Scots law and the UK codification of bills of exchange

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The transfer of money claims in Scots law

The transfer of money claims (debts) is of the utmost practical importance. In Scots law this is achieved by an 'assignation' (also known as 'assignment' or 'cession'). The first part of the thesis (chapters 2 and 3) places the Scots law of assignation in its comparative and historical context. At the outset, the differences between an assignation and other juridical institutions are highlighted. Assignation is but one - albeit important - method whereby a debt relationship may be utilised. With these distinctions in mind the accepted history of the law of assignment is considered. The development of the law, from Roman law through the jus commune, and the apparent reception of the French approach in Scots law, is traced.The following three chapters deal with three important elements in a modern assignation. The constitutive role that debtor notification plays in Scots law is the subject of chapter 4. Chapter 5 looks as at the so-called 'assignatus utitur jure auctoris'1 rule, i.e. the defences available to the debtor in an assignation against the assignee. Particular reference is made to the set-off pleas of compensatio and retention. Finally, chapter 6 is concerned with issues of validity. Does Scots law subscribe to the abstract theory of transfer? If so, what are the consequences? Particular reference is made to the effect of a contractual prohibition on assignment (pactum de non cedendo), including its effect on creditors, and the so-called 'offside goals' rule.It will become apparent that, despite the relative paucity of recent litigation on the subject, the Scottish jurisprudence on assignment is rich. The sources show an unbroken path of legal development stretching over half a millennium. Although often characterised as unnecessarily formal, Scots law has a strikingly liberal attitude to the assignability of claims and other incorporeal assets. Clear general principles have been distilled. On matters of detail the position is less certain. The thesis identifies the relevant sources of the law of Scotland, many of which have been ignored. These are critically analysed, often from a comparative perspective

SuSpect: a Fortran Code for the Supersymmetric and Higgs Particle Spectrum in the MSSM

We present the Fortran code SuSpect version 2.3, which calculates the Supersymmetric and Higgs particle spectrum in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). The calculation can be performed in constrained models with universal boundary conditions at high scales such as the gravity (mSUGRA), anomaly (AMSB) or gauge (GMSB) mediated breaking models, but also in the non-universal MSSM case with R-parity and CP conservation. Care has been taken to treat important features such as the renormalization group evolution of parameters between low and high energy scales, the consistent implementation of radiative electroweak symmetry breaking and the calculation of the physical masses of the Higgs bosons and supersymmetric particles taking into account the dominant radiative corrections. Some checks of important theoretical and experimental features, such as the absence of non desired minima, large fine-tuning in the electroweak symmetry breaking condition, as well as agreement with precision measurements can be performed. The program is user friendly, simple to use, self-contained and can easily be linked with other codes; it is rather fast and flexible, thus allowing scans of the parameter space with several possible options and choices for model assumptions and approximations.Comment: 44 pages, 1 figure. Program updated and text shortened. The program can be found at http://www.lpta.univ-montp2.fr/~kneur/Suspec

Reflexion and reflection: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to attributional inference

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