 rights in light of domestic experience. Just as international criminal law can benefit from domestic realism, domestic law could incorporate more international idealism and accountability, creating healthy political pressures to discipline and publicize enforcement decisions

Combining Climate and Energy Policies: Synergies or Antagonism? Modeling Interactions With Energy Efficiency Instruments

In addition to the already present Climate and Energy package, the European Union (EU) plans to include a binding target to reduce energy consumption. We analyze the rationales the EU invokes to justify such an overlapping and develop a minimal common framework to study interactions arising from the combination of instruments reducing emissions, promoting renewable energy (RE) production and reducing energy demand through energy efficiency (EE) investments. We find that although all instruments tend to reduce emissions and a price on carbon tends to give the right incentives for RE and EE too, the combination of more than one instrument leads to significant antagonisms regarding major objectives of the policy package. The model allows to show in a single framework and to quantify the antagonistic effects of the joint promotion of RE and EE. We also show and quantify the effects of this joint promotion on ETS permit price, on wholesale market price and on energy production levels.Renewable Energy, Energy Efficiency, Energy Policy, Climate Policy, Policy Interaction

International Idealism Meets Domestic-Criminal-Procedure Realism

Though international criminal justice has flourished over the last two decades, scholars have neglected institutional design and procedure questions. International-criminal-procedure scholarship has developed in isolation from its domestic counterpart but could learn much realism from it. Given its current focus on atrocities like genocide, international criminal law\u27s main purpose should be not only to inflict retribution but also to restore wounded communities by bringing the truth to light. The international justice system needs more ideological balance, stable career paths, and civil-service expertise. It should also draw on the American experience of federalism to cultivate cooperation with national authorities and select fewer cases for international prosecution. Revised plea bargaining and sentencing rules could learn from American experience and pitfalls, husbanding scarce resources and minimizing haggling, yet still buying needed cooperation. Finally, in blending adversarial and inquisitorial systems, international criminal justice has jettisoned too many safeguards of either one. It should reform discovery, speedy-trial rules, witness preparation, cross-examination, and victims\u27 rights in light of domestic experience. Just as international criminal law can benefit from domestic realism, domestic law could incorporate more international idealism and accountability, creating healthy political pressures to discipline and publicize enforcement decisions

Associations between Feeling and Judging the Emotions of Happiness and Fear: Findings from a Large-Scale Field Experiment

Background: How do we recognize emotions from other people? One possibility is that our own emotional experiences guide us in the online recognition of emotion in others. A distinct but related possibility is that emotion experience helps us to learn how to recognize emotions in childhood. Methodology/Principal Findings: We explored these ideas in a large sample of people (N = 4,608) ranging from 5 to over 50 years old. Participants were asked to rate the intensity of emotional experience in their own lives, as well as to perform a task of facial emotion recognition. Those who reported more intense experience of fear and happiness were significantly more accurate (closer to prototypical) in recognizing facial expressions of fear and happiness, respectively, and intense experience of fear was associated also with more accurate recognition of surprised and happy facial expressions. The associations held across all age groups. Conclusions: These results suggest that the intensity of one's own emotional experience of fear and happiness correlates with the ability to recognize these emotions in others, and demonstrate such an association as early as age 5

A New Look at an Old Problem: A Universal Learning Approach to Linear Regression

Linear regression is a classical paradigm in statistics. A new look at it is provided via the lens of universal learning. In applying universal learning to linear regression the hypotheses class represents the label $y\in {\cal R}$ as a linear combination of the feature vector $x^T\theta$ where $x\in {\cal R}^M$, within a Gaussian error. The Predictive Normalized Maximum Likelihood (pNML) solution for universal learning of individual data can be expressed analytically in this case, as well as its associated learnability measure. Interestingly, the situation where the number of parameters $M$ may even be larger than the number of training samples $N$ can be examined. As expected, in this case learnability cannot be attained in every situation; nevertheless, if the test vector resides mostly in a subspace spanned by the eigenvectors associated with the large eigenvalues of the empirical correlation matrix of the training data, linear regression can generalize despite the fact that it uses an ``over-parametrized'' model. We demonstrate the results with a simulation of fitting a polynomial to data with a possibly large polynomial degree

Exacerbating Injustice

This brief essay responds to Josh Bowers\u27 argument that criminal procedure should openly allow innocent defendants to plead guilty as a legal fiction. Though most scholars emphasize the few but salient serious felony cases, Bowers is right to refocus attention on misdemeanors and violations, which are far more numerous. And though the phrase wrongful convictions conjures up images of punishing upstanding citizens, Bowers is also right to emphasize that recidivists are far more likely to suffer wrongful suspicion and conviction. Bowers\u27 mistake is to treat the criminal justice system as simply a means of satisfying defendants\u27 preferences and choices. This narrow, utilitarian approach downplays the importance of public faith and confidence in the criminal justice system. It also risks undercutting the pleas of guilty defendants, who could later change their minds and tell themselves and others that their pleas were simply legal fictions, leaving them in denial and frustrating victims. Most fundamentally, Bowers\u27 utilitarianism sacrifices the deontic command not to facilitate convicting the innocent. Though the massive flaws in criminal justice are frustrating, we must not sacrifice justice as our ideal