Narratives of capital versus narratives of community: conservation covenants and the private regulation of land use

Drawing on experiences in other jurisdictions, this article takes the Law Commission’s 2014 proposals for the introduction of a ‘conservation covenant’ as occasion for reflection on the problems with utilising private law mechanisms as vehicles for furthering the collective interest in environmental protection. It argues that the certainty and security provided by private property relations may come at the expense of openness to environmental and social complexity, raising concerns regarding environmental justice. It considers how the legitimacy of any reform might be increased, arguing that fairer provision of opportunities for public involvement would be necessary to secure the promised public environmental benefits. It highlights the potential for better collection and dissemination of information about covenants and for the involvement of a more diverse range of actors in monitoring and enforcement. Overall, however, the primary role of the parties to a conservation covenant limits the extent to which it could be a suitable mechanism for setting or securing public conservation priorities

Non-perturbative aspects of Sp(2N) gauge theories

Yang-Mills theories based on the symplectic groups – denoted by Sp(2N) – are inter-esting for both theoretical and phenomenological reasons. Sp(2N) theories with two fundamental Dirac fermions give rise to pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons which can be interpreted as a composite Higgs particle. This framework can describe the existing Higgs boson without the need for unnatural fine-tuning. This justifies a programme of wider investigations of Sp(2N) gauge theories aimed at understanding their general behaviour. In this work, we study the glueball mass spectrum for Sp(2N) Yang-Mills theories using the variational method applied to Monte-Carlo generated gauge config-urations. This is carried out both for finite N and in the limit N → ∞. The results are compared to existing results for SU(N) Yang-Mills theories, again, for finite- and large-N. Our glueball analysis is then used to investigate some conjectures related to the behaviour of the spectrum in Yang-Mills theories based on a generic non-Abeliangauge group G. We also find numerical evidence that Sp(2N) groups confine both for finite and large N. As well as studying the glueball spectrum, we examine the quenched-meson spectrum for fermions in the fundamental, antisymmetric and sym-metric representations for N = 2 and N = 3. This study enables us to provide a first account of how the related observables vary with N. The investigations presented in this work contribute to our understanding of the non-perturbative dynamics of Sp(2N) gauge theories in connection with Higgs compositeness and, more in general, with fun-damental open problems in non-Abelian gauge theories such as confinement and global symmetry breaking

Commodity or propriety? Unauthorised transfer of intangible entitlements in the EU emissions trading system

This article argues that the law governing transfer of allowances within the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) should place greater weight upon transactional (and environmental) integrity, even over market liquidity. More broadly, it reflects on the role played by registries in sharing or concealing information about the material world. Although property rules enable market activity through the creation of an abstract carbon commodity, they must also link past to future entitlements in a just way. In emissions trading markets, justice in private transactions is intimately connected to public questions of environmental justice. The relevant EU Regulation prioritises facility of transfer over protection of existing holders, insulating registered entitlements from prior proprietary claims. This approach ignores the important connections between history, integrity and responsibility in both public and private spheres. A preferable response would be to distinguish between transactional and register error, protecting against register mistakes, but not transactional defects

Ensuring the ‘care’ of London’s children:discourses of exclusion, marginality and punishment

Using inspectorate reports this article explores the discourses about a London prison where children are inmates. The construction of the child prisoner inmates intimates their contribution to a pervasive culture of violence, bullying, opposition and poor engagement with purposive activities. While inspectorate reporting is based on the policy of ensuring a safe and rehabilitative experience for prisoners it is suggested that the discourses they harness do not engage with the fabric of these lives. The adoption of a corporate discourse, minimizes the communication of the individual harms inflicted on these children by criminal ‘justice’