The Unsung Virtues of Global Forum Shopping

Forum shopping gets a bad name. This is even more true in the context of transnational litigation. The term is associated with unprincipled gamesmanship and undeserved victories. Courts therefore often seek to thwart the practice. But in recent years, exaggerated perceptions of the “evils” of forum shopping among courts in different countries have led U.S. courts to impose high barriers to global forum shopping. These extreme measures prevent global forum shopping from serving three unappreciated functions: protecting access to justice, promoting private regulatory enforcement, and fostering legal reform. This Article challenges common perceptions about global forum shopping that have supported recent doctrinal developments. It traces the history of concerns about global forum shopping and distinguishes between domestic and global forum shopping to discern the core objections to the practice. It then identifies these unappreciated virtues of global forum shopping and suggests balanced ways for courts to protect them

Litigation Isolationism

Over the past two decades, U.S. courts have pursued a studied avoidance of transnational litigation. The resulting litigation isolationism appears to be driven by courts’ desire to promote separation of powers, international comity, and the interests of defendants. This Article demonstrates, however, that this new kind of “avoidance” in fact frequently undermines not only these values but also other significant U.S. interests by continuing to interfere with foreign relations and driving plaintiffs to sue in foreign courts. This Article offers four contributions: First, it focuses the conversation about transnational litigation on those doctrines designed to avoid it—that is, doctrines that permit or require courts to dismiss a case based on its “foreignness.” Doing so helps to identify the particular concerns justifying this kind of avoidance and to evaluate them on their own terms. Second, the Article presents evidence of emerging foreign trends that increasingly (and surprisingly) permit traditionally American, plaintiff-friendly procedures, including higher damages awards, aggregate litigation, and third-party litigation financing. Third, the Article demonstrates that, particularly in light of these foreign trends, avoidance has failed to achieve its stated goals, and in many instances has undermined them. Finally, the Article suggests ways to refine avoidance doctrines to address these unintended consequences. Its more basic and urgent task, however, is to identify the growing phenomenon of litigation isolationism, highlight its perversities, and caution against its further expansion

Analytical theory of modulated magnetic solitons

Droplet solitons are coherently precessing solitary waves that have been recently realized in thin ferromagnets with perpendicular anisotropy.In the strongly nonlinear regime, droplets can be well approximated by a slowly precessing, circular domain wall with a hyperbolic tangent form. Utilizing this representation, this work develops a general droplet modulation theory and applies it to study the long range effects of the magnetostatic field and a nanocontact spin torque oscillator (NC-STO) where spin polarized currents act as a gain source to counteract magnetic damping. An analysis of the dynamical equations for the droplet's center, frequency and phase demonstrates a negative processional frequency shift due to long range dipolar interactions, dependent on film thickness. Further analysis also demonstrates the onset of a saddle-node bifurcation at the minimum sustaining current for the NC-STO. The basin of attraction associated with the stable node demonstrates that spin torque enacts a restoring force to excursions of the droplet from the nanocontact center, observed previously in numerical simulations. Large excursions lead to the droplet's eventual decay into spin waves

Workforce Issues in the Greater Boston Health Care Industry: Implications for Work and Family

This working paper synthesizes critical problems identified by interviews with more than 40 leaders in the Boston area health care industry and places them in the context of work and family issues. At present, the defining circumstance for the health care industry nationally as well as regionally is an extraordinary reorganization, not yet fully negotiated, in the provision and financing of health care. Hoped-for controls on increased costs of medical care have fallen far short of their promise. Pressures to limit expenditures have produced dispiriting conditions for the entire healthcare workforce. Under such strains, relations between managers and workers providing care are uneasy. Five key issues affect a broad cross-section of occupational groups, albeit in different ways: staffing shortages; long work hours and inflexible schedules; degraded and unsupportive working conditions; lack of opportunities for training and advancement; professional and employee voices are insufficiently heard. The paper concludes with possible ways to address such issues

Workforce Issues in the Greater Boston Health Care Industry: Implications for Work and Family

Interviews with more than 40 leaders in the Boston area health care industry have identified a range of broadly-felt critical problems. This document synthesizes these problems and places them in the context of work and family issues implicit in the organization of health care workplaces. It concludes with questions about possible ways to address such issues. The defining circumstance for the health care industry nationally as well as regionally at present is an extraordinary reorganization, not yet fully negotiated, in the provision and financing of health care. Hoped-for controls on increased costs of medical care – specifically the widespread replacement of indemnity insurance by market-based managed care and business models of operation--have fallen far short of their promise. Pressures to limit expenditures have produced dispiriting conditions for the entire healthcare workforce, from technicians and aides to nurses and physicians. Under such strains, relations between managers and workers providing care are uneasy, ranging from determined efforts to maintain respectful cooperation to adversarial negotiation. Taken together, the interviews identify five key issues affecting a broad cross-section of occupational groups, albeit in different ways: Staffing shortages of various kinds throughout the health care workforce create problems for managers and workers and also for the quality of patient care. Long work hours and inflexible schedules place pressure on virtually every part of the healthcare workforce, including physicians. Degraded and unsupportive working conditions, often the result of workplace "deskilling" and "speed up," undercut previous modes of clinical practice. Lack of opportunities for training and advancement exacerbate workforce problems in an industry where occupational categories and terms of work are in a constant state of flux. Professional and employee voices are insufficiently heard in conditions of rapid institutional reorganization and consolidation. Interviewees describe multiple impacts of these issues--on the operation of health care workplaces, on the well being of the health care workforce, and on the quality of patient care. Also apparent in the interviews, but not clearly named and defined, is the impact of these issues on the ability of workers to attend well to the needs of their families--and the reciprocal impact of workers' family tensions on workplace performance. In other words, the same things that affect patient care also affect families, and vice versa. Some workers describe feeling both guilty about raising their own family issues when their patients' needs are at stake, and resentful about the exploitation of these feelings by administrators making workplace policy. The different institutions making up the health care system have responded to their most pressing issues with a variety of specific stratagems but few that address the complexities connecting relations between work and family. The MIT Workplace Center proposes a collaborative exploration of next steps to probe these complications and to identify possible locations within the health care system for workplace experimentation with outcomes benefiting all parties

Impact of earthquakes on agriculture during the Roman–Byzantine period from pollen records of the Dead Sea laminated sediment

The Dead Sea region holds the archives of a complex relationship between an ever-changing nature and ancient civilisations. Regional pollen diagrams show a Roman–Byzantine period standing out in the recent millennia by its wetter climate that allowed intensive arboriculture. During that period, the Dead Sea formed laminites that display mostly a seasonal character. A multidisciplinary study focused on two earthquakes, 31 BC and AD 363, recorded as seismites in the Ze’elim gully A unit III which has been well dated by radiocarbon in a previous study. The sampling of the sediment was done at an annual resolution starting from a few years before and finishing a decade after each earthquake. A clear drop in agricultural indicators (especially Olea and cereals) is shown. These pollen indicators mostly reflect human activities in the Judean Hills and coastal oases. Agriculture was disturbed in large part of the rift valley where earthquake damage affected irrigation and access to the fields. It took 4 to 5 yr to resume agriculture to previous conditions. Earthquakes must be seen as contributors to factors damaging societies. If combined with other factors such as climatic aridification, disease epidemics and political upheaval, they may lead to civilisation collapse

Magnetic droplet nucleation boundary in orthogonal spin-torque nano-oscillators

Static and dynamic magnetic solitons play a critical role in applied nanomagnetism. Magnetic droplets, a type of non-topological dissipative soliton, can be nucleated and sustained in nanocontact spin-torque oscillators with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy free layers. Here, we perform a detailed experimental determination of the full droplet nucleation boundary in the current–field plane for a wide range of nanocontact sizes and demonstrate its excellent agreement with an analytical expression originating from a stability analysis. Our results reconcile recent contradicting reports of the field dependence of the droplet nucleation. Furthermore, our analytical model both highlights the relation between the fixed layer material and the droplet nucleation current magnitude, and provides an accurate method to experimentally determine the spin transfer torque asymmetry of each device

Vegetation history and climatic fluctuations on a transect along the Dead Sea west shore and impact on past societies over the last 3500 years.

This study represents the vegetation history of the last 3500 years and conducts an analysis of the climatic fluctuations on a 75 km long transect on the western Dead Sea shore. Palynological and sedimentological data are available from six cores near Mount Sedom, Ein Boqueq, and Ein Gedi and from outcrops near Ze'elim and Ein Feshkha. The comparison of the pollen data with the lake levels shows synchronous trends. During the Middle Bronze Age, Iron Age and Hellenistic to Byzantine Period the high lake level of the Dead Sea signals an increase in precipitation. Contemporaneously, values of cultivated plants indicate an increase in agriculture. Lake level is low during the Late Bronze Age, within the Iron Age and at the end of the Byzantine period, indicating dry periods when all pds show a decrease of cultivated plants. Forest regeneration led by drought-resistant pines is observed in all pollen diagrams (pds) following the agricultural decline in the Byzantine period and, in the pds near Ein Boqeq, Ze'elim and Ein Feshkha, during the late Iron Age. The modern vegetation gradient is reflected in the palaeo-records: a stronger expansion of Mediterranean vegetation and cultivated plants in the northern sites is recognisable