Critical Legal Studies as Radical Politics and World View

Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. ix, 360. $14.95. As an act of simple justice to Professor Mark Kelman and his A Guide to Critical Legal Studies, I must begin with a caveat. Every author has the right to expect a reviewer to criticize the book he has written, not the one he might have written. I have tried to meet that obligation but probably failed. Accordingly, Professor Kelman has a right to get sore. Still, the Critical Legal Studies movement entails a good deal more than quarrels over strictly legal questions, however discretely important. It proudly proclaims itself the cutting-edge of a new radical politics and a new social theory. He who would guide us through CLS but obscures that larger program is asking for trouble. Guide consists of nine chapters that might have been grouped in three parts. As a bonus, Kelman offers fifty-eight pages of annotated notes that provide an invaluable bibliography of CLS writings. The first three chapters discuss rules and standards, the subjectivity of value, and intentionality and determinism. Together, they constitute a synthesis of CLS\u27s familiar, controversial, slashing attacks on the premises and practices of the legal system. The synthesis contains some fresh contributions by Kelman, but its primary value lies in its systematic recapitulation of the arguments the Critics have been scattering throughout a variety of law journals

Bell measurements as a witness of a dualism in entanglement

We show how a property of dualism, which can exist in the entanglement of identical particles, can be tested in the usual photonic Bell measurement apparatus with minor modifications. Two different sets of coincidence measurements on the same experimental setup consisting of a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer demonstrate how the same two-photon state can emerge entanglement in the polarization or the momentum degree of freedom depending on the dynamical variables used for labeling the particles. Our experiment demonstrates how the same source can be used as both a polarization entangled state, as well as a dichotomic momentum entangled state shared between distant users Alice and Bob in accordance to which sets of detectors they access. When the particles become distinguishable by letting the information about one of the variables to be imprinted in yet another (possibly inaccessible) system or degree of freedom, the feature of dualism is expected to vanish. We verify this feature by polarization decoherence (polarization information in environment) or arrival time difference, which both respectively destroy one of the dual forms of entanglement.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Role of heat and mechanical treatments in the fabrication of superconducting Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2 ex-situ Powder-In-Tube tapes

Among the recently discovered Fe-based superconducting compounds, the (K,Ba)Fe2As2 phase is attracting large interest within the scientific community interested in conductor developments. In fact, after some years of development, critical current densities Jc of about 105 A/cm2 at fields up to more than 10 T have been obtained in powder in tube (PIT) processed wires and tapes. Here we explore the crucial points in the wire/tape fabrication by means of the ex-situ PIT method. We focus on scaling up processes which are crucial for the industrial fabrication. We analyzed the effects on the microstructure of the different heat and mechanical treatments. By an extensive microstructural analysis correlated with the transport properties we addressed the issues concerning the phase purity, the internal porosity and crack formation in the superconducting core region. Our best conductors with a filling factor of about 30 heat treated at 800 C exhibited Tc = 38 K the highest value measured in such kind of superconducting tape. The microstructure analysis shows clean and well connected grain boundaries but rather poor density: The measured Jc of about 3 x 10^4 A/cm2 in self-field is suppressed by less than a factor 7 at 7 T. Such not yet optimized Jc values can be accounted for by the reduced density while the moderate in-field suppression and a rather high n-factor confirm the high homogeneity and uniformity of these tapes

Planck-scale modifications to Electrodynamics characterized by a space-like symmetry-breaking vector

In the study of Planck-scale ("quantum-gravity induced") violations of Lorentz symmetry, an important role was played by the deformed-electrodynamics model introduced by Myers and Pospelov. Its reliance on conventional effective quantum field theory, and its description of symmetry-violation effects simply in terms of a four-vector with nonzero component only in the time-direction, rendered it an ideal target for experimentalists and a natural concept-testing ground for many theorists. At this point however the experimental limits on the single Myers-Pospelov parameter, after improving steadily over these past few years, are "super-Planckian", {\it i.e.} they take the model out of actual interest from a conventional quantum-gravity perspective. In light of this we here argue that it may be appropriate to move on to the next level of complexity, still with vectorial symmetry violation but adopting a generic four-vector. We also offer a preliminary characterization of the phenomenology of this more general framework, sufficient to expose a rather significant increase in complexity with respect to the original Myers-Pospelov setup. Most of these novel features are linked to the presence of spatial anisotropy, which is particularly pronounced when the symmetry-breaking vector is space-like, and they are such that they reduce the bound-setting power of certain types of observations in astrophysics

The tragedy of Islamism in Britain: a fetishism for politics

This dissertation critically argues that the dominant representation of the dominated groups can mirror its way into the self-representation of those groups. Moreover, a fetishism for politics (i.e., a repression and denial of engagement in the political arena) deflects the interaction between the dominant and the dominated groups (in this case, the UK Government and Islamist parties in the UK) and ultimately disempowers them both. This research is an analysis of the discourses and practices of a large number of Islamist parties in the UK over a period of nearly 20 years (1989-2007); a period when they gained public attention during the debates over multiculturalism and the supposed threats to security from the rise of radical Islam. By ʻIslamist partiesʼ, I mean political groups who place their Muslim identity at the centre of their political practices and who see their political future in Islam. Such political groups are not just Muslims, but Islamists. In asserting this, I argue against the commonplace culturalist-orientalist approach that denies and rejects any ʻpoliticalʼ in relation to Islamists. As part of a dominant discourse, this culturalist-orientalist approach consists of a binary view whereby Islam is either a matter of private professed belief or a matter of a terrorist disruption into the Western democratic systems. In response to this stark dichotomy, I adopt a constructionist theoretical approach that sees ʻculturesʼ and ʻreligionsʼ as political acts within the terms of a power-relationship. Practically, I approach the issue based on two years of fieldwork amongst the British Islamists. I have interviewed a large number of Islamists from different parties. For practical and epistemological reasons, I divide them into two groups: the Participationists and the Rejectionists. Participationists are those who are willing to take part in British political life, for instance, by taking part in elections, while the Rejectionists are those who reject the British political system as illegitimate and plan to subvert it. The participationist parties act politically but show a strong reticence in adopting any political label themselves.The explanation for this lies in their fetishism for politics. Taking a collaborative and non-confrontational approach, they choose to remain in the category of the ʻfaith-groupsʼ. Ultimately, this delegitimizes their Islamist quest because it mirrors the dominant culturalist-orientalist discourse that depoliticizes and disempowers them. The rejectionist groups are those with a confrontational approach toward the dominant discourse; they promote an Islamic system as the alternative. They declare that their struggle is aimed at instituting a ʻKhilafahʼ so that the ʻPoliticalʼ is at the service of the ʻSpiritualʼ. My findings indicate that, paradoxically, the exact reverse is true. Their efforts promote a ʻsecularizationʼ of Islam; this is denied (repressed) by the Islamists themselves, and exorcized by the dominant discourse under the label of religious fundamentalism. The ʻfetishismʼ for politics from both the dominant and the dominated distorts their interaction, and is ultimately responsible, both for the political ʻfailureʼ of Islamist parties, and for the string of past and future terrorist attacks. The novelty of my approach has been to analyze the hiatus between the two parties -- the political stalemate and the security threat -- through the convex mirror of repression and exorcism; politics, as discoursed and practiced through the emotional, the visceral, and the de-sacralization of the secular and the religious at the same time. The novelty also lies in providing a new ethnography of a political actor -- the British Islamist -- whose politics has been underemphasized, and who has been much maligned and commented upon from a dominant culturalist-orientalist framework. The new ethnography acknowledges the agency of British Islamists as political actors and argues that they should be represented and recognized as such by the dominant discourse and by the Government. The Manichean representation of these political actors (British Islamists) as either faith groups or terrorists, debilitates the very democratic process and reproduces a recurrent security threat