Big Leagues: Specters of Milton and Republican International Justice between Shakespeare and Marx

Through Jacques Derrida’s extended discussion in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has become “an exemplary text for thinking together about the current state of the world” (Royle). This article concerns Shakespeare’s Hamlet alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost as texts central to writing the “literary history of the International.” Whereas Derrida and Marx placed Hamlet at the center of their influential international visions, this article argues that the role of republicanism in forging international solidarity from the seventeenth-century onwards suggests that any literary history of the International ought also to include that key republican touchstone, Milton’s Paradise Lost. Against current critical consensus, however, it also argues that Paradise Lost’s republican internationalism developed through Milton’s own reading of Hamlet, and that Shakespeare himself may have been Milton’s “old mole.

History, Literature, and Authority in International Law

One consequence of international law’s recent historical turn has been to sharpen methodological contrasts between intellectual history and international law. Scholars including Antony Anghie, Anne Orford, Rose Parfitt, and Martti Koskenniemi have taken on board historians’ interest in contingency and context but pointedly relaxed historians’ traditional stricture against presentist instrumentalism. This essay argues that such a move disrupts a longstanding division of labor between history and international law and ultimately brings international legal method closer to literature and literary scholarship. The essay therefore details several more or less endemic ways in which literature and literary studies confront challenges of presentism, anachronism, meaning, and time. Using examples from writers as diverse as Anghie, Spinoza, Geoffrey Hill, Emily St. John Mandel, China Miéville, John Hollander, Pascale Casanova, Matthew Nicholson, John Selden, Shakespeare, and Dante, it proposes a “trilateral” discussion among historians, international lawyers, and literary scholars that takes seriously the multipolar disciplinary field in which each of these disciplines makes and sustains relations with each of the others.

To Ruin the Repairs: Milton, Allegory, Transitional Justice

International legal theorists posit historical moments when conceptions of justice are “constituted by, and constitutive of, the transition” (Teitel). This article uses the framework of transitional justice to understand the cultural work of political allegory in the spring of 1660 on the eve of the English Restoration. Insights from transitional justice (1.) help explain how Anglican royalists convinced wary Presbyterians to assent to a restoration of the monarchy; (2.) permit a new reading of Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost; and (3.) facilitate a more critical history of the framework of transitional justice itself

Trouble in the Melting Arctic: The EPA’s Failure to Impose Air Pollution Control Measures

In 2010, the EPA approved two permits for Shell to begin offshore exploratory drilling in the Arctic’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas with the drillship Discoverer. REDOIL, a group representing the rights of the region’s indigenous peoples, contested the permits and argued that they violated the Clean Air Act by failing to require best available control technology (BACT) for emissions from the operation’s associated fleet of service vessels. In Resisting Environmental Destruction of Indigenous Lands (REDOIL) v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the Act is ambiguous on the application of BACT to the drilling operation’s associated fleet and upheld the EPA’s interpretation that BACT is only required for the main drillship. The court was bound to defer to the agency’s reasonable interpretation under Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. This Comment argues that the EPA could have ensured a more environmentally friendly outcome by embracing stricter applications of BACT that it has embraced in the past

Angels and Diplomats: A Pleromatic Paradigm for Human Rights

Parts I and II of this Article show as a descriptive matter that the conceptual histories of early modern angels and diplomats are interlinked, and that their shared etymology opens into a new intellectual history of human rights—one that extends and, in some cases, revises previous work by thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Carl Schmitt, Samuel Moyn, and Jeremy Waldron. Angels and diplomats are figures of abundance and plenitude. As such, they throw into relief minimalist conceptions of human rights that, in certain scholars’ view, have become “eroded,” “a worldwide slogan in a time of downsized ambition,” “weak and cheap,” and “prisoners of the contemporary age of inequality.” Angels and diplomats, by contrast, exemplify what this Article calls a pleromatic paradigm of inviolable fullness—fullness of dignity, fullness of power, fullness of rights, and even fullness of resources. Borrowing from the ancient Greek term for fullness, pleroma, this so-called pleromatic paradigm—more so than the downsized version of human rights criticized by scholars like Samuel Moyn—imposes more substantial correlative duties and liabilities onto sovereignty. However, the pleromatic paradigm’s sources in hierarchical, monotheistic political theology invite consideration of whether we ought to bring angels and diplomats back down to earth in the name of political equality or whether, on the other hand, the pleromatic paradigm calls us toward fuller, more ambitious manifestations of human rights

Design and characterization of a low cost dual differential proving ring force sensor utilizing Hall-effect sensors

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 31).A novel dual differential hall-effect based proving ring force sensor has been designed, manufactured, and tested. Strain gauge based force sensors are among the most common methods of measuring static and dynamic forces, yet they suffer from a wide array of negative attributes including: high cost due to signal amplification instrumentation, high temperature sensitivity, and only moderate dynamic range. The goal of the research herein described was to design and test a low cost, high dynamic range force sensor. Hall-Effect sensors have high bandwidth (>100 kHz), a wide dynamic range, are low in cost (<0.5$), and are ideally suited to dynamic and static force measurements. Proving rings - diametrally loaded hoops of metal, have long been used to measure force yet suffer many setbacks due to their historical designs utilizing mechanical and strain gauge methods of strain detection. A novel nested proving ring flexure has been combined with hall-effect sensors to fulfill the design requirements of a low cost and robust force sensor. Initial data demonstrates that the nested proving ring force sensor herein described is capable of resolving forces of in the range of 0 to 30 Newtons with an accuracy of 0.235 Newtons, all at a potential mass-manufactured cost of U.S.$10.00 per unit.by Christopher W. Rivest.S.B

Blowing the Whistle on Environmental Law: How Congress Can Help the EPA Enlist Private Resources in the Fight to Save the Planet

Following the 2008 financial crisis, regulators faced the task of returning the country to financial stability and protecting consumers. Given the challenges involved, Congress empowered the SEC and the CFTC, through the Dodd-Frank Act, to encourage whistleblowers to come forward through programs that provide significant financial rewards and protection. These programs are part of the evolving field of whistleblower law that has been tremendously successful at uncovering wrongdoing while rewarding whistleblowers. Given the success of these programs and recognition by Congress that they can be useful tools to combat threats to the government, Congress should consider whether a similar system would be beneficial in the environmental arena. Threats to the environment may pose a bigger, more tangible danger to the United States than threats to the economy. This Note argues that current environmental whistle-blower laws are too uncertain and lack adequate financial incentives and protections to attract meaningful participation. It advocates for a uniform whistleblower program established under the EPA, similar to those established by the Dodd-Frank Act under the SEC and the CFTC