Congress\u27s International Legal Discourse

Despite Congress’s important role in enforcing U.S. international law obligations, the relevant existing literature largely ignores the branch. This omission may stem partly from the belief, common among both academics and lawyers, that Congress is generally unsympathetic to or ignorant of international law. Under this conventional wisdom, members of Congress would rarely if ever imply that international law norms should impact otherwise desirable domestic legislation. Using an original dataset comprising thirty years of legislative histories of pertinent federal statutes, this Article questions and tests that view. The evidence refutes the conventional wisdom. It shows instead that, in legislative debates over bills whose enactment arguably triggers international law violations, members of Congress urge international law compliance relatively often, using rhetorical framing devices similar to those that members use for comparable constitutionally problematic bills. The arguments are overwhelmingly supportive of international law and often phrased in legalistic terms. The evidence suggests, moreover, that such international law invocation may be partially motivated by political self-interest. These findings, together with existing literature and qualitative evidence from former policymakers, imply that members of Congress may be incentivized to take public pro-international law positions by international law-minded executive officials. In this way, the executive may use the legislature to reinforce the national commitment to international law obligations. Through this interbranch bargaining, the president might use congressional international law discourse to boost the country’s international credibility and strengthen her office’s own hand in making and enforcing future commitments

Lost in Translation: The Accidental Origins of Bond v. United States

One of the unusual features of cases about the constitutionality of federal statutes is that they are nearly always foreseeable. Even before the bill’s introduction in Congress, lawmakers are often aware that they are inviting a federal lawsuit. Anticipating a legal challenge, legislators and their staffs attempt to predict the courts’ views of the statute and adapt the bill accordingly. Generally speaking, the bigger the bill’s potential constitutional impact, the more foreseeable the resulting case. By this logic, jurists should have seen the constitutional issues in Bond v. United States from a mile away. In reality, they were foreseen by virtually no one. Bond addresses the constitutionality of a high-profile act of Congress, the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998 (hereinafter the “Act” or the “Implementation Act”). The Act domesticizes the Chemical Weapons Convention (“CWC”), a global treaty concluded in 1993, which the United States joined four years later. The CWC is expressly aimed at stopping the development, stockpiling, and deployment of chemical weapons of mass destruction. The Act’s application in Bond tests the limits of Congress’s power to implement treaties that encroach on traditional state prerogatives. The specific question before the Court is whether the Necessary and Proper Clause of the U.S. Constitution and Missouri v. Holland allow Congress to penalize “local” conduct not within any of its enumerated powers—and in fact quintessentially within the states’ police powers—when it is implementing a valid treaty. Both parties and numerous amici now seem to believe that the case could transform key parts of federalism doctrine and/or the United States’ ability to make treaty commitments. Yet despite the plethora of legal expertise in Congress and the executive branch, no one seemed aware of these issues until Bond’s attorneys raised them before a federal district court in 2007. Given Bond’s grand, disarmament-treaty origins, that oversight will probably trouble anyone interested in the growing role of international law in the U.S. federal legal system. Much has been written about how Bond should be decided and how its outcome could shape constitutional law and U.S. foreign relations. This Essay instead looks backward, exploring the strange roots of Bond and what those origins say about the process by which the United States converts treaties into federal law. The Essay suggests that the reason that Bond—and its implications for treaties and federalism— took so many by surprise lies in the incentives inherent in the arcane art of translating international law into domestic law. In that sense, Bond is a cautionary tale for future treaty-implementation efforts

Developing an Optimized Light Spectrum for Plant Growth and Development

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are a rapidly developing technology for plant growth lighting and have become a powerful tool for understanding the spectral effects of light on plants. Several studies have shown that some blue light is necessary for normal growth and development, but the effects of blue light appear to be species dependent and may interact with other wavelengths of light as well as photosynthetic photon flux (PPF). Here we report the photobiological effects of three types of white LEDs (warm, neutral and cool) on the growth and development of radish, soybean, and wheat. All species were grown at two PPFs (200 and 500 μmol m-2 s-1) under each LED type, which facilitated testing the effect of absolute (μmol photons m-2 s-1) and relative (percent of total PPF) blue light on plant development. Root and shoot environmental conditions other than light quality were uniformly maintained among six chambers (three lamp types x two PPFs). All LEDs had similar phytochrome photoequilibria and red:far red ratios. Blue light did not affect total dry weight (DW) in any species, but significantly altered plant development. Overall, the low blue light from warm white LEDs increased stem elongation and leaf expansion while the high blue light from cool white LEDs resulted in more compact plants. For radish and soybean, absolute blue light was a better predictor of stem elongation than relative blue light, but relative blue light better predicted leaf area. Absolute blue light better predicted the percent leaf OW in radish and soybean and percent tiller OW in wheat. The largest percentage differences among light sources occurred in low light (200 μmol m-2 s-1) . These results confirm and extend the results of other studies indicating that light quantity and quality interact to determine plant morphology. The optimal amount of blue light likely changes with plant age as plant communities balance the need for rapid leaf expansion, which is necessary to maximize radiation capture, with prevention of excessive stem elongation. A thorough understanding of this interaction is essential to the development of light sources for optimal plant growth and development

Congress\u27s International Legal Discourse

Despite Congress’s important role in enforcing U.S. international law obligations, the relevant existing literature largely ignores the branch. This omission may stem partly from the belief, common among both academics and lawyers, that Congress is generally unsympathetic to or ignorant of international law. Under this conventional wisdom, members of Congress would rarely if ever imply that international law norms should impact otherwise desirable domestic legislation. Using an original dataset comprising thirty years of legislative histories of pertinent federal statutes, this Article questions and tests that view. The evidence refutes the conventional wisdom. It shows instead that, in legislative debates over bills whose enactment arguably triggers international law violations, members of Congress urge international law compliance relatively often, using rhetorical framing devices similar to those that members use for comparable constitutionally problematic bills. The arguments are overwhelmingly supportive of international law and often phrased in legalistic terms. The evidence suggests, moreover, that such international law invocation may be partially motivated by political self-interest. These findings, together with existing literature and qualitative evidence from former policymakers, imply that members of Congress may be incentivized to take public pro-international law positions by international law-minded executive officials. In this way, the executive may use the legislature to reinforce the national commitment to international law obligations. Through this interbranch bargaining, the president might use congressional international law discourse to boost the country’s international credibility and strengthen her office’s own hand in making and enforcing future commitments

Seed Poppy in the Garden

This fact sheet describes seed poppy in the garden, varieties, how to grow, problems, harvesting and storage, productivity, and frequently asked questions

The Logic of Treaty-Making

Multilateral treaties' success depends in large part on decisions made during their drafting and negotiations. Lack of support from key states, weak or non-binding commitments, and sweeping reservations often doom treaties to ineffectiveness or worse. Challenges to treaty effectiveness have inspired significant bodies of research in international law and relations. Yet existing research in these fields has given little systematic attention to negotiations or to the political origins of treaties generally. This dissertation aims to improve our understanding of treaty-making through both theory development and empirical analysis. I first develop a positive decision-theoretical model of the factors that states consider in drafting, negotiating, approving, and ratifying multilateral treaties. The model considers states' right to opt-out of a treaty and that right's several implications: that treaty-making entails a three-stage decisional process unique in democratic lawmaking, and that treaty externalities and the quantity and character of future members both affect states' decisional logic during negotiations. These phenomena have not been fully appreciated in either the legal or international relations literatures, much less formally theorized. I then apply these insights to analyze real-world drafting efforts. Using a novel technique, I code the drafting states' recorded positions based on three treaties' negotiating histories, and I use them to estimate states' ideal points on multiple issues. My findings demonstrate that this method can predict states' ratifications and reservations with reasonable accuracy. The analysis provides new insights into how international law is created and implemented, and under what circumstances it meaningfully affects later state behaviors. Specifically, the issues that divide states differ across treaties, and I find evidence that states' preferences for particular treaty provisions coincide with those we would expect of utility-maximizing states. That the state positions predict subsequent behavior implies that treaty negotiations yield a rich trove of relatively authentic revealed state preferences. This finding suggests that, in addition to fueling theory and data-generation, these methods and the insights they provide might even be used to aid future treaty negotiations.PHDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155267/1/klcope_1.pd