Discovering SUSY with m02<0m_0^2 < 0 in the First LHC Physics Run

In minimal supergravity, the parameter space where the slepton is the LSP is usually neglected, because of strong constraints on charged dark matter. When the gravitino is the true LSP, this region avoids these constraints and offers spectacular collider signals. We investigate this scenario for the LHC and find that a large portion of the ignored mSugra parameter space can lead to discovery within the first physics run, with 1-4 $\text{fb}^{-1}$ of data. We find that there are regions where discovery is feasible with only 1 day of running

Freedom of Religion and Belief in India and Australia: An Introductory Comparative Assessment of Two Federal Constitutional Democracies

This article considers the freedom of religion and belief (“free exercise”) in two secular federal constitutional democracies: India and Australia. Both constitutional systems emerged from the former British Empire and both continue in membership of the Commonwealth of Nations, which succeeded it. However, the similarities end there, for while both separate church and state, and protect free exercise, they do so in very different ways. On the one hand, the Indian Constitution contains express provisions which comprehensively deal with free exercise. On the other hand, while one finds what might appear a protection for free exercise in the Australian Constitution, that protection is far from comprehensive. Instead, unlike its Indian counterpart, the Australian federal democracy depends upon a piecemeal collection of Constitutional, legislative, and common law provisions which, when taken together, seem to achieve plenary protection for free exercise. Still, while India protects free exercise within a comprehensive constitutional framework, and while Australia does so in a disjointed and fragmentary way, both arrive at the same place: a constitutionalism characterized by secularism/separation of church and state combined with a corresponding comprehensive protection for free exercise

Is Africa Integrated in the Global Economy?

The popular impression that Africa has not integrated into world trade, as suggested by the evolution in simple indicators, has been called into question recently by more formal analysis. This paper refines and generalizes this analysis and lends support to the popular view of disintegration, but only for countries in Francophone Africa. These countries are currently underexploiting their trading opportunities and have witnessed disintegration over time, a trend that is most pronounced in their trade with technologically advanced countries. There is some evidence, on the other hand, that countries in Anglophone Africa are reversing the trend of disintegration, particularly in their trade with advanced countries. Copyright 2003, International Monetary Fund

The Muddles over Outsourcing

Critics have muddled the public debate over offshore outsourcing by using the term interchangeably to refer to altogether different phenomena such as on-line purchase of services, direct foreign investment and, sometimes, all imports. We argue that clarity requires distinguishing among these various phenomena and define outsourcing explicitly as the services trade at arm's length that does not require geographical proximity of the buyer and the seller—the so-called Mode 1 services in the WTO terminology—conducted principally via the electronic mediums such as the telephone, fax and Internet. The definition is appropriate because this is the phenomenon that is relatively new and scary in public consciousness and has fueled the recent “outsourcing” debate. Under this definition, the total number of the U.S. jobs outsourced annually is minuscule and is expected to remain so over the next decade, even on a gross basis (i.e., without adjusting for the jobs in-sourced from the U.S.). The fears that offshore outsourcing will lead to high-value jobs being replaced by low-value jobs down the road are also argued here to be implausible in view of several qualitative arguments to the contrary. We also demonstrate that offshore outsourcing of Mode 1 services raises no new analytical issues, contrary to what many fear. Thus, it leads to gains from trade (with the standard caveats applicable to conventional trade in goods) and, in specific cases, to income-distribution effects.Outsourcing,WTO, Services

Legal ideology, legal doctrine and the UK's top judges

Most work on the UK's judiciary reflects the assumption that the institutional issues raised by attitudinal studies of the US Supreme Court are irrelevant to the UK because the UK's judiciary is not political. This article challenges those assumptions. We present an empirical and theoretical analysis of the 'doctrinal model' of judicial decision-making in the upper judiciary of the UK, that is to say, of the position that judges decide cases on the basis of doctrinal positions rather than political views, and argue that it has far more in common with the attitudinal model than is conventionally assumed. We elaborate upon this through an empirical analysis of decisions of the Law Lords on challenges to state bodies over a twenty-five year period, which estimates judges' ideological positions on a scale derived from doctrine. We find that (a) there are meaningful and measurable differences in judicial positions in key doctrinal controversies (b) these differences have an impact on the outcome of a significant minority of cases. Our results support the view that doctrinal positions are more salient than party-political ideology in the UK context, but also demonstrate that even faithful adherence to a doctrinal model does not affect the validity of the insights of the attitudinal model in relation to the role and impact of judges' personal views. We show that on a proper understanding, doctrinal adjudication raises the same questions of institutional structure and design emphasised by the attitudinal model, and that these questions assume particular significance given changes to the British judiciary's institutional role

The curious origins of judicial review

This article tells the story of the birth of modern judicial review. In the conventional account, the judge-led development of judicial review is one of the great successes of the twentieth century common law: “the greatest achievement of my judicial lifetime”, as Lord Diplock famously put it. On this interpretation, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, the judiciary abandoned its earlier quiescence and, building on doctrines, approaches and remedies that had been used to control inferior tribunals since Victorian times, fashioned a new body of law capable of subordinating the administrative state to the rule of law. The modern law is thus seen as representing the same common law commitment to the rule of law seen in early cases such as Entick v Carrington and Cooper v Wandsworth. This article challenges this story of continuous unbroken development. On the face of it, the cases from Ridge to GCHQ did indeed draw on an older line of case law. Yet, as we demonstrate, the 1960s and 1970s were a transformative period in administrative law. Underlying the seeming doctrinal doctrinal continuity and consolidation, lay a deeper conceptual and theoretical discontinuity—a fundamental shift of approach from a ‘mediating’ conception of administrative law to a ‘public’ conception. While the motives underlying this shift were laudable, the resulting system of judicial review has nevertheless failed to achieve its objectives. We argue that the source of the problems lies in a system of judicial review designed to eschew questions of “merit”, and that truly addressing the problem will require us to revisit the issues which were at the forefront of debate in the first half of this century, but which have never received a satisfactory resolution

SuperWIMP Cosmology and Collider Physics

Dark matter may be composed of superWIMPs, superweakly-interacting massive particles produced in the late decays of other particles. We focus here on the well-motivated supersymmetric example of gravitino LSPs. Gravitino superWIMPs share several virtues with the well-known case of neutralino dark matter: they are present in the same supersymmetric frameworks (supergravity with R-parity conservation) and naturally have the desired relic density. In contrast to neutralinos, however, gravitino superWIMPs are impossible to detect by conventional dark matter searches, may explain an existing discrepancy in Big Bang nucleosynthesis, predict observable distortions in the cosmic microwave background, and imply spectacular signals at future particle colliders.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in the proceedings of SUSY2004, the 12th International Conference on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions, Tsukuba, Japan, 17-23 June 200