The impact of EU expansion on the Preliminary Rulings Procedure

In CILFIT (case 283/81), the European Court of Justice (ECJ) endorsed the use of the acte clair doctrine – the notion that national courts of “last resort” may decide to refrain from seeking a preliminary ruling under Article 234 (3) EC. The Court also stipulated a list of factors – the CILFIT criteria – that should be satisfied before the doctrine may be properly invoked. One criterion is that the national court “must be convinced that the matter is equally obvious to the courts of the other Member States” (emphasis added). In 1982, there were nine “other” Member States; in 2008, there are 26. Another criterion requires courts to bear in mind that Community legislation is “drafted in several languages”. There were seven official languages in 1982; there are now 22 (23 if Irish is included). The CILFIT criteria were difficult to satisfy in 1982; they have become increasingly more difficult as EU membership has expanded; they are, it is submitted, practically impossible to satisfy in any meaningful sense in 2008. The CILFIT criteria should therefore be re-written. As EU membership has expanded (and looks set for further expansion in the not too distant future), various reform proposals concerning the preliminary rulings procedure have been formulated, the central idea being to change the “judicial architecture” to allow the ECJ to cope with its ever increasing workload. The most notable of these is (by default, given that it is the only one that has actually been implemented): the insertion of the present Article 225 (3) EC by the Treaty of Amsterdam, conferring limited jurisdiction for dealing with preliminary rulings on the Court of First Instance (CFI). More specifically, the CFI is authorised to deal with preliminary rulings in as yet unspecified ‘specific areas’. The time has come to bring Article 225 (3) EC into effect, with the free movement of goods being selected as the first ‘specific area’

Integration and Participation in Rural Development: the Case of Ireland

Rural development initiatives in recent years, in Ireland and elsewhere in western Europe, have placed great emphasis on ideas of integration, participation and empowerment. As a consequence, at both national and European Union levels, there have been a range of territorially-based programmes which, to a greater or lesser extent, espouse the idea of a more locally attuned ‘bottom-up’ approach to rural development. This approach is seen as a more appropriate mechanism than traditional 'top-down' strategies. While current strategies might be seen as offering new possibilities for those living in rural areas, this paper presents some evidence from on-going research in Ireland suggesting that there are a number of issues which need to be teased out. Two key themes are highlighted. Firstly, there are a number of what can be seen as ‘technical’ considerations centring on the mechanics of co-ordination and integration. Secondly, there are issues pertaining to power relationships at both national and local levels which need to be explored

Memories: A Photo Feature

The following is a small selection of the photographs I took during my 12 months with UNPROFOR. In the Spring of 1993, WO Stebbings and myself were the first Terrain Analysis Team sent to UNPROFOR Headquarters, Zagreb, Croatia. We were actually the first Terrain Analysis Team in the Former Yugoslavia. We were the geographic experts for the mission and worked out of Zagreb. The nature of the job allowed us unlimited access to the complete UNPROFOR Theatre of Operations, which included: Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, parts of Serbia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

The Success of the Light Armoured Vehicle

In order to understand the purchase of military vehicles, one must understand the vehicle and where it falls in the evolution of vehicle procurement. This article, written in response to an earlier article in response to an earlier article in Canadian Military History by Frank Maas, examines the chronology and motivations behind the Canadian acquisition of wheeled armoured fighting vehicles

Images of Rurality: Commodification and Place Promotion

It is argued that rural areas and landscapes can increasingly be regarded as places of consumption rather than production. This is reflected in the emphasis which appears to be placed on attracting visitors to rural localities. While some rural locations are long-standing tourist attractions, others are increasingly endeavouring to promote themselves through the ‘marketing’ of local uniqueness. An emphasis on local heritage frequently underpins these attempts and landscapes, local individuals or families, events, traditions, building styles are amongst the ‘resources’ put into the service of place promotion. The use of local heritage as a mechanism to promote rural places opens up a series of issues including those of authenticity, romanticisation, sanitisation, contestation and dissonance. These place promotional trends are reflected in the importance attaching to tourism in rural development strategies pursued at a local level. In this way development funding and the various local strategies devised by local partnerships appear to increasingly emphasise the importance of attracting visitors. This apparent commodification of the countryside appears to be motivated by a number of concerns. While the desire to generate revenue is clearly one of these, social and cultural factors may also play a role. In turn, these place promotional initiatives affect both visitors’ and local residents’ perceptions of place. This paper explores aspects of the historic and contemporary promotion of rural places

Incoherent superconductivity well above TcT_c in high-TcT_c cuprates - harmonizing the spectroscopic and thermodynamic data

Cuprate superconductors have long been known to exhibit an energy gap that persists high above the superconducting transition temperature ($T_c$). Debate has continued now for decades as to whether it is a precursor superconducting gap or a pseudogap arising from some competing correlation. Failure to resolve this has arguably delayed explaining the origins of superconductivity in these highly complex materials. Here we effectively settle the question by calculating a variety of thermodynamic and spectroscopic properties, exploring the effect of a temperature-dependent pair-breaking term in the self-energy in the presence of pairing interactions that persist well above $T_c$. We start by fitting the detailed temperature-dependence of the electronic specific heat and immediately can explain its hitherto puzzling field dependence. Taking this same combination of pairing temperature and pair-breaking scattering we are then able to simultaneously describe in detail the unusual temperature and field dependence of the superfluid density, tunneling, Raman and optical spectra, which otherwise defy explanation in terms a superconducting gap that closes conventionally at $T_c$. These findings demonstrate that the gap above $T_c$ in the overdoped regime likely originates from incoherent superconducting correlations, and is distinct from the competing-order "pseudogap" that appears at lower doping.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Hall effect and Fermi surface reconstruction via electron pockets in the high-TcT_c cuprates

The mechanism by which the Fermi surface of high-$T_c$ cuprates undergoes a dramatic change from a large hole-like barrel to small arcs or pockets on entering the pseudogap phase remains a question of fundamental importance. Here we calculate the normal-state Hall coefficient from the resonating-valence-bond spin-liquid model developed by Yang, Rice and Zhang. In this model, reconstruction of the Fermi surface occurs via an intermediate regime where the Fermi surface consists of both hole- and electron-like pockets. We find that the doping $(x)$ dependence of the Hall number transitions from $1+x$ to $x$ over this narrow doping range. At low temperatures, a switch from a downturn to an upturn in the Hall coefficient signals the departure of the electron-like pockets from the Fermi surface.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure