The Third Moment in Law and Development Theory and the Emergence of a New Critical Practice

The study of the relationship between law and economic development goes back at least to the nineteenth century. It is a question that attracted the attention of classical thinkers like Marx and Weber. And there were some early efforts to craft policy in this area; for example, under the Raj, some English Utilitarians tried to put Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about law and economic progress into practice in India. But it was only after World War II that systematic and organized efforts to reform legal systems became part of the practice of international development agencies. Initially, development agencies turned to law as an instrument for state policy aimed at generating economic growth. Starting in the 1980s, interest in the role of law in economic development grew, but it was an interest in law more as a framework for market activity than as an instrument of state power. This book argues that, starting in the mid-1990s, development practitioners approached law in a fundamentally new way – as a correction for market failures and as a constitutive part of “development” itself. As a result, “the rule of law” has become significant not only as a tool of development policy, but as an objective for development policy in its own right. This book charts the history of this growing interest in the legal field, explores the shifting rationales behind development policy initiatives, and explores in detail the newest – and most surprising – of these rationales. To do that, we trace the history of a body of ideas about law and economic development that have been employed not just by academics but also by development practitioners responsible for allocating funds and designing projects. In this introduction, we refer to that body of ideas as law and development doctrine. Although this doctrine has academic roots in economic and legal theory, it is a practical working tool of development agencies

Blazes: Coordination Analysis for Distributed Programs

Distributed consistency is perhaps the most discussed topic in distributed systems today. Coordination protocols can ensure consistency, but in practice they cause undesirable performance unless used judiciously. Scalable distributed architectures avoid coordination whenever possible, but under-coordinated systems can exhibit behavioral anomalies under fault, which are often extremely difficult to debug. This raises significant challenges for distributed system architects and developers. In this paper we present Blazes, a cross-platform program analysis framework that (a) identifies program locations that require coordination to ensure consistent executions, and (b) automatically synthesizes application-specific coordination code that can significantly outperform general-purpose techniques. We present two case studies, one using annotated programs in the Twitter Storm system, and another using the Bloom declarative language.Comment: Updated to include additional materials from the original technical report: derivation rules, output stream label

Torricelli’s Law and Conservation of Momentum

Treballs Finals de Grau de Física, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2021, Tutors: Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, Ramon PlanetThis TFG discusses Conservation of Momentum in the context of Torricelli’s law. We consider a large tank filled with water with a tiny hole near its base, and compute the horizontal force exerted on the fluid by the container walls in two ways, finding that the results differ by a factor of 2. We obtain that = 2ℎ2, where 2 is the cross-sectional area of the hole, after applying conservation of momentum, and = ℎ2 using Cauchy’s hypothesis. We analyze the assumptions made in these calculations, and perform experiments to confirm that some of them are not realized, identifying the sources of the discrepancy. Specifically, the assumption that the pressure is hydrostatic everywhere in the tank except at the hole and that the velocity is strictly horizontal are the key reasons for our discrepancy. Finally, we discuss Borda’s Mouthpiece and redefine the selected control volume as a way to reconcile both approaches to obtain the force