The rule of law in the Islamic legal system

This presentation was given as part of the Islamic Law and International Law Conference 2011 by Irmgard Marboe from the University of Vienna. The conference was hosted by the Brunel Law School on the 9th September 2011

"Efficient Breach" and Economic Analysis of International Investment Law

The field of economic analysis of law may be traced to works of Bentham and even the Italian Beccaria , but finds its current structure with seminal works by Coase , Becker , Calabresi , Posner and, more recently, Cooter & Ulen and Shavell.The law&economics revolution has, so far, very rarely touched international law (and, a fortiori, international investment law), perhaps because analysis has focused only on the domestic (and mainly US) context or maybe because of a lack of knowledge of technical international legal mechanisms by his founding fathers. The authors argue that the concept of "efficient breach" is not adequate for an international investment law context

The low-energy limit of AdS(3)/CFT2 and its TBA

We investigate low-energy string excitations in AdS3 × S3 × T4. When the worldsheet is decompactified, the theory has gapless modes whose spectrum at low energies is determined by massless relativistic integrable S matrices of the type introduced by Al. B. Zamolodchikov. The S matrices are non-trivial only for excitations with identical worldsheet chirality, indicating that the low-energy theory is a CFT2. We construct a Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz (TBA) for these excitations and show how the massless modes’ wrapping effects may be incorporated into the AdS3 spectral problem. Using the TBA and its associated Y-system, we determine the central charge of the low-energy CFT2 to be c = 6 from calculating the vacuum energy for antiperiodic fermions — with the vacuum energy being zero for periodic fermions in agreement with a supersymmetric theory — and find the energies of some excited states