NAFTA Chapter 11 as Supraconstitution

More and more legal scholars are turning to constitutional law to make sense of the growth of transnational and international legal orders. They often employ constitutional terminology loosely, in a bewildering variety of ways, with little effort to clarify their analytical frameworks or acknowledge the normative presuppositions embedded in their analysis. The potential of constitutional analysis as an instrument of critique of transnational legal orders is frequently lost in methodological confusion and normative controversy. An effort at clarification is necessary. We propose a functional approach to supraconstitutional analysis that applies across issue areas, accommodates variation in kinds and degrees of supraconstitutionalization, recognizes its simultaneously domestic and transnational character, and reflects its uneven incidence and impacts. We apply this framework to NAFTA to consider whether and how it superimposes a supraconstitutional legal order on member states\u27 domestic constitutional orders. We show that the main thrust of this contemporary supraconstitutional project is to restructure state and international political forms to promote market efficiency and discipline, enable free capital movement, confer privileged rights of citizenship and representation on corporate capital, insulate key aspects of the economy from state interference, and constrain democratic decision-making

Genetically modified food in the news: Media representations of the GM debate in the UK

This paper analyses a corpus of articles on GM crops and food which appeared in six UK newspapers in the first three months of 2004, the year following the GM Nation? debate (2003). Using the methods of critical discourse analysis we focus on how specific and pervasive representations of the major stakeholders in the national debate on GM—the British public, the British government, the science of GM, and biotechnology companies—served significant rhetorical functions in the controversy. Of particular significance was the pervasive representation of the British public as uniformly opposed to GM crops and food which served rhetorically to position the British government as undemocratic and as being beholden to powerful political and economic interests. Of significance also in our analysis, is how the science of GM farming itself became a highly contested arena. In short, our analysis demonstrates how the GM debate was represented in the newsprint media as a “battleground” of competing interests. We conclude by considering the possible implications of this representation given the increasing emphasis placed on the importance of deliberative and inclusive forms of science policy decision-making.Martha Augoustinos, Shona Crabb and Richard Shepher

Regulation of PPARγ coactivator 1α (PGC-1α) signaling by an estrogen-related receptor α (ERRα) ligand

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ) coactivator 1α (PGC-1α) is a transcriptional coactivator that is a key component in the regulation of energy production and utilization in metabolic tissues. Recent work has identified PGC-1α as a strong coactivator of the orphan nuclear receptor estrogen-related receptor α (ERRα), implicating ERRα as a potential mediator of PGC-1α action. To understand the role of ERRα in PGC-1α signaling, a parallel approach of high-throughput screening and gene-expression analysis was used to identify ERRα small-molecule regulators and target genes. We report here the identification of a potent and selective ERRα inverse agonist that interferes effectively with PGC-1α/ERRα-dependent signaling. This inverse agonist inhibits the constitutive activity of ERRα in both biochemical and cell-based assays. Also, we demonstrate that monoamine oxidase B is an ERRα target gene whose expression is regulated by PGC-1α and ERRα and inhibited by the ERRα inverse agonist. The discovery of potent and selective ERRα modulators and their effect on PGC-1α signaling provides mechanistic insight into gene regulation by PGC-1α. These findings validate ERRα as a promising therapeutic target in the treatment of metabolic disorders, including diabetes and obesity