A Realist Defense of the Alien Tort Statute

This Article offers a new justification for modern litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a provision from the 1789 Judiciary Act that permits victims of human rights violations anywhere in the world to sue tortfeasors in U.S. courts. The ATS, moribund for nearly 200 years, has recently emerged as an important but controversial tool for the enforcement of human rights norms. “Realist” critics contend that ATS litigation exasperates U.S. allies and rivals, weakens efforts to combat terrorism, and threatens U.S. sovereignty by importing into our jurisprudence undemocratic international law norms. Defenders of the statute, largely because they do not share the critics‟ realist assumptions about international relations, have so far declined to engage with the cost-benefit critique of ATS litigation and instead justify the ATS as a key component in a global human rights regime. This Article addresses the realists‟ critique on its own terms, offering the first defense of ATS litigation that is itself rooted in realism—the view that nations are unitary, rational actors pursuing their security in an anarchic world and obeying international law only when it suits their interests. In particular, this Article identifies three flaws in the current realist ATS critique. First, critics rely on speculation about catastrophic future costs without giving sufficient weight to the actual history of ATS litigation and to the prudential and substantive limits courts have already imposed on it. Second, critics‟ fears about the sovereignty costs that will arise when federal courts incorporate international-law norms into domestic law are overblown because U.S. law already reflects the limited set of universal norms, such as torture and genocide, that are actionable under the ATS. Finally, this realist critique fails to overcome the incoherence created by contending that the exercise of jurisdiction by the courts may harm U.S. interests while also assuming that nations are unitary, rational actors. Moving beyond the current realist ATS critique, this Article offers a new, positive realist argument for ATS litigation. This Article suggests that, in practice, the U.S. government as a whole pursues its security and economic interests in ATS litigation by signaling cooperativeness through respect for human rights while also ensuring that the law is developed on U.S. terms. This realist understanding, offered here for the first time, both explains the persistence of ATS litigation and bridges the gap that has frustrated efforts to weigh the ATS‟s true costs and benefits

Higher Education: Obligation or Opportunity?

From the beginning of my experience at Marquette, I continually observed students that appeared to demonstrate no enthusiasm for getting an education, reflected in a noticeable lack of participation in class discussions. I felt my expectations of academia being crushed as students boasted about skipping lectures and passively sat in class, seemingly disinterested in the professor and the material. If college was truly regarded as an opportunity for intellectual growth, why did students treat education as nothing more than an obligation? Through mixed-method, qualitative research, combining observation, interviews, and review of scholarly literature, this project examines what factors influence student engagement in the learning environment.https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_3210ur/1021/thumbnail.jp

On shock waves in solids

This paper describes some recent theoretical results pertaining to the experimentally-observed relation between the speed of a shock wave in a solid and the particle velocity immediately behind the shock. The new feature in the present analysis is the assumption that compressive strains are limited by a materially-determined critical value, and that the internal energy density characterizing the material is unbounded as this critical strain is approached. It is shown that, with this assumption in force, the theoretical relation between shock speed and particle velocity is consistent with many experimental observations in the sense that it is asymptotically linear for strong shocks of the kind often arising in the laboratory

Introduction to G.W.F. Hegel

No abstract available

Interaction of two tributary glacier branches and implications for surge behavior

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2018A glacier surge is a dynamic phenomenon where the glacier after a long period of quiescence, increases its velocities by up to two orders of magnitude. These surges tend to have complex interactions with tributaries, yet the role of these tributary interactions towards glacier surging has yet to be fully investigated. In this work we construct a synthetic glacier with an adjustable tributary intersection angle to study tributary interaction with the trunk glacier. The geometry we choose is loosely based on the main trunk and tributary interaction of Black Rapids Glacier, AK, USA, which last surged in 1936-1937. We investigate surface elevations, medial moraine locations, and erosive power at the bed of the glacier in response to our adjustable domain and relative flux. A nonlinear relationship between tributary flux and surface elevations is found that indicates flow restrictions can occur with geometries like Black Rapids Glacier. These flow restrictions cause increased ice thicknesses up-glacier which can lead to surges via increased stresses

A Note on the Energy Release Rate in Quasi-Static Elastic Crack Propagation

This paper considers analytical issues associated with the notion of the energy release rate in quasi-static elastic crack propagation