Misplaced Boldness: The Avoidance of Substance in the International Court of Justice’s Kosovo Opinion

The International Court of Justice\u27s Kosovo Advisory Opinion is a masterpiece of avoidance. The Court has lived to run another day, and one can only admire the judges\u27 skill in arriving at the vacant place between difficult and clashing conclusions of substance. Still, in the wake of the Opinion, questions inevitably arise: Of what use is this document? Has it advanced a project of justice, or of law? The Opinion has done something, though not, perhaps, what it purports to do. To understand it, we must engage this cautious, crimped document in its full context—or rather, we must understand the ways in which the Opinion itself comprehensively avoids any engagement with context. Its caution and its crimped nature are themselves features illuminating the self-image, role, and limited value of the Court. This Article argues that in the Kosovo Opinion, the International Court of Justice assiduously asserted its own jurisdictional, interpretative, and institutional prerogatives, at the cost of avoiding the momentous questions about secession and self-determination with which the Court was so clearly confronted. These two outcomes are related: The avoidance of substance and the assertion of prerogative were achieved by the selfsame maneuvers of definition and interpretation. Faced with a choice between emphasizing its own authority and actually engaging the question, the Court chose to invest in itself—but it did not, in turn, use that investment to any substantive end. The Opinion exhibits a misplaced boldness, advancing its procedural agenda but saying—almost literally—nothing in the process. This Article also considers what a bolder Opinion might have looked like, by comparing the Opinion to the Canadian Supreme Court\u27s seminal Reference re Secession of Quebec. This comparative exercise helps us to understand why questions of self-determination are easier to avoid than to decide—why it is hard even to talk about them in coherent and productive terms, and thus why one must feel sympathy for the seemingly impossible task facing the ICJ—but also to see that another, bolder language is in fact possible

Killing Globally, Punishing Locally?: The Still-Unmapped Ecology of Atrocity

Book review of Mark A. Drumbl\u27s Atrocity, Punishment, and International La

Contemplating Failure and Creating Alternatives in the Balkans: Bosnia\u27s Peoples, Democracy, and the Shape of Self-Determination

I think it obvious that while we may owe Bosnians a great deal, we owe Bosnia nothing. In the quotidian bustle of politics, we seldom pose ultimate questions about the existing order-we tend to assume France or Japan as a kind of given-but such heuristics hardly should, and barely can, apply to a shadow like Bosnia. Almost everyone agrees that Bosnia today is dysfunctional, its existence too contingent to take for granted, and so we reasonably may and properly should ask fundamental constitutional questions about its future, its people, and their state. And yet: Bosnia. The name conjures a moral vision more than an actual state. A moral vision and a political commitment: to no peace without justice, to never again, to not rewarding aggression, to multiculturalism and the political irrelevance of ethnicity, to cosmopolitanism over postmodem neo-tribalism. We have come to believe in a commitment to preserve, to restore, to redeem the state of Bosnia

The Time-Domain Spectroscopic Survey: Understanding the Optically Variable Sky with SEQUELS in SDSS-III

The Time-Domain Spectroscopic Survey (TDSS) is an SDSS-IV eBOSS subproject primarily aimed at obtaining identification spectra of ~220,000 optically-variable objects systematically selected from SDSS/Pan-STARRS1 multi-epoch imaging. We present a preview of the science enabled by TDSS, based on TDSS spectra taken over ~320 deg^2 of sky as part of the SEQUELS survey in SDSS-III, which is in part a pilot survey for eBOSS in SDSS-IV. Using the 15,746 TDSS-selected single-epoch spectra of photometrically variable objects in SEQUELS, we determine the demographics of our variability-selected sample, and investigate the unique spectral characteristics inherent in samples selected by variability. We show that variability-based selection of quasars complements color-based selection by selecting additional redder quasars, and mitigates redshift biases to produce a smooth quasar redshift distribution over a wide range of redshifts. The resulting quasar sample contains systematically higher fractions of blazars and broad absorption line quasars than from color-selected samples. Similarly, we show that M-dwarfs in the TDSS-selected stellar sample have systematically higher chromospheric active fractions than the underlying M-dwarf population, based on their H-alpha emission. TDSS also contains a large number of RR Lyrae and eclipsing binary stars with main-sequence colors, including a few composite-spectrum binaries. Finally, our visual inspection of TDSS spectra uncovers a significant number of peculiar spectra, and we highlight a few cases of these interesting objects. With a factor of ~15 more spectra, the main TDSS survey in SDSS-IV will leverage the lessons learned from these early results for a variety of time-domain science applications.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figures, submitted to Ap

Genome sequence of an Australian kangaroo, Macropus eugenii, provides insight into the evolution of mammalian reproduction and development.

BACKGROUND: We present the genome sequence of the tammar wallaby, Macropus eugenii, which is a member of the kangaroo family and the first representative of the iconic hopping mammals that symbolize Australia to be sequenced. The tammar has many unusual biological characteristics, including the longest period of embryonic diapause of any mammal, extremely synchronized seasonal breeding and prolonged and sophisticated lactation within a well-defined pouch. Like other marsupials, it gives birth to highly altricial young, and has a small number of very large chromosomes, making it a valuable model for genomics, reproduction and development. RESULTS: The genome has been sequenced to 2 × coverage using Sanger sequencing, enhanced with additional next generation sequencing and the integration of extensive physical and linkage maps to build the genome assembly. We also sequenced the tammar transcriptome across many tissues and developmental time points. Our analyses of these data shed light on mammalian reproduction, development and genome evolution: there is innovation in reproductive and lactational genes, rapid evolution of germ cell genes, and incomplete, locus-specific X inactivation. We also observe novel retrotransposons and a highly rearranged major histocompatibility complex, with many class I genes located outside the complex. Novel microRNAs in the tammar HOX clusters uncover new potential mammalian HOX regulatory elements. CONCLUSIONS: Analyses of these resources enhance our understanding of marsupial gene evolution, identify marsupial-specific conserved non-coding elements and critical genes across a range of biological systems, including reproduction, development and immunity, and provide new insight into marsupial and mammalian biology and genome evolution