Kivalina at the Supreme Court: A Lost Opportunity for Federal Common Law

This article discusses the status of federal common law in the wake of the Supreme Court's May, 2013 denial of petitioners' writ of certiorari in Native Village of Kivalina v. Exxonmobil.  A close reading of Supreme Court and recent appellate decisions on federal common law as applied to transboundary pollution reveals three views on the availability and function of federal common law where a federal statute addresses a category of environmental harms: presumptive displacement of federal common law when a federal statute creates a regulatory approach, presumptive coexistence of federal statutory and common law where a federal statute does not provide relief for injuries alleged under common law, and case-by-case balancing of the interfering effect of federal common law against the injuries left unaddressed by federal statutory law.  The Court’s current approach resides somewhere between presumptive displacement and case-by-case balancing, and although the Court offers various rationales for this approach in its latest federal common law opinion, the most convincing of these is that cases involving transboundary pollution, particularly those alleging global warming-induced injury, are cumbersome for federal courts to handle as common law matters.  Allocation of judicial resources is within the Supreme Court's discretion to consider in rejecting a case, but it is a far more pragmatic than principled rationale, and thus less than satisfying as a court’s primary reason for denying relief.  A more principled approach, advocated by Justices Stevens and Blackmun in dissents to two key federal common law cases, is that the displacement analysis should begin with the premise that the judicial system aims, first and foremost, to compensate the injured, and that a federal common law claim should be displaced only where the legislative-regulatory regime covering the subject of a common law claim directly addresses the injury alleged under common law

Microwave cavity-enhanced transduction for plug and play nanomechanics at room temperature

Nanomechanical resonators with increasingly high quality factors are enabled following recent insights into energy storage and loss mechanisms in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). Consequently, efficient, non-dissipative transduction schemes are required to avoid the dominating influence of coupling losses. We present an integrated NEMS transducer based on a microwave cavity dielectrically coupled to an array of doubly-clamped pre-stressed silicon nitride beam resonators. This cavity-enhanced detection scheme allows resolving the resonators' Brownian motion at room temperature while preserving their high mechanical quality factor of 290,000 at 6.6 MHz. Furthermore, our approach constitutes an "opto"mechanical system in which backaction effects of the microwave field are employed to alter the effective damping of the resonators. In particular, cavity-pumped self-oscillation yields a linewidth of only 5 Hz. Thereby, an adjustement-free, all-integrated and self-driven nanoelectromechanical resonator array interfaced by just two microwave connectors is realised, potentially useful for applications in sensing and signal processing

Sovereignty, Self-determination, and Environment-based Cultures: The Emerging Voice of Indigenous Peoples in International Law

This article presents a survey of both the rhetoric and applications of international law addressing indigenous peoples\u27 environmental rights. Part I assesses three terms that are widely used in international instruments - sovereignty, human rights, and self-determination - for their applicability to the environment-related interests of indigenous peoples. Part II presents a sixty year litany of international instruments as a means of tracing the evolution of global awareness of the uniquely vulnerable position that indigenous people occupy in the world community in connection with their environmental interests. Part III offers a comparative analysis of the cases Kitok v. Sweden and the Awas Tingni Community v. Nicaragua, and Part IV discusses the draft American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous Peoples\u27 Environmental Rights: Evolving Common Law Perspectives in Canada, Australia, and the United States

Common law decisions on the environment-related interests of indigenous peoples that have emerged from the high courts of Canada, Australia, and the United States over the past several decades show a spectrum of approaches to fundamental issues. These issues include the questions of whether sovereign nations should acknowledge such environmental interests as legal rights and, if so, how they may do so in a manner that is both fair to indigenous peoples and achievable in the face of competing nonindigenous interests. In tracing the development of common law on indigenous peoples’ environmental rights in the three nations, this Article offers a discussion of key cases that establish the three high courts’ perspectives on matters such as the sovereign obligation of nations toward indigenous persons, the judiciary’s duty to embrace a tribal perspective on land and natural resources, and the difªculties inherent in translating indigenous peoples’ environment-related historical traditions into nonindigenous forms of evidence and other proof requirements

A detailed comparison of measured and simulated optical properties of a short-period GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs distributed Bragg reflector

A 6-period GaAs/Al$_{0.9}$Ga$_{0.1}$As distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) has been grown and its optical properties have been both measured and simulated. Incremental improvements were made to the simulation, allowing it to account for internal consistency error, incorrect layer thicknesses, and absorption due to substrate doping to improve simulation accuracy. A compositional depth profile using secondary-ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) has been taken and shows that the Al fraction averages 88.0$\pm0.3\%$. It is found that the amplitude of the transmission is significantly affected by absorption in the n-doped GaAs substrate, even though the energy of the transmitted light is well below the GaAs band gap. The wavelength of the features on the transmission spectrum are mostly affected by DBR layer thicknesses. On the other hand, the transmission spectrum is found to be relatively tolerant to changes to Al fraction

Hydrogenation of GaSb/GaAs quantum rings

We present the results of photoluminescence measurements on hydrogenated type-II GaSb/GaAs quantum dot/ring (QD/QR) samples at temperatures ranging from 4.2K to 400 K. Hydrogenation is found to suppress optically induced charge depletion (associated with the presence of carbon acceptors in this system). A redshift of the QD\QR emission energy of a few tens of meV is observed at temperatures 300 K, consistent with a reduction in average occupancy by 1 hole. These effects are accompanied by a reduction in PL intensity post-hydrogenation. We conclude that although hydrogenation may have neutralized the carbon acceptors, multiple hole occupancy of type-II GaSb/GaAs QD/QRs is very likely a precondition for intense emission, which would make extending the wavelength significantly beyond 1300 nm at room temperature difficult

Demonstration of a Fast, Low-Voltage, III-V Semiconductor, Non-Volatile Memory

ULTRARAM™ is a III-V semiconductor memory technology which exploits resonant tunneling to allow ultra-low-energy memory logic switching (per unit area), whilst retaining non-volatility. Single-cell memories developed on GaAs substrates with a revised design and atomic-layer-deposition Al 2 O 3 gate dielectric demonstrate significant improvements compared to prior prototypes. Floating-gate (FG) memories with 20-μm gate length show 0/1 state contrast from 2.5-V program-read-erase-read (P/E) cycles with 500-μs pulse duration, which would scale to sub-ns switching speed at 20-nm node. Nonvolatility is confirmed by memory retention tests of 4×10 3 s with both 0 and 1 states completely invariant. Single cells demonstrate promising endurance results, undergoing 10 4 cycles without degradation. P/E cycling and disturbance tests are performed using half-voltages (±1.25 V), validating the high-density random access memory (RAM) architecture proposed previously. Finally, memory logic is retained after an equivalent of >10 5 P/E disturbances