The End of Law: The ISIL Case Study for a Comprehensive Theory of Lawlessness

This Article has five parts. Part I sets out and adopts the basic premises of the jurisprudential perspective championed by Professor Reisman and sketches his argument that legal solutions can always be fashioned in a meaningful and realistic manner. Part II discusses the development of ISIL in the Middle East. Part III analyzes the lawlessness problem created by ISIL for the affected local communities and explains how loss of control, left unattended, transforms into a loss of authority of prescription by destroying the social fabric needed for legal processes to have meaning. Part IV develops how municipal lawlessness has a contagion effect on the international plane through what this Article calls the transnational transference of lawlessness by comparing international legal reactions to ISIL’s putative establishment of a caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Part V sketches how the contagion effect can be stopped by means of the diagnostic tools developed in Parts III and IV. The Article demonstrates that both public debate and scholarly engagement so far have focused on the wrong question: whether or how to use force to wrest control of territory from ISIL. Given the progression of lawlessness from loss of control to loss of authority mapped in Part III of the Article, this incorrect focus is understandable. But to be effective, the debate instead must focus directly on how authoritative decision-making processes can be rekindled and protected in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. These structures were degraded not just by ISIL, which may well be a symptom of failing authority structures rather than its proximate cause; in fact, these structures were sabotaged by Western and Ottoman colonial powers long before ISIL sought its opportunity on Arabian soil. Perhaps counter-intuitively, use of force that does not also address and re-strengthen the social fabric in the region could well be worse long-term than no use of force at all. Given the human toll in the region—and the role as other than an innocent bystander of Western powers—the normative end of law should inspire us towards more effective—and more authoritative—forms of intervention

Universal Scrambling Properties of Spectra and Wave functions in Disordered Interacting Systems

Recent experiments on quantum dots in the Coulomb Blockade regime have shown how adding successive electrons into a dot modifies the energy spectrum and the wave functions of the electrons already present in the dot. Using a microscopic model, we study the importance of electron-electron interaction on these ``scrambling'' effects. We compute the Hartree-Fock single particle properties as function of the number $p$ of added electrons. We define parametric correlation functions that characterize the scrambling properties of the Hartree-Fock wave functions and energy spectra. We find that each of these correlation functions exhibit a universal behavior in terms of the ratio $p/p^{\ast}$ where $p^{\ast}$ is a characteristic number that decreases with increasing either the interaction strength, the disorder strength or the system sizeComment: proceedings Recontres de Moriond, les Arcs 2001, 2 figure

A Shallow Water Analogue of the Standing Accretion Shock Instability: Experimental Demonstration and Two-Dimensional Model

Despite the sphericity of the collapsing stellar core, the birth conditions of neutron stars can be highly non spherical due to a hydrodynamical instability of the shocked accretion flow. Here we report the first laboratory experiment of a shallow water analogue, based on the physics of hydraulic jumps. Both the experiment and its shallow water modeling demonstrate a robust linear instability and nonlinear properties of symmetry breaking, in a system which is one million times smaller and about hundred times slower than its astrophysical analogue.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Letters. Supplementary Material (6 movies) available at http://irfu.cea.fr/Projets/SN2NS/outreach.htm

Comparative Law as Rhetoric: An Analysis of the Use of Comparative Law in International Arbitration

The bulk of the comparative work of an arbitration counsel will go towards finding effective means of persuading a tribunal. It is part of his advocacy tool kit. Typically, there are three distinct ways in which counsel would then deploy these tools in practice: (1) he could use comparative law to explain law foreign to the tribunal in a manner helpful to his case, (2) he could use it as a means to close legal gaps in the law applicable to the dispute, and (3) he could use it to extract general principles of international law or trade usages. This essay deals with the first of these questions. In brief, it focuses on comparative legal rhetoric in arbitration. It leaves for later discussion the more traditional substantive roles of comparative law in the context of international arbitration

The Dark Sun Network

Climate scientists agree that climate change will soon require the deployment of a highly dangerous geoengineering approach known as “solar radiation management.” Solar radiation management uses chemical or physical barriers to solar energy entering the atmosphere and thereby forces global temperatures downwards almost immediately by creating “artificial shade.” Problematically, the unilateral deployment of domestic solar radiation management approaches can have different and potentially devastating effects around the world, even if they help the country deploying the approach to limit the worst climate change consequences at home. So far, there is no global governance framework that can guide the development and deployment of solar radiation management. In this Article, I develop how a networked, bottom-up governance approach can resolve the current solar radiation management global governance deadlock. I argue that such bottom-up governance must be consistent with principles of nondomination developed in civic republican and postcolonial theories of consent. I submit that the most promising way to jumpstart such a network is to lean into what appears to many as U.S. unilateralism. I argue that U.S. environmental law provides a ready model for global bottom-up solar radiation management governance coordination and collaboration in the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act. Centrally, the Dark Sun Network provides a realistic and meaningful governance approach that can be scaled up immediately on the basis of existing law

Winding vector: how to annihilate two Dirac points with the same charge

The merging or emergence of a pair of Dirac points may be classified according to whether the winding numbers which characterize them are opposite ($+-$ scenario) or identical ($++$ scenario). From the touching point between two parabolic bands (one of them can be flat), two Dirac points with the {\it same} winding number emerge under appropriate distortion (interaction, etc), following the $++$ scenario. Under further distortion, these Dirac points merge following the $+-$ scenario, that is corresponding to {\it opposite} winding numbers. This apparent contradiction is solved by the fact that the winding number is actually defined around a unit vector on the Bloch sphere and that this vector rotates during the motion of the Dirac points. This is shown here within the simplest two-band lattice model (Mielke) exhibiting a flat band. We argue on several examples that the evolution between the two scenarios is general.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure