Fast-Fish, Loose-Fish: How Whalemen, Lawyers, and Judges Created the British Property Law of Whaling

Anglo-American whalemen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used customs largely of their own creation to resolve disputes at sea over contested whales. These customs were remarkably effective as litigation was rare and violence even rarer. Legal scholars such as Robert Ellickson have correctly pointed to these customs as an example of how close knit communities settle disputes without recourse to formal legal institutions or even knowledge of the applicable law. Ellickson’s belief, however, that these whaling customs were universally followed at sea and were – in turn – adopted by courts, is not entirely accurate. While courts often deferred, in part, to whaling practices, judges and lawyers were also active participants in creating the property law of whaling. British courts at the turn of the nineteenth century did much to advance one whaling custom over a competing practice. In the 1820s, British lawyers and judges applied the emerging action of interference with trade to whaling disputes and thereby reintroduced aspects of the custom their predecessors had previously rejected. This paper is the first chapter of my dissertation. The second chapter looks at how Americans resolved disputes over contested whales. Beginning with municipal regulations and colonial legislation in the seventeenth century governing dead whales that drifted ashore, the second chapter follows the growth of American whaling into the sperm whale fisheries of the South Pacific at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although American whalemen followed the custom of iron holds the whale by the middle of the eighteenth century, nineteenth century American legal scholars – in the absence of reported decisions from domestic courts – continued to rely on British cases and treatises and thereby failed to recognize that their countrymen had abandoned fast-fish, loose-fish. The American whalemen who dominated the sperm whale fisheries off the coasts of South America continued the practice of iron holds the whale that they had followed in the bowhead and right whale grounds of the North Atlantic. They did not, as Robert Ellickson argues, develop iron holds the whale in response to the challenges of catching swift and notoriously ornery sperm whales. Chapter 3 traces the course of American whaling into the North Pacific bowhead fisheries of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Arctic by the middle of the nineteenth century. A close reading of the depositions preserved in the case file of the first nineteenth century American whale property dispute to be litigated – Taber v. Jenny (US Dist. Ct., D. MA, 1856) – shows that while iron holds the whale was still the prevailing norm, American whalemen were also governed by an unwritten code of fairness that required honesty when providing information to competitors as to the location of whales. Chapters 4 and 5, which are still being developed, look at the court files of the four other litigated nineteenth century American whaling property disputes. These chapters will highlight the improvisational nature of whaling customs and demonstrate that whalemen never really developed a universal law of whaling. The final chapter answers the question of why American whalemen after 1850 and only in the Sea of Okhotsk suddenly lost their ability to settle arguments among themselves at sea or through arbitration. The Sea of Okhotsk – like the Greenland bowhead fishery – presented whalemen with a number of unique environmental challenges that overwhelmed their ability to resolve disputes without involving lawyers and courts

Master of Arts

thesisThis thesis is an analysis of geminate consonant segments in Shoshoni, a member of the Numic family of Uto-Aztecan languages. Shoshoni dialects exhibit a series of consonant segments described as geminate or geminating segments contrastively characterized as a) being twice as long as initial stops, b) "not phonetically geminate, but rather very tense and slightly protracted single sound segments, or c) segments that are hardened. This variance combined with a lack of word/utterance medial unvoiced singleton consonants in Shoshoni raises questions concerning a geminate analysis. In an effort to mitigate this lack of contrast, I propose an analysis in which the surface geminate behaviors of Shoshoni are compared to known behaviors of geminates in other languages and deducing the underlying structure based on the known behaviors and underlying structures of the languages to which the comparisons are made. In this thesis I present 1) an examination of the distribution of the described Shoshoni geminates and geminating segments, 2) an examination of the underlying attributes of segments participating in geminate production and the environments in which they are found, 3) a demonstration of the predictive potential resulting from the underlying distinctions of the geminate structures in Shoshoni, and 4) a comparison of findings in Shoshoni to the exceptional behavior of geminates in other languages in support of the geminate analysis in Shoshoni

Is the magnitude of the Peccei-Quinn scale set by the landscape?

Rather general considerations of the string theory landscape imply a mild statistical draw towards large soft SUSY breaking terms tempered by the requirement of proper electroweak symmetry breaking where SUSY contributions to the weak scale are not too far from m(weak)~ 100 GeV. Such a picture leads to the prediction that m_h~ 125 GeV while most sparticles are beyond current LHC reach. Here we explore the possibility that the magnitude of the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) scale f_a is also set by string landscape considerations within the framework of a compelling SUSY axion model. First, we examine the case where the PQ symmetry arises as an accidental approximate global symmetry from a more fundamental gravity-safe Z(24)^R symmetry and where the SUSY mu parameter arises from a Kim-Nilles operator. The pull towards large soft terms then also pulls the PQ scale as large as possible. Unless this is tempered by rather severe (unknown) cosmological or anthropic bounds on the density of dark matter, then we would expect a far greater abundance of dark matter than is observed. This conclusion cannot be negated by adopting a tiny axion misalignment angle theta_i because WIMPs are also overproduced at large f_a. Hence, we conclude that setting the PQ scale via anthropics is highly unlikely. Instead, requiring soft SUSY breaking terms of order the gravity-mediation scale m_{3/2}~ 10-100 TeV places the mixed axion-neutralino dark matter abundance into the intermediate scale sweet zone where f_a~ 10^{11}-10^{12} GeV. We compare our analysis to the more general case of a generic SUSY DFSZ axion model with uniform selection on theta_i but leading to the measured dark matter abundance: this approach leads to a preference for f_a~ 10^{12} GeV.Comment: 24 pages plus 10 figure

\u3cem\u3eToxic Bones\u3c/em\u3e: The Burdens of Discovering Human Remains in West Virginia\u27s Abandoned and Unmarked Graves

This article pulls up and highlights a land use restriction, or financial burden, imposed upon West Virginia private real estate owners who inadvertently uncover human skeletal remains in unmarked graves on their property. In this state, those coming across human bones that historians and archaeologists eventually deem have no historical or archeological significance have a choice—pay the costs to have the bones removed and reinterred or cover the bones and use the property only as a cemetery in perpetuity. This burden becomes more acute when comparing West Virginia’s law to those of other states that require government officials, at public expense, to remove and re-bury discovered bones in a state cemetery set aside for that purpose. This leads one to consider whether West Virginia’s law, as implemented, constitutes a Fifth Amendment “taking” of private property for public use without just compensation, that is, whther the state is imposing upon private property owners a de facto cemetery for the remains of unknown and insignificant persons. It may be helpful to point out what this Article is not about. This Article does not address bones located in marked and designated burial sites, such as established cemeteries. It also does not take up the uncovering of Native American remains, or for that matter, any other remains that the scientific and cultural communities ultimately determine are historically or archeologically significant. Rather, this Article focuses on the inadvertent discovery of the bones of people who, through the passage of time, have been forgotten or abandoned, and who historians and archaeologists deem unremarkable

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases workshop report: "Chlamydia vaccines: The way forward".

Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct), an intracellular pathogen, is the most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection. In addition to acute cervicitis and urethritis, Ct can lead to serious sequelae of significant public health burden including pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) and infertility. Ct control efforts have not resulted in desired outcomes such as reduced incidence and reinfection, and this highlights the need for the development of an effective Ct vaccine. To this end, NIAID organized a workshop to consider the current status of Ct vaccine research and address critical questions in Ct vaccine design and clinical testing. Topics included the goal(s) of a vaccine and the feasibility of achieving these goals, animal models of infection including mouse and nonhuman primate (NHP) models, and correlates of protection to guide vaccine design. Decades of research have provided both whole cell-based and subunit vaccine candidates for development. At least one is currently in clinical development and efforts now need to be directed toward further development of the most attractive candidates. Overall, the discussions and presentations from the workshop highlighted optimism about the current status of Ct vaccine research and detailed the remaining gaps and questions needed to move vaccines forward

The Dark Universe after Reheating in String Inflation

We study the production of dark matter and dark radiation after reheating in string inflation models where the Calabi-Yau has a fibred structure and the visible sector lives on D3 branes. We show how the interplay between different physical constraints from inflation, reheating, supersymmetry breaking and dark radiation, leads to distinct predictions for the nature of dark matter.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Prognosis in Aphasia: Investigation of the High-Overall Prediction (HOAP) and the Short-Direct or HOAP Slope Method to Predict Change in PICA Performance

TB

The dark universe: the interplay of cosmological moduli, axions, and the MSSM

In this work, we introduce two effective field theories which parameterize a light modulus field interacting both with the MSSM ($\phi$MSSM) and with the MSSM combined with an additional supersymmetric DFSZ axion ($\phi$PQMSSM). All two-body decays of the modulus are cataloged and connected to explicit string scenarios, with all model-independent decay widths calculated incorporating mixing and phase-space effects for the first time. Dark matter and dark radiation production are studied in both models for a subset of string scenarios, with comments provided on expectations for the remaining scenarios. Quite generally, we find that many string scenarios with a modulus-driven early matter dominated period overproduce dark matter and/or dark radiation. The overproduction of dark matter may be remedied with a sufficiently large modulus mass, however various consistency conditions show that most scenarios are incompatible with weak-scale supersymmetry and with a DFSZ-type axion, at least without additional model-building. We also study statistical properties of the Peccei-Quinn scale $f_a$ and the derived value of the SUSY $\mu$-term in the string landscape. Here, we find the predicted value of $f_a$ is in the cosmological sweet-spot for axion dark matter, while the predicted higgsino masses are slightly above current LHC bounds. Additionally, we study the predicted nature of viable dark matter candidates in explicit inflationary scenarios in string theory, finding a WIMP in K\"{a}hler inflation and open string axions in fibre inflation to be natural dark matter candidates