7,423 research outputs found
Constitutional Analogies in the International Legal System
This Article explores issues at the frontier of international law and constitutional law. It considers five key structural and systemic challenges that the international legal system now faces: (1) decentralization and disaggregation; (2) normative and institutional hierarchies; (3) compliance and enforcement; (4) exit and escape; and (5) democracy and legitimacy. Each of these issues raises questions of governance, institutional design, and allocation of authority paralleling the questions that domestic legal systems have answered in constitutional terms. For each of these issues, I survey the international legal landscape and consider the salience of potential analogies to domestic constitutions, drawing upon and extending the writings of international legal scholars and international relations theorists. I also offer some preliminary thoughts about why some treaties and institutions, but not others, more readily lend themselves to analysis in constitutional terms. And I distinguish those legal and political issues that may generate useful insights for scholars studying the growing intersections of international and constitutional law from other areas that may be more resistant to constitutional analogies
Divergence-free Nonrenormalizable Models
A natural procedure is introduced to replace the traditional, perturbatively
generated counter terms to yield a formulation of covariant, self-interacting,
nonrenormalizable scalar quantum field theories that has the added virtue of
exhibiting a divergence-free perturbation analysis. To achieve this desirable
goal it is necessary to reexamine the meaning of the free theory about which
such a perturbation takes place.Comment: 22 pages. Version accepted for publication; involves modest addition
to the end of Sec.
The Chagos Islands cases: the empire strikes back
Good governance requires the accommodation of multiple interests in the cause of decision making. However, undue regard for particular sectional interests can take their toll upon public faith in government administration. Historically, broad conceptions of the good of the commonwealth were employed to outweigh the interests of groups that resisted colonisation. In the decision making of the British Empire, the standard approach for justifying the marginalisation of the interests of colonised groups was that they were uncivilised and that particular hardships were the price to be paid for bringing to them the imperial dividend of industrial society. It is widely assumed that with the dismantling of the British Empire, such impulses and their accompanying jurisprudence became a thing of the past. Even as decolonisation proceeded apace after the Second World War, however, the United Kingdom maintained control of strategically important islands with a view towards sustaining its global role. In an infamous example from this twilight period of empire, in the 1960s imperial interests were used to justify the expulsion of the Chagos islanders from the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Into the twenty-first century, this forced elision of the UKâs interests with the imperial âcommon goodâ continues to take centre stage in courtroom battles over the islandersâ rights, being cited before domestic and international tribunals in order to maintain the Chagossiansâ exclusion from their homeland. This article considers the new jurisprudence of imperialism which has emerged in a string of decisions which have continued to marginalise the Chagossiansâ interests
Rolling of asymmetric disks on an inclined plane
In a recent papers, Turner and Turner (2010 {\em Am. J. Phys.} {\bf 78}
905-7) and Jensen (2011 {\em Eur. J. Phys.} {\bf 32} 389-397) analysed the
motion of asymmetric rolling rigid bodies on a horizontal plane. These papers
addressed the common misconception that the instantaneous point of contact of
the rolling body with the plane can be used to evaluate the angular momentum
and the torque in the equation of motion
. To obtain the correct equation of motion,
the "phantom torque" or various rules that depend on the motion of the point
about which and are evaluated were discussed. In
this paper, I consider asymmetric disks rolling down an inclined plane and
describe the most basic way of obtaining the correct equation of motion; that
is, to choose the point about which and are
evaluated that is stationary in an inertial frame
Time-scales of close-in exoplanet radio emission variability
We investigate the variability of exoplanetary radio emission using stellar
magnetic maps and 3D field extrapolation techniques. We use a sample of hot
Jupiter hosting stars, focusing on the HD 179949, HD 189733 and tau Boo
systems. Our results indicate two time-scales over which radio emission
variability may occur at magnetised hot Jupiters. The first is the synodic
period of the star-planet system. The origin of variability on this time-scale
is the relative motion between the planet and the interplanetary plasma that is
co-rotating with the host star. The second time-scale is the length of the
magnetic cycle. Variability on this time-scale is caused by evolution of the
stellar field. At these systems, the magnitude of planetary radio emission is
anticorrelated with the angular separation between the subplanetary point and
the nearest magnetic pole. For the special case of tau Boo b, whose orbital
period is tidally locked to the rotation period of its host star, variability
only occurs on the time-scale of the magnetic cycle. The lack of radio
variability on the synodic period at tau Boo b is not predicted by previous
radio emission models, which do not account for the co-rotation of the
interplanetary plasma at small distances from the star.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, accepted in MNRA
The ambivalent shadow of the pre-Wilsonian rise of international law
The generation of American international lawyers who founded the American Society of International Law in 1906 and nurtured the soil for what has been retrospectively called a âmoralistic legalistic approach to international relationsâ remains little studied. A survey of the rise of international legal literature in the U.S. from the mid-19th century to the eve of the Great War serves as a backdrop to the examination of the boosting effect on international law of the Spanish American War in 1898. An examination of the Insular Cases before the US Supreme Court is then accompanied by the analysis of a number of influential factors behind the pre-war rise of international law in the U.S. The work concludes with an examination of the rise of natural law doctrines in international law during the interwar period and the critiques addressed.by the realist founders of the field of âinternational relationsâ to the âmoralistic legalistic approach to international relation
Neural network emulation of a rainfall-runoff model
International audienceThe potential of an artificial neural network to perform simple non-linear hydrological transformations is examined. Four neural network models were developed to emulate different facets of a recognised non-linear hydrological transformation equation that possessed a small number of variables and contained no temporal component. The modeling process was based on a set of uniform random distributions. The cloning operation facilitated a direct comparison with the exact equation-based relationship. It also provided broader information about the power of a neural network to emulate existing equations and model non-linear relationships. Several comparisons with least squares multiple linear regression were performed. The first experiment involved a direct emulation of the Xinanjiang Rainfall-Runoff Model. The next two experiments were designed to assess the competencies of two neural solutions that were developed on a reduced number of inputs. This involved the omission and conflation of previous inputs. The final experiment used derived variables to model intrinsic but otherwise concealed internal relationships that are of hydrological interest. Two recent studies have suggested that neural solutions offer no worthwhile improvements in comparison to traditional weighted linear transfer functions for capturing the non-linear nature of hydrological relationships. Yet such fundamental properties are intrinsic aspects of catchment processes that cannot be excluded or ignored. The results from the four experiments that are reported in this paper are used to challenge the interpretations from these two earlier studies and thus further the debate with regards to the appropriateness of neural networks for hydrological modelling
Cognition-Enhancing Drugs: Can We Say No?
Normative analysis of cognition-enhancing drugs frequently weighs the liberty interests of drug users against egalitarian commitments to a level playing field. Yet those who would refuse to engage in neuroenhancement may well find their liberty to do so limited in a society where such drugs are widespread. To the extent that unvarnished emotional responses are world-disclosive, neurocosmetic practices also threaten to provide a form of faulty data to their users. This essay examines underappreciated liberty-based and epistemic rationales for regulating cognition-enhancing drugs
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