The Semisecret Life of Late Mao-Era International Law Scholarship

This Article is delimited by a focus on international law scholarship during the late Mao era, not on the PRC’s actual approach to or pronouncements on international law, mainly in order to respond directly to the assertion of U.S.-based international law scholars on late Mao-era scholarship. Of course, considerable ambiguity surrounds what constitutes scholarly work; no legal or even consensus definition generally exists. To be clear, definitions might exist in specific contexts such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) of the United States, which prohibits foreign lobbying except for “bonafide religious, scholastic, academic or scientific pursuits or the fine arts,” inter alia, although the distinction between scholarly and other types of activities is left entirely ambiguous under the legislation and the case law. In this particular context, Chiu signaled in 1966 what he might have meant by scholarly when he added the qualification to similar assertions from the past that Mao-era international law commentators exhibited “a lack of interest in original studies of international law problems,” suggesting that his definition of scholarly requires an element of originality and intellectual rigor concerning clearly identified problems. Whether the plain-language definition of scholarly contains such elements depends on which dictionary one consults. The Oxford English Dictionary refers to “learned, erudite” for its definition. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines scholarly as “containing a serious, detailed study of a subject,” which suggests the same type of study that a learned or erudite person would undertake. As this Article looks at U.S.based international law scholars, it might be helpful to look at U.S. dictionaries. The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides a similar definition as that of the Oxford English Dictionary— “of, characteristic of, or suitable to learned persons.” Collins Dictionary provides a first definition of “learned” and then a second of “having or showing much knowledge, accuracy, and critical ability.” Of course, accuracy might depend on the viewer’s perspective and the referent employed. Regardless, an amalgam of these definitions would include a large measure of detailed knowledge and serious independence in expressing that detailed knowledge, which presumably would create some form of originality in addressing the problem at issue. This Article uses all three elements—knowledge, independence and originality—to assess whether a particular Mao-era work between 1965 and 1979 represents a scholarly contribution. This is distinguished from non-scholarly contributions, which may relate to education but more closely resemble indoctrination and political propaganda

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Coercion, Causation, and the Fictional Elements of Indirect State Responsibility

This Article provides an in-depth analysis of Article 18 of the 2001 ILC Draft Articles on State Responsibility, which holds a coercing state indirectly responsible for an injurious act committed by a coerced state. Not only does this provision lack support from state practice, but the structural and logical flaws within the current formulation ensure that this provision does not significantly influence the evolution of state practice. Indeed, it would have been better for the ILC to have left Article 18 out of the Draft Articles, given that other, less problematic provisions could have covered such situations involving coercion. In reaching this conclusion, this Article explores the fascinating roles that coercion and causation play within the law of state responsibility

Dionysian Disarmament: Security Coucil WMD Coercive Disarmament Measures and Their Legal Implication

This Article provides the first comprehensive legal analysis of the Security Council\u27s coercive disarmament and arms control measures involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the process of providing this legal analysis, it presents a fresh perspective on a variety of widely held beliefs about disarmament and arms control law, as well as about U.N. law

Gas Smalls Awful: U.N. Forces, Riot-Control Agents, and the Chemical Weapons Convention

This Article takes a comprehensive look at the use of riot-control agents (RCAs) by U.N. forces and the legal issues that arise as a result. This Article is the first to look at these legal issues from a practical perspective, not merely a theoretical one, because prior publications have questioned what would happen if U.N. forces used these weapons, whereas this Article analyzes forty instances of actual use. This Article is designed to spark debate within the areas of peacekeeping law, collective security law, the responsibility of international organizations, and arms control law relating to RCAs, and provides compelling legal and policy arguments for why U.N. forces should refrain from using them. This Article is particularly timely, given that some key states, such as the United States, recently have shown a willingness to reconsider their interpretation of disabling chemicals under the Chemical Weapons Convention and support the ICRC\u27s efforts in this realm. Moreover, as this Article was going to press, numerous news reports described how U.N. forces in Haiti heavily relied on RCAs in subduing victims of the January 12 earthquake who aggressively were demanding food from relief workers. These particular instances in Haiti are not included in the forty instances analyzed in Part II due to time constraints, although they are entirely relevant to this Article. With this overview in mind, the remainder of this Introduction sets out the thesis and the structure for defending that thesis throughout this Article

Gas Smalls Awful: U.N. Forces, Riot-Control Agents, and the Chemical Weapons Convention

This Article takes a comprehensive look at the use of riot-control agents (RCAs) by U.N. forces and the legal issues that arise as a result. This Article is the first to look at these legal issues from a practical perspective, not merely a theoretical one, because prior publications have questioned what would happen if U.N. forces used these weapons, whereas this Article analyzes forty instances of actual use. This Article is designed to spark debate within the areas of peacekeeping law, collective security law, the responsibility of international organizations, and arms control law relating to RCAs, and provides compelling legal and policy arguments for why U.N. forces should refrain from using them. This Article is particularly timely, given that some key states, such as the United States, recently have shown a willingness to reconsider their interpretation of disabling chemicals under the Chemical Weapons Convention and support the ICRC\u27s efforts in this realm. Moreover, as this Article was going to press, numerous news reports described how U.N. forces in Haiti heavily relied on RCAs in subduing victims of the January 12 earthquake who aggressively were demanding food from relief workers. These particular instances in Haiti are not included in the forty instances analyzed in Part II due to time constraints, although they are entirely relevant to this Article. With this overview in mind, the remainder of this Introduction sets out the thesis and the structure for defending that thesis throughout this Article

The Permanent Court of International Justice in Global History

The Permanent Court of International Justice\u27s contributions often are overshadowed by the fact that it was the predecessor of the overwhelmingly important International Court of Justice. This article is the first to look at the Permanent Court\u27s possible contribution to global history in its own right. While the case-study method adopted in this article does not allow for the determination of causal linkages between acts of the Permanent Court and consequences in global history, it nevertheless provides compelling support for liberal institutionalism and the notion that global history has been influenced by actors other than states, even though states remain the main shapers of global history

Gaussianizing the non-Gaussian lensing convergence field I: the performance of the Gaussianization

Motivated by recent works of Neyrinck et al. 2009 and Scherrer et al. 2010, we proposed a Gaussianization transform to Gaussianize the non-Gaussian lensing convergence field $\kappa$. It performs a local monotonic transformation $\kappa\rightarrow y$ pixel by pixel to make the unsmoothed one-point probability distribution function of the new variable $y$ Gaussian. We tested whether the whole $y$ field is Gaussian against N-body simulations. (1) We found that the proposed Gaussianization suppresses the non-Gaussianity by orders of magnitude, in measures of the skewness, the kurtosis, the 5th- and 6th-order cumulants of the $y$ field smoothed over various angular scales relative to that of the corresponding smoothed $\kappa$ field. The residual non-Gaussianities are often consistent with zero within the statistical errors. (2) The Gaussianization significantly suppresses the bispectrum. Furthermore, the residual scatters around zero, depending on the configuration in the Fourier space. (3) The Gaussianization works with even better performance for the 2D fields of the matter density projected over \sim 300 \mpch distance interval centered at $z\in(0,2)$, which can be reconstructed from the weak lensing tomography. (4) We identified imperfectness and complexities of the proposed Gaussianization. We noticed weak residual non-Gaussianity in the $y$ field. We verified the widely used logarithmic transformation as a good approximation to the Gaussianization transformation. However, we also found noticeable deviations.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures, accepted by PR

Selection, stopping conditions, and response characteristics of Dodge\u27s continuous sampling plans when incoming quality deteriorates to an unacceptable level

This paper proposes two modifications to the Dodge type CSP-I continuous sampling plan. A stopping rule and a cost model is presented