Evaporation of extrasolar planets

Atomic hydrogen escaping from the extrasolar giant planet HD209458b provides the largest observational signature ever detected for an extrasolar planet atmosphere. In fact, the upper atmosphere of this planet is evaporating. Observational evidences and interpretations coming from various models are reviewed. Implications for exoplanetology are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the Les Houches Winter School "Physics and Astrophysics of Planetary Systems" (EDP Sciences: EAS Publications Series

We The People\u27s Executive

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, a recent survey found that most Americans know far more about television hits than they know about the United States Constitution. For instance, 52% of Americans surveyed could name at least two characters from The Simpsons, and 41% could name at least two judges from American Idol. Meanwhile, a mere 28% could identify more than one of the rights protected by the First Amendment. Surveys such as this help clear up one of the apparent mysteries of the last five years: How did we change so quickly from a nation in which the rule of law seemed deeply entrenched to a nation that has seen an astonishingly successful executive power grab? The answer, is that many Americans—including those who serve in Congress—neither know nor care very much about our constitutional system. Although the subject of constitutional checks and balances is a matter of endless interest to most of the people who populate America’s law schools, the rule of law and the protection of constitutional rights turn out to be matters of extreme indifference to quite a few of our fellow citizens

Law in the Heart of Darkness: Atrocity & Duress

Our faith in the law is rarely tested, since in America, at least, few of us ordinary people ever find ourselves at the extremes, confronting violence and terror. But the extremes have a way of creeping up on us, and the unimaginable can quickly and imperceptibly begin to seem routine. Millions of ordinary Europeans discovered this in the middle of the last century, and thousands of ordinary Americans discovered it in Vietnam. Some Americans are discovering it again today in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq. Experientially, there is often no sharp dividing line between ordinary life and ordinary law, on the one hand, and the extremes, on the other. After Stalin, after Pol Pot, after the Balkan Wars and the Rwandan genocide, as well as the countless other smaller-scale conflicts around the globe, this truth should be apparent to us, but most of the time we prefer to forget or deny it. What the author wants to do in this essay is look closely at one example of law operating at the extreme edge of human behavior and emotion, and see whether it has anything particularly satisfying to offer those people who do find themselves caught in the dark places of the earth--or any lessons for those of us who have not so far been tested. The example she has in mind involves the first judgment handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (better know as the Hague Tribunal ). It is the story of an ordinary man who found one day that the moral terrain around him had changed beyond recognition. It is also, of course, a story about law. The case, Prosecutor v. Erdemovic, was decided in 1997, but it has received only minimal attention in English-language journals. This is probably because, to many observers of the Tribunal, it seemed an unimportant and even disappointing case. It involved the wrongs of an obscure young Croatian soldier, not those of a general or a president, and its outcome, to many critics, was hardly a resounding or satisfying victory over the forces of evil. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating case. It addresses a particularly troublesome issue in criminal law: the scope of duress as a defense. This issue in turn leads to difficult questions about what law in general can offer us, what it is fair and reasonable to expect of ordinary human beings caught in terrible times, and whether we it is wise to assume a sharp discontinuity between the ordinary and the extreme in life or in law. The Erdemovic case can be seen as a parable about the failure of law to live up to its optimistic promise (to protect humans from atrocity or provide guidance to those who wish to prevent atrocity). Alternatively, it can be seen as a parable about law\u27s expressive and redemptive possibilities, even in the face of evil. It is these ambiguities that the author wants to explore here

Failed States, or the State as Failure?

This article seeks to challenge a basic assumption of international law and policy, arguing that the existing state-based international legal framework stands in the way of developing effective responses to state failure. It offers an alternative theoretical framework designed to spark debate about better legal and policy responses to failed states. Although the article uses failed states as a lens to focus its arguments, it also has broad implications for how we think about sovereignty, the evolving global order, and the place of states within it. State failure causes a wide range of humanitarian, legal, and security problems. Unsurprisingly, given the state-centric international legal system, responses to state failure tend to focus on restoring failed states to the status of successful states, through a range of short- and long-term nation building efforts. This article suggests that this is a misguided approach, which in some cases may do as much harm as good. In large part, this is because most failed states were never successful states. Indeed, the state itself is a recent and historically contingent development, as is an international legal system premised on state sovereignty. What\u27s more, both states and the state-centric international system have poor track records in creating stability or democratic accountability. This article explores the implications of this for approaches to failed states. It concludes that although the existing state system is likely to survive for some time to come, despite the challenges of globalization, not all states will or should survive in their current form. The populations of many failed states might benefit more from living indefinitely in a nonstate society than in a dysfunctional state, artificially sustained by international efforts. Long-term nonstate arrangements could range from international trusteeships to affiliations with willing third-party states to special status within regional bodies, and alternative accountability mechanisms could be developed to overcome democratic deficits associated with the lack of formal legal statehood as currently understood by international law

The New Imperialism: Violence, Norms, and the Rule of Law

The goal of this Article is to participate in the challenging project of carving out a new area of study in the place where international law, comparative law, and domestic law intersect. In this Article, I use the story of flawed rule-of-law assistance efforts to demonstrate the importance of this inquiry. I take as a basic premise that there are many situations in which it is justifiable and beneficial for the U.S. and other actors to seek to promote human rights and the rule of law abroad, and that at times even military interventions are a necessary and justifiable part of this effort. These are controversial statements (and do not imply endorsement of any particular past intervention), but I will simply assume their truth for the limited purposes of this Article. If we assume that efforts to promote the rule of law are important and justifiable, however, we need to make those efforts as effective as possible. The initial goal of this Article, then, is to convince readers that there is indeed a problem with how we go about promoting human rights and the rule of law. I argue that the root cause of the problem is the failure to take seriously issues of norm creation, and the complex relation between law and norms. In part, truly acknowledging this problem must involve recognizing something lawyers are often reluctant to acknowledge - that at times the law in its formal sense is of peripheral importance at best. Although we imagine that the trappings of formal law are central to creating order and reducing violence, there is little evidence that this is so. Second, this Article seeks to map out a preliminary research agenda for this new field, outlining the kinds of questions we urgently need to start asking, and suggesting some of the things we will need to do to start feeling our way towards some answers. I recognize, of course, that we may never have complete answers to questions of such complexity, but insist nonetheless that we can be at least a little bit more sophisticated than we currently are. Finally, I want to suggest some very preliminary hypotheses about what those answers might look like

Evolution of Strategic Communication and Information Operations Since 9/11: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on Emerging Threats & Capabilities of the H. Comm. on Armed Services, 112th Cong., July 12, 2011 (Statement of Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks)

I know that members of this sub-committee are deeply committed to ensuring that reform of strategic communication organizational structures and policies remains a top priority for the executive branch. I have to confess that in my former role as a Defense Department official with responsibility for a range of SC and IO issues, I was not always wholly grateful for your interest: you and your colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee put the Department through the ringer with quite a lot of different reporting requirements. As a citizen, however, I am deeply grateful to you for having kept us on our toes— and occasionally held our feet to the fire. This is a vital area, and we can’t afford either to ignore it or rest on our laurels. I would like to begin today by looking briefly at the emergence of the concept of “strategic communication” within the US government, and talk about some drawbacks to the term itself. I’d then like to highlight some of the lessons we can draw from the decade since 9/11, and I will close by offering some thoughts on the future

Feminism and International Law: An Opportunity for Transformation

In this essay, the author wants to outline briefly both some of the ways in which the assumptions and categories of international law can be damaging to women, and also some of the ways in which creative feminists could use international law to transform both international policy and the domestic political and legal discourse. In the wake of September 11, a robust feminist engagement with international law and policy is more urgent than ever before

War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, and the Law of Armed Conflict in the Age of Terror

Both international and domestic law take as a basic premise the notion that it is possible, important, and usually fairly straightforward to distinguish between war and peace, emergencies and normality, the foreign and the domestic, the external and the internal. From an international law perspective, the law of armed conflict is triggered only when a armed conflict actually exists; the rest of the time, other bodies of law are applicable. Domestically, U.S. courts have developed a constitutional and statutory jurisprudence that distinguishes between national security issues and domestic questions, with the courts subjecting government actions to far less scrutiny when those actions are taken in the name of national security. This article asserts that these distinctions are no longer tenable. In almost every sphere, the process of globalization has problematized once straightforward legal categories, but this is nowhere more apparent and more troubling than in the realm of armed conflict and national security. September 11 and its aftermath have highlighted the increasing incoherence and irrelevance of these traditional legal categories. Shifts in the nature of security threats have broken down once tenable distinctions between situations of armed conflict and situations of internal disturbance that do not rise to the level of armed conflict, between states and non-state actors, between combatants and civilians, between geographic zones in which conflict is occurring and zones in which conflict is not occurring, between temporal moments in which there is no conflict and temporal moments in which there is conflict, and between matters that clearly affect the security of the nation and matters that clearly do not. The breakdown of these once straightforward distinctions has allowed the U.S. government to argue, among other things, that detainees at Guantanamo may be held indefinitely without charge; that even U.S. citizens may be designated unlawful combatants by executive fiat and held indefinitely without charge or access to attorneys, and that the U.S. may kill any suspected terrorist in any state on earth at any time. In response to these arguments, many in the human rights, civil rights and international law communities have struggled to insist on the continuing viability of the law of armed conflict\u27s traditional boundaries, since the erosion of these boundaries has had (and will almost certainly continue to have) a disastrous effect on basic rights and vulnerable populations. But the erosion of boundaries is an inescapable social fact, and this article asserts that it needs to be candidly acknowledged, rather than denied. To say that the erosion of traditional boundaries is in inescapable fact is not to minimize the degree to which it is nonetheless genuinely cause for alarm. The existence of reasonably clear boundaries between conflict and non-conflict, combatants and civilians, and lawful and unlawful belligerents is what allows us to determine which legal rules apply, and, more critically, allows us to identify people and rights meriting protection. As traditional categories lose their logical underpinnings, we are entering a new era: the era of War Everywhere. It is an era in which the legal rules that were designed to protect basic rights and vulnerable groups have lost their analytical force, and thus, too often, their practical force. In the long run, the old categories and rules need to be replaced by a radically different system that better reflects the changed nature of 21st century conflict and threat. What such a radically different system would look like is difficult to say, and this article does not attempt to describe what such a new system might look like. This article does suggest, however, that at least on an interim basis, international human rights law may provide some benchmarks for evaluating U.S. government actions in the war on terror. Unlike domestic U.S. law and the law of armed conflict, human rights apply to all people at all times, regardless of citizenship, location, and status. Although human rights law permits derogation in times of emergency, it also outlines core rights that cannot be eliminated regardless of the nature of the threat or the existence or non-existence of an armed conflict. Applying international human rights law in both domestic and international contexts would not solve all the problems created by the increasing irrelevance of other legal frameworks, but it would provide at least a basic floor, a minimum set of standards by which international and domestic governmental actions could be evaluated

Dignity and Discrimination: Toward A Pluralistic Understanding of Workplace Harassment

Part I of this article briefly examines some of the drawbacks and inconsistencies of Title VII sexual harassment jurisprudence and shows that Title VII does not provide an adequate framework for understanding many common forms of workplace harassment. Title VII is unquestionably a critical means of fighting against workplace discrimination; however, by emphasizing discrimination at the expense of dignity, the Title VII workplace harassment paradigm provides an incomplete understanding of the wrongs of workplace harassment. Part II of this article asserts the importance of an approach to sexual harassment that distinguishes between the nature of the harm of workplace sexual harassment (a dignitary harm) and the context in which the harm occurs (a context of discrimination against women). A pluralistic understanding of workplace harassment permits the provision of legal remedies for workers of any sex or sexual orientation who suffer from abusive treatment (whether sexual or nonsexual in nature), while still recognizing that workplace harassment occurs in patterned ways and has historically operated to exclude women, in particular, from equal access to social, political, and economic power. While Title VII highlights the discriminatory--and often sexist--motives and patterns in many cases of workplace harassment, harassment is not a matter of concern only when sexual. Further, the claim that workplace harassment is a group harm that only affects women is too simplistic. First, as Vicki Schultz has eloquently argued, not all discriminatory workplace harassment of women is sexual in nature. Second, men as well as women can be subjected to harassment and abusive treatment at work. A pluralistic understanding of workplace harassment must reflect these insights. Part III of this article contends that common-law tort causes of action provide a promising way to address the dignitary harm element of classic cases of sexual harassment, those involving male harassers and female victims. Twenty years ago, feminist scholars such as MacKinnon considered--and rejected--this approach. Dismissing a tort approach in this manner, while understandable in 1979, now does a disservice to women and other harassment victims. Moving beyond classic cases of sexual harassment, Part III of this article also argues that common-law tort causes of action contain the germ of a more general right to be free of severe dignitary harm in the workplace and that the changing social meaning of work should be deemed to create special duties for employers in protecting all workers from workplace harassment, sexual and nonsexual. Part IV defends this approach against several possible objections. These objections include the group harm objection, the rigid courts objection, the liability and preemption objection, and the civility code objection. Finally, Part V demonstrates why a pluralistic understanding of workplace harassment would benefit all workers while strengthening feminist efforts to protect women from workplace discrimination. A pluralistic approach to workplace harassment--one that combines the use of Title VII, where appropriate, with tort causes of action--has three important benefits. First, such a pluralistic approach allows for legal remedies for the many workers who experience severe harassment on the job, but who would be hard-pressed to assert that their harassment was because of sex, as required by even the most expansive reading of Title VII. Second, a pluralistic approach keeps the primary focus of Title VII where it should be: on addressing the problem of widespread workplace discrimination against members of less powerful groups, such as racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, and, of course, women. Third, grounding understanding of the sexual harassment of women in a notion of dignitary harm as well as in a discrimination paradigm makes a critical political and philosophical point: The workplace harassment of women is wrong not because women are women, but because women are human beings and share with all other human beings the right to be treated in the workplace with respect and concern