Theorising international environmental law

From The Oxford Handbook of International Legal Theory (Florian Hoffmann and Anne Orford, eds, Oxford UP, forthcoming 2014). --- This paper, part of a larger work on international law theory, sketches some early lines of inquiry towards a theoretical understanding of international environmental law. As the body of international law regulating human interaction with the natural world, one might expect this branch of law to be a cornerstone of the international system. Yet in practice, international environmental law's reach is strikingly circumscribed. Little of the governance of natural resources, for example, is 'environmental'. Subsisting at the periphery, environmental law focuses on conserving particular (rare, exotic) species and 'ecosystems', and curbing certain kinds of pollution. Its principles are vague, peppering the margins of rulings within other judicial fora: it is quintessential soft law. In this paper, we suggest that international environmental law's dilemmas are due to two competing heritages. On one hand, this law enshrines the peculiar pantheism of the European romantic period, positing the 'natural world' as sacred, inviolable, redemptive. On the other, its main antecedents are found in colonial era practices, which provided the data for the earliest environmental science and a laboratory for prototypical attempts at conservation and sustainable development. Caught between irreconcilable demands, international environmental law struggles today to avoid utopian irrelevance or nugatory paralysis

Household Access to Mortgages in the UK

We employ the propensity score matching approach to investigate household access to mortgages in the UK using information on 29,732 households between 2003 and 2010. We find that, on average, the probability of obtaining a mortgage is similar for White and Non-White households. However, we find that Black households with low incomes are less likely to have mortgages compared to White households with similar characteristics. Asian households, in contrast, do not seem to have a lower probability of having a mortgage

The Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) Level 2 Version 2

The Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) is a machine-readable model representation language for software tools in computational systems biology. By supporting SBML as an input/output format, different tools can all operate on an identical representation of a model, removing opportunities for translation errors and assuring a common starting point for analyses and simulations. SBML is by no means a perfect format, but it has achieved widespread acceptance as a de facto standard. It is supported worldwide by over 100 software systems (both open-source and commercial). The broad acceptance of a common, open format for exchanging models between software tools is a crucial step towards wider use of quantitative modeling in biology, because it allows researchers to build upon each other's work with greater ease and accuracy.

SBML can encode models consisting of biochemical entities (species) linked by reactions to form networks. An important principle is that models are decomposed into explicitly-labeled constituent elements, the set of which resembles a verbose rendition of chemical reaction equations. The representation deliberately does not cast the model directly into a set of differential equations or other specific interpretation of the model. The formalisms in SBML allows a wide range of biological phenomena to be modeled, including metabolism, cell signaling, gene regulation, and more. Significant flexibility and power comes from the ability to define arbitrary formulae for the rates of change of variables as well as the ability to express other constraints mathematically.

This tutorial covered the latest edition of SBML, which is Level 2 Version 2, finalized in September 2006. Topics covered include the basic common principles in SBML as well the changes introduced in Level 2 Version 2. We also discussed software tools for programmers, in particular libSBML