THE CLASSIFICATION OF SOME POWERS OF APPOINTMENT

Many problems involving powers of appointment depend for their solution on the classification of the power in question as general or special. It is now clearly established in English law and in most American jurisdictions that this classification depends on the persons to whom an appointment may be made. The fact that the power is exercisable on a contingency or in a specified manner does not affect the character of the power. Nor is it relevant for the purpose of classification that the power permits the appointment of a limited interest only. A general power is usually said to be one which enables the donee of the power to appoint to anyone he pleases, including himself. A special power is usually defined as one which the donee may exercise in favor of certain specified persons or classes. Sometimes it is said that these specified persons or classes do not include the donee

Legal Models for the International Regulation of Exchange Rates

No legal scholar has contributed more to the study of the harmonization of national interests by international agreement than Professor Eric Stein. This essay in his honor examines some of the efforts that have been made since the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944 to bring order into the important international relationships that are called exchange rates. The subject has a further pertinence because of Eric Stein\u27s work on the European Community. The law of the Community on exchange rates has been affected by the fortunes of the law of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Treaty of Rome relied to a large extent on the legal order established originally by the IMF\u27s Articles of Agreement, but the Community has attempted to create its own system as the wider order of the IMF has come under the pressure of troublesome economic developments. Here is another aspect of harmonization: the law of the European collectivity must fit into the law of the broader society of nations. Finally, the subject is timely because the behavior of exchange rates is a constant preoccupation of monetary authorities and scholars and provokes them to call for improvements in international monetary arrangements

A Report on Certain Recent Legal Developments in the International Monetary Fund

In the recent past, the main activity of the International Monetary Fund in connection with the development of international law has been the negotiation and drafting of an amendment of the Fund\u27s Articles of Agreement. The present report deals primarily with that activity, but also comments on the sixth general review of the quotas of member states in the Fund. On August 15, 1971, the United States, having decided to free itself from certain constraints that had become unacceptable and to exercise greater autonomy for national policies, suspended the convertibility into gold or other reserve assets of balances of United States dollars held by the monetary authorities of other members of the Fund. This action made it clear that certain fundamental assumptions on which the Articles had been agreed at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944 were now disputable or even untenable. In due course, the Committee of the Board of Governors of the Fund on Reform of the International Monetary System and Related Issues (the Committee of Twenty), composed of Governors of the Fund, ministers, or others of comparable rank (such as governors of central banks), was appointed to negotiate reform of the international monetary system

On the Disalignment of Interstellar Grains

Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the alignment of grains with the interstellar magnetic field, including paramagnetic dissipation, radiative torques, and supersonic gas-grain streaming. These must compete with disaligning processes, including randomly directed torques arising from collisions with gas atoms. I describe a novel disalignment mechanism for grains that have a time-varying electric dipole moment and that drift across the magnetic field. Depending on the drift speed, this mechanism may yield a much shorter disalignment timescale than that associated with random gas atom impacts. For suprathermally rotating grains, the new disaligning process may be more potent for carbonaceous dust than for silicate dust. This could result in efficient alignment for silicate grains but poor alignment for carbonaceous grains.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Ap

A Bayesian Approach to Latent Class Modeling for Estimating the Prevalence of Schizophrenia Using Administrative Databases

Estimating the incidence and the prevalence of psychotic disorders in the province of Quebec has been the object of some interest in recent years as a contribution to the epidemiological study of the causes of psychotic disorders being carried out primarily in the UK and Scandinavia. A number of studies have used administrative data from the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec (RAMQ) that includes nearly all Quebec citizens to obtain geographical and temporal prevalence estimates for the illness. However, there has been no investigation of the validity of RAMQ diagnoses for psychotic disorders, and without a measure of the sensitivity and the specificity of these diagnoses, it is impossible to be confident in the accuracy of the estimates obtained. This paper proposes the use of latent class analysis to ascertain the validity of a diagnosis of schizophrenia using RAMQ data