Climate change litigation: a review of research on courts and litigants in climate government

Studies of climate change litigation have proliferated over the past two decades, as lawsuits across the world increasingly bring policy debates about climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate change‐related loss and damage to the attention of courts. We systematically identify 130 articles on climate change litigation published in English in the law and social sciences between 2000 and 2018 to identify research trajectories. In addition to a budding interdisciplinarity in scholarly interest in climate change litigation we also document a growing understanding of the full spectrum of actors involved and implicated in climate lawsuits and the range of motivations and/or strategic imperatives underpinning their engagement with the law. Situating this within the broader academic literature on the topic we then highlight a number of cutting edge trends and opportunities for future research. Four emerging themes are explored in detail: the relationship between litigation and governance; how time and scale feature in climate litigation; the role of science; and what has been coined the “human rights turn” in climate change litigation. We highlight the limits of existing work and the need for future research—not limited to legal scholarship—to evaluate the impact of both regulatory and anti‐regulatory climate‐related lawsuits, and to explore a wider set of jurisdictions, actors and themes. Addressing these issues and questions will help to develop a deeper understanding of the conditions under which litigation will strengthen or undermine climate governance. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governanc

An efficient algorithm for the stochastic simulation of the hybridization of DNA to microarrays

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Although oligonucleotide microarray technology is ubiquitous in genomic research, reproducibility and standardization of expression measurements still concern many researchers. Cross-hybridization between microarray probes and non-target ssDNA has been implicated as a primary factor in sensitivity and selectivity loss. Since hybridization is a chemical process, it may be modeled at a population-level using a combination of material balance equations and thermodynamics. However, the hybridization reaction network may be exceptionally large for commercial arrays, which often possess at least one reporter per transcript. Quantification of the kinetics and equilibrium of exceptionally large chemical systems of this type is numerically infeasible with customary approaches.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this paper, we present a robust and computationally efficient algorithm for the simulation of hybridization processes underlying microarray assays. Our method may be utilized to identify the extent to which nucleic acid targets (e.g. cDNA) will cross-hybridize with probes, and by extension, characterize probe robustnessusing the information specified by MAGE-TAB. Using this algorithm, we characterize cross-hybridization in a modified commercial microarray assay.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>By integrating stochastic simulation with thermodynamic prediction tools for DNA hybridization, one may robustly and rapidly characterize of the selectivity of a proposed microarray design at the probe and "system" levels. Our code is available at <url>http://www.laurenzi.net</url>.</p

Polymorphic session pocesses as morphisms

The study of expressiveness of concurrent processes via session types opens a connection between linear logic and mobile processes, grounded in the rigorous logical background of propositions-as-types. One such study includes a notion of parametric session polymorphism, which connects session typed processes with rich higher-order functional computations. This work proposes a novel and non-trivial application of session parametricity – an encoding of inductive and coinductive session types, justified via the theory of initial algebras and final co-algebras using a processes-as-morphisms viewpoint. The correctness of the encoding (i.e. universality) relies crucially on parametricity and the associated relational lifting of sessions

Compact Proof Certificates For Linear Logic

Abstract. Linear logic is increasingly being used as a tool for communicating reasoning agents in domains such as authorization, access control, electronic voting, etc., where proof certificates represent evidence that must be verified by proof consumers as part of higher protocols. Controlling the size of these certificates is critical. We assume that the proof consumer is allowed to do some search to reconstruct details of the full proof that are omitted from the certificates. Because the decision problem for linear logic is unsolvable, the certificate must contain at least enough information to bound the search: we show how to use the sequence of contractions in the sequent proof for this bound. The remaining content of the proof, in particular the information about resource divisions, can then be omitted from the certificate. We also describe a technique for giving a variable amount of additional search hints to the proof consumer to limit its non-determinism.

A logical characterization of forward and backward chaining in the inverse method

Abstract. The inverse method is a generalization of resolution that can be applied to non-classical logics. We have recently shown how Andreoli’s focusing strategy can be adapted for the inverse method in linear logic. In this paper we introduce the notion of focusing bias for atoms and show that it gives rise to forward and backward chaining, generalizing both hyperresolution (forward) and SLD resolution (backward) on the Horn fragment. A key feature of our characterization is the structural, rather than purely operational, explanation for forward and backward chaining. A search procedure like the inverse method is thus able to perform both operations as appropriate, even simultaneously. We also present experimental results and an evaluation of the practical benefits of biased atoms for a number of examples from different problem domains.