The Oil Pollution Act of 1990

In response to several major oil spills, including the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA) was signed into law. The author reviews responses to various oil spills, and the inadequacy of legislation applicable to such responses prior to the OPA. This article reviews various sections of the OPA and the breadth of its coverage. The author points out that this new legislation expands liability with respect to oil spills, providing an incentive to potentially responsible tanker owners to take stronger measures to avoid such spills. However, as the author explains, the OPA may create as many problems as it solves. For example, insurers may have to provide new insurance coverage due to larger exposure under the OPA, or even stop providing such insurance altogether. The OPA requires that barges be double hulled, which is extremely costly to install and may be the cause of more explosions or extensive leaks than single hulls. The author also opines that the increased liability under the OPA may deter foreign oil importers from using the ports of the United States

Zeta Polynomials and the Möbius Function

Using the theory of zeta polynomials, chain generalizations of well-known Möbius function identities are obtained. The proofs of these identities are combinatorial, and the Möbius function identities follows as corollaries

Multichains, non-crossing partitions and trees

AbstractBijections are presented between certain classes of trees and multichains in non-crossing partition lattices

The Dimension of the Supreme Court

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lawrence Sirovich introduced two novel mathematical techniques to study patterns in recent Supreme Court decisions. One of these methods, information theory, has never been applied previously. The other method, singular value decomposition, is closely related to other methods that have previously been employed. In this paper I give an explication of these two methods and evaluate their use in the context of understanding the Supreme Court. I conclude that information theory holds some promise for furthering our understanding but singular value decomposition, as applied by Sirovich, is a less appropriate methodology

What Are We Comparing in Comparative Negligence?

This Article begins the formal study of how juries should calculate the percentages of negligence they are required to provide. Based on the standard model of negligence from law and economics, I will provide a specific framework for juries to use. This framework determines fault assessment based on different kinds of negligence torts. I distinguish among the methods of apportionment by examining the incentives they give for the parties to exercise care. As a consequence of this analysis, I make specific recommendations for jury instructions in comparative negligence cases. This Article proceeds in four parts. After a brief discussion in Section II of what juries are asked to do in assigning responsibility in comparative negligence cases, I will introduce three new concepts to analyze the nature of negligence cases. In Section III I classify two party negligence cases as being either commensurable or incommensurable, depending on whether the nature of the care to be taken by the two parties lies on the same or incomparable scales. Since a jury will be called upon to compare the levels of care taken and their ability to do so is radically different in the two cases, this distinction is an important one in comparative negligence regimes

The Law and Large Numbers. Book Review of Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution. by Michael I. Meyerson

Book review of Political numeracy: mathematical perspectives on our chaotic constitution. By Michael I. Meyerson. W. W. Norton and Company. 2002. Pp. 9, 287

Is Groton the Next \u3ci\u3eEvenwel\u3c/i\u3e?

In Evenwel v. Abbott the Supreme Court left open the question of whether states could employ population measures other than total population as a basis for drawing representative districts so as to meet the requirement of one person, one vote (OPOV). It was thought that there was little prospect of resolving this question soon as no appropriate instances of such behavior were known. That belief was mistaken. In this Essay I report on the Town of Groton, Connecticut, which uses registered voter data to apportion seats in its Representative Town Meeting and has done so since its incorporation in 1957. The resulting apportionment arguably meets the requirements of OPOV as applied to registered voter data but badly fails if total population is employed. Thus, it would make a good test case to resolve some of the open questions in Evenwel