69 research outputs found
BG Group and âConditionsâ to Arbitral Jurisdiction
Although the Supreme Court has over the last decade generated a robust body of arbitration caselaw, its first decision in the area of investment arbitration under a Bilateral Investment Treaty was only handed down in 2014. BG Group v. Argentina was widely anticipated and has attracted much notice, and general approval, on the part of the arbitration community. In this paper we assess the Courtâs decision from two different perspectivesâthe first attempts to situate it in the discourse of the American law of commercial arbitration; the second considers it in light of the expectations of the international community surrounding the proper construction of Conventions between states.
Our initial goal had been to write jointly, with the hope that we could bridge our differences to find, if not common, at least neighboring, ground. On some points we did so, but ultimately our divergent appreciations of the proper way to interpret the condition precedent in the investment treaty in BG Group overcame the idealism with which we commenced the project. Nonetheless we have decided to present the two papers together to emphasize the dichotomous approaches to treaty interpretation that two moderately sensible people, who inhabit overlapping but non-congruent interpretive communities, can have.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
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Arbitral Power and the Limits of Contract: The New Trilogy
An excerpt from the introductory paragraphs of the article:
âThe American law of arbitration has for some reason been replete with what we have become accustomed to call âtrilogiesââand the last two terms of the U.S. Supreme Court have curiously continued that pattern. Once again the Court has handed us three leading cases on closely related themesâand these decisions have turned out in fact to be in many ways the most interesting of the lot [referring to Stolt-Nielsen, Rent-A-Center, and Conception]. All three amount to extended riffs on the Question of Questions, the scope of arbitral power: And so the Court has continued to dip its finger into this rich mixtureâcompounded of notions of judicial review, âarbitrability,â âseparability,â competence/compĂ©tence, and the preemption of state lawâall of our hard-earned lore and learning is there.
Undoubtedly for the moment the greatest salience will be with respect to arbitration clauses in contracts of adhesion entered into by consumers and employeesâand yet this recent jurisprudence has the potential of sweeping far more broadly. It seems reasonably clear that these cases will continue to generate endless discussion. Things now seem curiously muddled: If our law of arbitration now no longer seems to have any clear unifying theme, any fil conducteur, this suggests that private adjudicationârather than presenting us as it once did with a coherent and self-contained body of doctrineâhas become a hostage to a game played out on a larger stage, a pawn of wider, systemic âpoliticalâ concerns. And soâyet another untoward result â these cases will require the reevaluation of what seemed, for a while, to constitute comfortably settled certainties. Here is at least one step in that direction.âThe Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
LSST Science Book, Version 2.0
A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint
magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science
opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)
will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field
of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over
20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with
fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a
total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic
parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book
discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a
broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and
outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies,
the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local
Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the
properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then
turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to
z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and
baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to
constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at
http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo
Antiinflammatory Therapy with Canakinumab for Atherosclerotic Disease
Background: Experimental and clinical data suggest that reducing inflammation without affecting lipid levels may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Yet, the inflammatory hypothesis of atherothrombosis has remained unproved. Methods: We conducted a randomized, double-blind trial of canakinumab, a therapeutic monoclonal antibody targeting interleukin-1ÎČ, involving 10,061 patients with previous myocardial infarction and a high-sensitivity C-reactive protein level of 2 mg or more per liter. The trial compared three doses of canakinumab (50 mg, 150 mg, and 300 mg, administered subcutaneously every 3 months) with placebo. The primary efficacy end point was nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, or cardiovascular death. RESULTS: At 48 months, the median reduction from baseline in the high-sensitivity C-reactive protein level was 26 percentage points greater in the group that received the 50-mg dose of canakinumab, 37 percentage points greater in the 150-mg group, and 41 percentage points greater in the 300-mg group than in the placebo group. Canakinumab did not reduce lipid levels from baseline. At a median follow-up of 3.7 years, the incidence rate for the primary end point was 4.50 events per 100 person-years in the placebo group, 4.11 events per 100 person-years in the 50-mg group, 3.86 events per 100 person-years in the 150-mg group, and 3.90 events per 100 person-years in the 300-mg group. The hazard ratios as compared with placebo were as follows: in the 50-mg group, 0.93 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.80 to 1.07; P = 0.30); in the 150-mg group, 0.85 (95% CI, 0.74 to 0.98; P = 0.021); and in the 300-mg group, 0.86 (95% CI, 0.75 to 0.99; P = 0.031). The 150-mg dose, but not the other doses, met the prespecified multiplicity-adjusted threshold for statistical significance for the primary end point and the secondary end point that additionally included hospitalization for unstable angina that led to urgent revascularization (hazard ratio vs. placebo, 0.83; 95% CI, 0.73 to 0.95; P = 0.005). Canakinumab was associated with a higher incidence of fatal infection than was placebo. There was no significant difference in all-cause mortality (hazard ratio for all canakinumab doses vs. placebo, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.83 to 1.06; P = 0.31). Conclusions: Antiinflammatory therapy targeting the interleukin-1ÎČ innate immunity pathway with canakinumab at a dose of 150 mg every 3 months led to a significantly lower rate of recurrent cardiovascular events than placebo, independent of lipid-level lowering. (Funded by Novartis; CANTOS ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01327846.
THE NEEDLE in the 100 deg<sup>2</sup> HAYSTACK: UNCOVERING AFTERGLOWS of FERMI GRB<inf>s</inf> with the PALOMAR TRANSIENT FACTORY
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has greatly expanded the number and energy window of observations of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). However, the coarse localizations of tens to a hundred square degrees provided by the Fermi GRB Monitor instrument have posed a formidable obstacle to locating the bursts' host galaxies, measuring their redshifts, and tracking their panchromatic afterglows. We have built a target-of-opportunity mode for the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory in order to perform targeted searches for Fermi afterglows. Here, we present the results of one year of this program: 8 afterglow discoveries out of 35 searches. Two of the bursts with detected afterglows (GRBs 130702A and 140606B) were at low redshift (z = 0.145 and 0.384, respectively) and had spectroscopically confirmed broad-line Type Ic supernovae. We present our broadband follow-up including spectroscopy as well as X-ray, UV, optical, millimeter, and radio observations. We study possible selection effects in the context of the total Fermi and Swift GRB samples. We identify one new outlier on the Amati relation. We find that two bursts are consistent with a mildly relativistic shock breaking out from the progenitor star rather than the ultra-relativistic internal shock mechanism that powers standard cosmological bursts. Finally, in the context of the Zwicky Transient Facility, we discuss how we will continue to expand this effort to find optical counterparts of binary neutron star mergers that may soon be detected by Advanced LIGO and Virgo. © 2015. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved
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The Errors of Comity: Forum Non-Conveniens Returns to the Second Circuit
What is a federal court expected to do when asked to enforce a foreign arbitral award; what constraints do Conventions impose on its normal course of adjudication? This article examines this question from a narrow standpoint which has been troublesome to the Second Circuit, that is what remains of the inherent power of a common-law court to defer or dismiss litigation of a Convention case on the grounds that it constitutes an âinconvenientâ forum.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
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Arbitrators Without Powers? Disqualifying Counsel in Arbitral Proceedings
An excerpt from the introductory paragraphs of the article:
The succession of conferences and the proliferation of soft law instruments are always pretty reliable indicators that a particular problem has risen to the level of the consciousness of the international community. That is abundantly true here: They are testimony to a general recognition of the need to identify what limitsâif anyâthere may be to the permissible conduct of counsel in international arbitration, and to identifyâalways the most interesting questionâthe appropriate fora in which such questions can be addressed and resolved.
My focus here, though, will be on a relatively small piece of the overall puzzle: Rather than to approach globallyâfrom a Godâs eye viewâthe problem of sanctions for supposed âcounsel misconduct,â I want instead to focus on one particular sanctionâone that is growing, and promises to grow even more, in importance: the ability of the tribunal to âexclude,â or as we say in the States, âdisqualify,â counsel from the proceedings.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
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Comment: Mandatory Law and the Enforceability of Arbitration Agreements
This article is Rauâs commentary on Professor Kleinheisterkampâs paper, âMandatory Law and the Enforceability of Arbitration Agreements,â which focuses on the effect of âinternationally mandatory rules.â Rau sets up a critique, analyzing the meaning of âmandatory rulesâ in this context, what is considered to be sufficiently central to the fundamental concepts of the local legal system, and general application of local versus international rules in arbitration in specific cases.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
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The Agreement to Arbitrate and the âApplicable Lawâ
The present article is an expanded version of one lecture in a series of lectures given at the Hague Academy of International Law in August 2017; the general subject of the series is the âallocation of power between arbitral tribunals and national courts.â I have tried to minimize here any cross-references to any of the other lectures, but as these are intended to form an integrated whole, and as all will eventually be published together, this could not be avoided entirely.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines
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