Transnational Corporations and Developing Public International Law

In recent years the international community has been developing various international codes of conduct, many of which will contain rules governing the behavior of transnational corporations (TNCs). Most of these rules are being developed with little or no direct TNC participation. Professor Charney argues that because TNCs represent major, independent centers of influence, failure to include them in the codes of conduct negotiations may result in rules that do not accurately reflect the realities of TNC interests and power. If the international community later seeks to convert these rules into legal norms, TNC resistance will probably place costly strains on both the rules and the entire international legal system. Professor Charney concludes that the international community should permit TNCs and other interested power groups to participate directly in the development of international norms applicable to their interests. But he cautions that it would be unwise to give TNCs complete international legal personality because this, too, might place undue strains on the international legal system

Theoretical studies of volatile processes in the outer solar system

Four studies of volatile processes in the outer solar system are discussed. Researchers suggest that the convective and conductive regions of Triton's atmosphere join at the tropopause near 10 km. A model of volatile transport on Triton's surface was constructed that predicts that Triton's surface north of 15 degrees north latitude is experiencing deposition of nitrogen frosts, as are the bright portions of the south polar cap near the equator. Also discussed are numerical models of the evolution of Titan's surface and atmosphere. Results of a study of the rheology of ammonia-water liquids were applied to the icy satellites of the outer solar system. Finally, the researchers examined the frictional heating, sublimation, and re-condensation of grains free-falling into the solar nebula from a surrounding interstellar cloud. The sublimation model includes the effect of various volatile species and accounts for the poor radiating properties of small grains using Mie theory

The State of Asylum Representation: Ideas for Change

The plight of refugees-those who flee persecution-touches a chord with Americans, who have supported both a substantial overseas resettlement program and a fair system for asylum seekers. U.S. laws provide a seemingly full opportunity for asylum applicants to explain their fear or actual experience of persecution. In fact, the U.S. offers an extensive process of interviews, hearings, and appeals to ensure that bona fide refugees are not sent back to their persecutors. The substantive law, too, has been developed considerably through administrative and judicial precedents. But how meaningful is a process that, no matter how extensive and developed, leaves asylum seekers on their own to present their claims when only experts understand how the process works and what the case law means? Asylum applicants often have escaped life threatening situations in their home countries and have overcome financial and physical obstacles to reach the United States, only to be faced with a daunting and confusing asylum application process. Legal assistance is permitted, but it must be at no expense to the government. While some asylum seekers find competent representation, many do not. Most of the key players in the U.S. asylum process-the representatives, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ( INS ) trial attorneys, the Asylum Officers and the Immigration Judges– believe that representation makes a difference for those seeking relief and for the effectiveness of the system. Immigration Court data indicates that represented asylum cases are four to six times more likely to succeed than pro se ones. The time has come to develop ways for all asylum seekers to have the type of legal assistance needed to more fully ensure that bona fide refugees receive the protection that the U.S. public wants to give them and that our laws require. Despite the importance of legal representation, there has yet to be a systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of the current delivery mechanisms in place to aid those in need of legal services and the effect of representation on the asylum system in general. This paper examines the state of affairs with regard to asylum representation and attempts to understand better the barriers to representation. It also begins to assess the effects of representation on asylum seekers and the asylum system itself, and to analyze the various ways in which the representation system can be improved

Regularized Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics

While the treatment of conical intersections in molecular dynamics generally requires nonadiabatic approaches, the Born-Oppenheimer adiabatic approximation is still adopted as a valid alternative in certain circumstances. In the context of Mead-Truhlar minimal coupling, this paper presents a new closure of the nuclear Born-Oppenheimer equation, thereby leading to a molecular dynamics scheme capturing geometric phase effects. Specifically, a semiclassical closure of the nuclear Ehrenfest dynamics is obtained through a convenient prescription for the nuclear Bohmian trajectories. The conical intersections are suitably regularized in the resulting nuclear particle motion and the associated Lorentz force involves a smoothened Berry curvature identifying a loop-dependent geometric phase. In turn, this geometric phase rapidly reaches the usual topological index as the loop expands away from the original singularity. This feature reproduces the phenomenology appearing in recent exact nonadiabatic studies, as shown explicitly in the Jahn-Teller problem for linear vibronic coupling. Likewise, a newly proposed regularization of the diagonal correction term is also shown to reproduce quite faithfully the energy surface presented in recent nonadiabatic studies.Comment: Third version with minor changes. To appear in Phys. Rev.

The spectra of finite 3-transposition groups

We calculate the spectrum of the diagram for each finite $3$-transposition group. Such graphs with a given minimal eigenvalue have occurred in the context of compact Griess subalgebras of vertex operator algebras