An Interpretivist Theory of the Principle of Legality

In this thesis, I develop a theory of the ‘principle of legality’, the method of statutory interpretation used by judges of UK courts where fundamental common law rights and principles are at issue. While both judges and public law theorists have engaged with this method of interpretation at length, I identify a number of important questions about it that remain unanswered. In order to develop answers to these questions, I first argue that any theory of statutory interpretation must be premised on a broader theory of general jurisprudence, that is, a theory about the nature of legal rights and obligations. I endorse a non-positivist account of legal obligations, wherein such obligations are viewed as genuine moral obligations. In particular, I argue that Ronald Dworkin’s theory of ‘law as integrity’ makes the best sense of the principle of legality. On this view, the correct interpretation of a statute is determined by principles of political morality. When judges employ the principle of legality, they are engaged in first order moral questions about the obligations that obtain in virtue of the statute’s enactment. This view, I argue, does a better job of accounting for key aspects of the practice than other theories, in particular those that view the principle of legality as a method of working out the intentions of the legislature. I show that a non-positivist theory of the principle of legality leads us to better answers to the outstanding questions identified at the beginning of the thesis

Why Fair Procedures Always Make a Difference

Section 31(2A) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 (as inserted by the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015) requires judges to refuse relief in judicial review of administrative decisions if it is ‘highly likely’ that the conduct complained of did not make a significant difference to the outcome of the decision. The strongest justification for this ‘Makes No Difference’ principle is provided by a ‘narrow instrumental view’ of fair procedures, according to which their value lies only in their producing the correct outcome. This conception of procedural fairness, however, is impoverished and flawed as a matter of political morality. Fair procedures reflect a conception of citizens as participants in their own governance and play an important communicative role in democratic legal orders. Inasmuch as it leaves no room for these aspects of the value of fair procedures, the Makes No Difference principle embodied in section 31(2A) is pro tanto unjust

Elementary science textbooks : their contents, text characteristics, and comprehensibility : longitudinal study

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 21-24)Supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation, #NSFMDR85-50320, and in part by the National Institute of Education, #400-81-003

Ethiopia, Europe and Modernity: A Preliminary Sketch

This paper explores some of the issues of cultural epistemology which underlie the relations between Ethiopia and Europe.  It briefly explores the origins of modern diplomatic contacts, arguing that the appropriation of modernity increasingly became a central concern of Ethiopia’s rulers in their relations with Europe.  It then raises the question, if Europeanized modernity has increasingly marked Ethiopia in the twentieth century, how are we to discern Ethiopia’s contribution to this process? To what extent, in its modernization, has Ethiopia’s educated elite lost contact with an indigenous point of view?  The paper argues that a critical appreciation of modernity in Ethiopia must be made against a background which historicizes the process whereby it came about, which takes fully into account the modes of reasoning embodied in Gǝʿǝz texts, and which privileges the views of those rural Ethiopians so lightly touched by modernity

Gustav Arén: Envoys of the Gospel in Ethiopia. In the Steps of the Evangelical Pioneers, 1898–1936

Review  

Verena Böll - Denis Nosnitsin - Thomas Rave - Wolbert Smidt - Evgenia Sokolinskaia (eds.): Studia Aethiopica. In Honour of Siegbert Uhlig on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday

   Review  

The development of Isaiah's conception of God

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

The development of Isaiah's conception of God

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Performance Evaluation of Sparse Matrix Multiplication Kernels on Intel Xeon Phi

Intel Xeon Phi is a recently released high-performance coprocessor which features 61 cores each supporting 4 hardware threads with 512-bit wide SIMD registers achieving a peak theoretical performance of 1Tflop/s in double precision. Many scientific applications involve operations on large sparse matrices such as linear solvers, eigensolver, and graph mining algorithms. The core of most of these applications involves the multiplication of a large, sparse matrix with a dense vector (SpMV). In this paper, we investigate the performance of the Xeon Phi coprocessor for SpMV. We first provide a comprehensive introduction to this new architecture and analyze its peak performance with a number of micro benchmarks. Although the design of a Xeon Phi core is not much different than those of the cores in modern processors, its large number of cores and hyperthreading capability allow many application to saturate the available memory bandwidth, which is not the case for many cutting-edge processors. Yet, our performance studies show that it is the memory latency not the bandwidth which creates a bottleneck for SpMV on this architecture. Finally, our experiments show that Xeon Phi's sparse kernel performance is very promising and even better than that of cutting-edge general purpose processors and GPUs