Constitutional Analogies in the International Legal System

This Article explores issues at the frontier of international law and constitutional law. It considers five key structural and systemic challenges that the international legal system now faces: (1) decentralization and disaggregation; (2) normative and institutional hierarchies; (3) compliance and enforcement; (4) exit and escape; and (5) democracy and legitimacy. Each of these issues raises questions of governance, institutional design, and allocation of authority paralleling the questions that domestic legal systems have answered in constitutional terms. For each of these issues, I survey the international legal landscape and consider the salience of potential analogies to domestic constitutions, drawing upon and extending the writings of international legal scholars and international relations theorists. I also offer some preliminary thoughts about why some treaties and institutions, but not others, more readily lend themselves to analysis in constitutional terms. And I distinguish those legal and political issues that may generate useful insights for scholars studying the growing intersections of international and constitutional law from other areas that may be more resistant to constitutional analogies

Parity realization in Vector-like theories from Fermion Bilinears

We reconsider in this paper the old aim of trying to understand if the observed realization of discrete symmetries as Parity or CP in the QCD vacuum can be satisfied from first principles. We show how under the appropriate assumptions implicitely done by Vafa and Witten in their old paper on parity realization in vector-like theories, all parity and CP odd operators constructed from fermion bilinears of the form $\bar\psi\tilde O\psi$ should take a vanishing vacuum expectation value in a vector-like theory with N degenerate flavours (N>1). In our analysis the Vafa-Witten theorem on the impossibility to break spontaneously the flavour symmetry in a vector-like theory plays a fundamental role.Comment: 12 pages, no figures To be published in JHE

Spacetime Defects: von K\'arm\'an vortex street like configurations

A special arrangement of spinning strings with dislocations similar to a von K\'arm\'an vortex street is studied. We numerically solve the geodesic equations for the special case of a test particle moving along twoinfinite rows of pure dislocations and also discuss the case of pure spinning defects.Comment: 9 pages, 2figures, CQG in pres

Thiemann transform for gravity with matter fields

The generalised Wick transform discovered by Thiemann provides a well-established relation between the Euclidean and Lorentzian theories of general relativity. We extend this Thiemann transform to the Ashtekar formulation for gravity coupled with spin-1/2 fermions, a non-Abelian Yang-Mills field, and a scalar field. It is proved that, on functions of the gravitational and matter phase space variables, the Thiemann transform is equivalent to the composition of an inverse Wick rotation and a constant complex scale transformation of all fields. This result holds as well for functions that depend on the shift vector, the lapse function, and the Lagrange multipliers of the Yang-Mills and gravitational Gauss constraints, provided that the Wick rotation is implemented by means of an analytic continuation of the lapse. In this way, the Thiemann transform is furnished with a geometric interpretation. Finally, we confirm the expectation that the generator of the Thiemann transform can be determined just from the spin of the fields and give a simple explanation for this fact.Comment: LaTeX 2.09, 14 pages, no figure

The ambivalent shadow of the pre-Wilsonian rise of international law

The generation of American international lawyers who founded the American Society of International Law in 1906 and nurtured the soil for what has been retrospectively called a “moralistic legalistic approach to international relations” remains little studied. A survey of the rise of international legal literature in the U.S. from the mid-19th century to the eve of the Great War serves as a backdrop to the examination of the boosting effect on international law of the Spanish American War in 1898. An examination of the Insular Cases before the US Supreme Court is then accompanied by the analysis of a number of influential factors behind the pre-war rise of international law in the U.S. The work concludes with an examination of the rise of natural law doctrines in international law during the interwar period and the critiques addressed.by the realist founders of the field of “international relations” to the “moralistic legalistic approach to international relation

Network synchronization: Optimal and Pessimal Scale-Free Topologies

By employing a recently introduced optimization algorithm we explicitely design optimally synchronizable (unweighted) networks for any given scale-free degree distribution. We explore how the optimization process affects degree-degree correlations and observe a generic tendency towards disassortativity. Still, we show that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between synchronizability and disassortativity. On the other hand, we study the nature of optimally un-synchronizable networks, that is, networks whose topology minimizes the range of stability of the synchronous state. The resulting ``pessimal networks'' turn out to have a highly assortative string-like structure. We also derive a rigorous lower bound for the Laplacian eigenvalue ratio controlling synchronizability, which helps understanding the impact of degree correlations on network synchronizability.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figs, submitted to J. Phys. A (proceedings of Complex Networks 2007

Wrong Turn in Cyberspace: Using ICANN to Route Around the APA and the Constitution

The Internet relies on an underlying centralized hierarchy built into the domain name system (DNS) to control the routing for the vast majority of Internet traffic. At its heart is a single data file, known as the root. Control of the root provides singular power in cyberspace. This Article first describes how the United States government found itself in control of the root. It then describes how, in an attempt to meet concerns that the United States could so dominate an Internet chokepoint, the U. S. Department of Commerce (DoC) summoned into being the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a formally private nonprofit California corporation. DoC then signed contracts with ICANN in order to clothe it with most of the U. S. government\u27s power over the DNS, and convinced other parties to recognize ICANN\u27s authority. ICANN then took regulatory actions that the U. S. Department of Commerce was unable or unwilling to make itself, including the imposition on all registrants of Internet addresses of an idiosyncratic set of arbitration rules and procedures that benefit third-party trademark holders. Professor Froomkin then argues that the use of ICANN to regulate in the stead of an executive agency violates fundamental values and policies designed to ensure democratic control over the use of government power, and sets a precedent that risks being expanded into other regulatory activities. He argues that DoC\u27s use of ICANN to make rules either violates the APA\u27s requirement for notice and comment in rulemaking and judicial review, or it violates the Constitution\u27s nondelegation doctrine. Professor Froomkin reviews possible alternatives to ICANN, and ultimately proposes a decentralized structure in which the namespace of the DNS is spread out over a transnational group of policy partners with DoC