EMPIRICAL DISTANCE METRICS RELATIONSHIPS AND UNCERTAINTIES IN SEISMIC HAZARD ASSESSMENT

The seismic hazard of an area is determined based on the ground motion observed at that site. The intensity of the ground motion can be predicted using ground motion models (GMMs). GMMs typically use distance metrics such as the Joyner-Boore distance (RJB) and the Rupture distance (RRUP). However, apart from RJB and RRUP, probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) also utilizes point-source-based distances like the Epicentral distance (REPI) and the Hypocentral distance (RHYP). These distance metrics are used for point sources when the fault geometry is unknown or is ignored. We need to determine the relationship between the distance metrics to obtain an accurate seismic hazard of an area. In this study, we develop empirical relationships between RJB and various other distance metrics. This avoids computationally intensive tasks such as computing finite-fault-based distances for different fault geometries of a virtual rupture plane for each point source. The empirical equations provide the relation between RJB and the target distance metric (Rtarget) based on the magnitude of the earthquake and the dip angle of the fault. In addition, we also require the depth to the top of the rupture to calculate RHYP. We discuss the steps to include the variability due to the conversion of the distance metrics in the PSHA. We have compared the results of this study with other published studies for distance conversion. A simple PSHA study of a circular area of 100 km using Pezeshk et al. (2011) and Boore et al. (2014) as the GMMs determined an increase in hazard using the proposed empirical equations and their uncertainties. The equations developed in this study can be directly applied in PSHA and are independent of the GMMs used for seismic hazard calculations. The equations can also be used for different fault geometries with a range of dip angles varying from 10° to 90°, for magnitudes 5.0 to 8.0, and for distances up to 200 km. We have focused on the Central and Eastern US

Introductory Note to the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

This Introductory Note to the publication in ILM of the newly-adopted Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (OP-ICESCR) seeks to put the primary source document in proper context by briefly explaining its history, content, and significance in international law. The Note is accompanied by the text of the OP-ICESCR, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 2008 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The OP creates an individual complaints procedure for alleged violations of the ICESCR, rectifying a thirty year asymmetry in human rights treaty law

Putting “Human Rights” Back into the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Shifting Frames and Embedding Participation Rights

Published as Chapter 4 in Business and Human Rights: Beyond the End of the Beginning, Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, ed.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1242/thumbnail.jp

Maximum Feasible Participation of the Poor: New Governance, New Accountability, and a 21st Century War on the Sources of Poverty

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a Nationwide War on the Sources of Poverty to “strike away the barriers to full participation” in our society. Central to that war was an understanding that given poverty’s complex and multi-layered causes, identifying, implementing, and monitoring solutions to it would require the “maximum feasible participation” of affected communities. Equally central, however, was an understanding that such decentralized problem-solving could not be fully effective without national-level orchestration and support. As such, an Office of Economic Opportunity was established – situated in the Executive Office of the President itself – to support, through encouragement, funding, and coordination, the development and implementation of community-based plans of action for poverty alleviation, as identified and prioritized by the poor themselves. This Article urges a return to this practical, locally-responsive, yet federally-orchestrated orientation of U.S. social welfare law. It argues that while the regulatory and political context of the 1960s provided inauspicious ground for the early “maximum feasible participation” policy to effectively take root, four decades later, two broad paradigm shifts have yielded a new, more fertile opportunity framework. The first involves the shift in U.S. regulatory law away from earlier command-and-control structures favoring fixed rules and centralized enforcement, toward a New Governance model that privileges decentralization, flexibility, stakeholder participation, performance indicators, and guided discretion. The second is the concurrent paradigm shift in U.S. social movement approaches to poverty – what I call “New Accountability” – which similarly promotes local voice and inclusive participation, performance monitoring around human rights standards, and negotiated policymaking (rather than non-negotiable material demands and mass confrontation, the preferred tactics of 1960s activism). Supported by a renewed U.S. interest in collecting and reporting performance indicators for government programs, these two shifts converge to create a theory and policy-based environment in which it is both practically feasible and normatively coherent to re-embrace the participatory orientation of the early “War on the Sources of Poverty” strategy. The challenge for U.S. social welfare rights law, I argue, is how to bring these two complementary paradigms together in constructive synergy to mount a 21st century battle against poverty. A set of national subsidiarity-based institutions to support this effort is proposed, each mandated to orchestrate and competitively incentivize targeted anti-poverty efforts by all social stakeholders, while opening new institutional spaces for the active participation of the poor in all aspects of meeting the nation’s poverty reduction targets

Implementing Truth and Reconciliation: Comparative Lessons for the Republic of Korea

This Article substantively introduces a special symposium issue on Implementing Truth and Reconciliation: Comparative Lessons for Korea. Inspired by the Dec. 2010 release of the official report and recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea (TRCK), the special issue gathers comparative national and cross-national lessons from four nations -- South Korea, South Africa, Cambodia, and Peru -- on the factors that contribute to or hinder the effective implementation of truth commission recommendations and other efforts aimed at achieving national, community, and individual-level reconciliation. Such lessons are offered in the hope of assisting victim groups and other advocacy communities in South Korea as they engage in the long, complex, and always difficult process of ensuring the meaningful and effective implementation of the TRCK\u27s recommendations for reform, follow-up, and reparation on the ground. The Article introduces the TRCK, the political context for its creation, design, and extensive mandate, as well as the substance and complexity of its multiple policy recommendations. It then summarizes the special issue\u27s substantive contributions, collecting and synthesizing the comparative lessons from each. The major global lessons discerned across the contributions include the priority need for active civil society engagement in the implementation process, the creation of permanent follow-up and orchestration bodies, the pursuit of truth as a dynamic and ongoing project, data independence and accessibility, and, finally, the use of measurable indicators for holding government and other key stakeholders to account

Rethinking the Less as More Thesis: Supranational Litigation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Americas

In their 2005 law review article Less as More: Rethinking Supranational Litigation of Economic and Social Rights in the Americas, James Cavallaro and Emily Schaffer argue for a rethinking of strategies to advance economic, social and cultural rights in the Americas. They posit that to achieve higher rates of real-world protection for such rights, social rights advocates should do two things: first, bring less litigation and, second, frame any marginal litigation that is pursued as violations of classic civil and political rights. According to the authors, this recommended course will increase the legitimacy of the litigation and lead to higher rates of real-world change because, in their estimation, only civil-political rights have corresponding justiciable obligations and are considered ripe for litigation by Latin American governments. This Article questions the legal and factual bases on which this thesis is constructed, highlighting the practical inconsistencies that result from its application and advocating a more technical and jurisdictional approach to social rights litigation. It demonstrates that, by underappreciating the legal significance of justiciability, legitimacy, and the adjudicable, as distinct from monitorable, dimensions of human rights obligations, the authors propose a thesis that in fact will have the inverse result: more distributive justice claims framed as absolute/immediate entitlements that are inattentive to justiciability rules, political realities, practical implementation time-tables, queue-jumping concerns, and social movement synergies - precisely the types of cases that are least likely to be admissible under contentious processes or to have long-term real-world impacts. The author calls for a rethinking of the proposed less as more thesis, reframing it from a technical-jurisdictional perspective that focuses not on decontextualized notions of justiciable rights but rather on the scope and nature of the claims made under those rights. In this sense, she insists that it is not rights that are or are not justiciable, but rather the claims advanced under them that fulfill or fail to fulfill the elements of a justiciable controversy. The number of justiciable claims thus cuts equally across all rights. On this critical understanding, the author sets out a new quadrant-based framework for thinking about the dimensions of human rights obligations that may properly be applied by adjudicators in individual petitions processes. She argues that while the full dimensionality of human rights obligations corresponds to all rights, only some of those dimensions are cognizable under contentious process, an insight reflected in the jurisprudential record, if not yet recognized in human rights theory. The author concludes that good lawyering, based on well-crafted claims that adhere to the fundamental elements of a justiciable case, not transparent decoys designed to hoodwink governments into thinking they are dealing with immediately-enforceable civil and political rights, is needed to expand legitimate protection of economic, social, and cultural rights in the Americas. Once jurisdictional issues are properly taken into account, the horizon for social rights litigation, both at national and supranational levels, is vast

Rethinking the Less as More Thesis: Supranational Litigation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Americas

In their 2005 law review article Less as More: Rethinking Supranational Litigation of Economic and Social Rights in the Americas, James Cavallaro and Emily Schaffer argue for a rethinking of strategies to advance economic, social and cultural rights in the Americas. They posit that to achieve higher rates of real-world protection for such rights, social rights advocates should do two things: first, bring less litigation and, second, frame any marginal litigation that is pursued as violations of classic civil and political rights. According to the authors, this recommended course will increase the legitimacy of the litigation and lead to higher rates of real-world change because, in their estimation, only civil-political rights have corresponding justiciable obligations and are considered ripe for litigation by Latin American governments. This Article questions the legal and factual bases on which this thesis is constructed, highlighting the practical inconsistencies that result from its application and advocating a more technical and jurisdictional approach to social rights litigation. It demonstrates that, by underappreciating the legal significance of justiciability, legitimacy, and the adjudicable, as distinct from monitorable, dimensions of human rights obligations, the authors propose a thesis that in fact will have the inverse result: more distributive justice claims framed as absolute/immediate entitlements that are inattentive to justiciability rules, political realities, practical implementation time-tables, queue-jumping concerns, and social movement synergies - precisely the types of cases that are least likely to be admissible under contentious processes or to have long-term real-world impacts. The author calls for a rethinking of the proposed less as more thesis, reframing it from a technical-jurisdictional perspective that focuses not on decontextualized notions of justiciable rights but rather on the scope and nature of the claims made under those rights. In this sense, she insists that it is not rights that are or are not justiciable, but rather the claims advanced under them that fulfill or fail to fulfill the elements of a justiciable controversy. The number of justiciable claims thus cuts equally across all rights. On this critical understanding, the author sets out a new quadrant-based framework for thinking about the dimensions of human rights obligations that may properly be applied by adjudicators in individual petitions processes. She argues that while the full dimensionality of human rights obligations corresponds to all rights, only some of those dimensions are cognizable under contentious process, an insight reflected in the jurisprudential record, if not yet recognized in human rights theory. The author concludes that good lawyering, based on well-crafted claims that adhere to the fundamental elements of a justiciable case, not transparent decoys designed to hoodwink governments into thinking they are dealing with immediately-enforceable civil and political rights, is needed to expand legitimate protection of economic, social, and cultural rights in the Americas. Once jurisdictional issues are properly taken into account, the horizon for social rights litigation, both at national and supranational levels, is vast