Beware of Courts Bearing Gifts: Transparency and the Court of Justice of the European Union

This article reconsiders the principle of transparency in the European Union (EU) legal order and takes as its focal point the contribution of the EU Courts as regards the presumptions of non-disclosure of EU documents. The aim is to investigate the role played by the judiciary in relation to a twofold question: How open can the Union’s decision-making be, and is it possible for citizens to participate in the decision-making process of EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies? The article argues that accountability deficits in the field of access to documents have been filled, to an extent, by the EU Courts’ imposition of boundaries on the broad derogations to the right of access to documents. But nevertheless, the article concludes that the establishment through the case law of general presumptions against openness has fundamentally weakened the standards of accountability. Rather regrettably, although the EU legislature set the default position to the widest access to documents, this has been reversed to non-disclosure by the EU judiciary as regards non-legislative documents

Superstring dualities and p-brane bound states

We show that the M-theory/IIA and IIA/IIB superstring dualities together with the diffeomorphism invariance of the underlying theories require the presence of certain p-brane bound states in IIA and IIB superstring theories preserving 1/2 of the spacetime supersymmetry. We then confirm the existence of IIA and IIB supergravity solutions having the appropriate p-brane bound states interpretation.Comment: 21 pages, Phyzzx, Minor corrections, Version that will appear in Nucl. Phys.

Coleman meets Schwinger

It is well known that spherical D-branes are nucleated in the presence of an external RR electric field. Using the description of D-branes as solitons of the tachyon field on non-BPS D-branes, we show that the brane nucleation process can be seen as the decay of the tachyon false vacuum. This process can describe the decay of flux-branes in string theory or the decay of quintessence potentials arising in flux compactifications.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure