The ambivalent shadow of the pre-Wilsonian rise of international law

The generation of American international lawyers who founded the American Society of International Law in 1906 and nurtured the soil for what has been retrospectively called a “moralistic legalistic approach to international relations” remains little studied. A survey of the rise of international legal literature in the U.S. from the mid-19th century to the eve of the Great War serves as a backdrop to the examination of the boosting effect on international law of the Spanish American War in 1898. An examination of the Insular Cases before the US Supreme Court is then accompanied by the analysis of a number of influential factors behind the pre-war rise of international law in the U.S. The work concludes with an examination of the rise of natural law doctrines in international law during the interwar period and the critiques addressed.by the realist founders of the field of “international relations” to the “moralistic legalistic approach to international relation

A dynamical gluon mass solution in a coupled system of the Schwinger-Dyson equations

We study numerically the Schwinger-Dyson equations for the coupled system of gluon and ghost propagators in the Landau gauge and in the case of pure gauge QCD. We show that a dynamical mass for the gluon propagator arises as a solution while the ghost propagator develops an enhanced behavior in the infrared regime of QCD. Simple analytical expressions are proposed for the propagators, and the mass dependency on the $\Lambda_{QCD}$ scale and its perturbative scaling are studied. We discuss the implications of our results for the infrared behavior of the coupling constant, which, according to fits for the propagators infrared behavior, seems to indicate that $\alpha_s (q^2) \to 0$ as $q^2 \to 0$.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures - Revised version to be consistent with erratum to appear in JHE

Bankruptcy Treatment of Intellectual Property Assets: An Economic Analysis

With the rise of intellectual property in the modern economy, bankruptcy treatment of intellectual property assets has taken on ever greater importance. The law in this area must balance different approaches to asset management. Viewing the world from an ex ante perspective, intellectual property laws seek to foster investment in research and development. Freedom of contract plays a central role in maximizing the potential value of intellectual property by encouraging a robust licensing market to exploit the value of intellectual creativity. By contrast, the bankruptcy system generally views asset management from an ex post standpoint, focusing narrowly on how to maximize the value of a failing or failed enterprise. Thus, bankruptcy law affords trustees and debtors substantial leeway to rescind contracts and reorder the affairs of the failed entity. This article examines the rather complex rules governing the treatment of intellectual property assets in bankruptcy and suggests various reforms that could better promote economic efficiency

Modified GBIG Scenario as an Alternative for Dark Energy

We construct a DGP-inspired braneworld model where induced gravity on the brane is modified in the spirit of $f(R)$ gravity and stringy effects are taken into account by incorporation of the Gauss-Bonnet term in the bulk action. We explore cosmological dynamics of this model and we show that this scenario is a successful alternative for dark energy proposal. Interestingly, it realizes the phantom-like behavior without introduction of any phantom field on the brane and the effective equation of state parameter crosses the cosmological constant line naturally in the same way as observational data suggest.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, Accepted for publication in JCA

Dissidents and God-Talk in the Johannine Epistles

Peer reviewe

Catching-up and falling behind knowledge spillover from American to German machine tool makers

In our days, German machine tool makers accuse their Chinese competitors of violating patent rights and illegally imitating German technology. A century ago, however, German machine tool makers used exactly the same methods to imitate American technology. To understand the dynamics of this catching-up process we use patent statistics to analyze firms? activities between 1877 and 1932. We show that German machine tool makers successfully deployed imitating and counterfeiting activities in the late 19th century and the 1920s to catchup to their American competitors. The German administration supported this strategy by stipulating a patent law that discriminated against foreign patent holders and probably also by delaying the granting of patents to foreign applicants. Parallel to the growing international competitiveness of German firms, however, the willingness to guarantee intellectual property rights of foreigners was also increasing because German firms had now to fear retaliatory measures in their own export markets when violating foreign property rights within Germany