Skeptical Internationalism: A Study of Whether International Law Is Law

Should international law be understood as a form of law at all? The premise here is that if we are to get some purchase on that question, we should consult the experience of international law in operation. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, the Article takes up the litigation connected to the Israeli/West Bank barrier, asking whether that case was or could have been addressed in such a way as to keep faith with minimal principles of legality. It wasn’t, the Article finds, but it could have been. Second, the Article specifies four values that are constitutive elements of the experience of law as law: that law have the capacity to give rise to events in the world (law’s efficacy); that it obligate as a matter of legitimate authority (law’s normativity); that it obligate as a matter of moral rationality (normativity again); and that it maintain a character distinct from the political or partisan (law’s objectivity). International law as seen in the Barrier case is then put to the test with respect to each of the four—and again the outcome is that nothing intrinsic to international law deprived it of the character of law, but that the courts and other institutions of the international system fell short of the law’s promise. These conclusions suggest a position this Article terms “skeptical internationalism”—a position that affirms international law’s project and doctrinal content, but is rebuttably skeptical of the courts and other institutions charged with interpreting that content and carrying that project out. The jurisprudential implications of such a view are explored

Direct evidence for local oscillatory current sources and intracortical phase gradients in turtle visual cortex

Visual stimuli induce oscillations in the membrane potential of neurons in cortices of several species. In turtle, these oscillations take the form of linear and circular traveling waves. Such waves may be a consequence of a pacemaker that emits periodic pulses of excitation that propagate across a network of excitable neuro-nal tissue or may result from continuous and possibly reconfigu-rable phase shifts along a network with multiple weakly coupled neuronal oscillators. As a means to resolve the origin of wave propagation in turtle visual cortex, we performed simultaneous measurements of the local field potential at a series of depths throughout this cortex. Measurements along a single radial pen-etration revealed the presence of broadband current sources, with a center frequency near 20 Hz ( g band), that were activated by visual stimulation. The spectral coherence between sources at two well-separated loci along a rostral– caudal axis revealed the pres-ence of systematic timing differences between localized cortical oscillators. These multiple oscillating current sources and their timing differences in a tangential plane are interpreted as the neuronal activity that underlies the wave motion revealed in previous imaging studies. The present data provide direct evidence for the inference from imaging of bidirectional wave motion that the stimulus-induced electrical waves in turtle visual cortex corre-spond to phase shifts in a network of coupled neuronal oscillators

Visual Memory in Village Eskimo and Urban Caucasian Children

The hypothesis that the ecological and cultural characteristics of Eskimo society lead to village Eskimo children having greater ability in visual memory than urban Caucasian children has been studied. A test of visual memory was given to 501 urban Caucasian and 125 village Eskimo children. Village Eskimo children demonstrated significantly higher levels of visual memory. Visual memory was also found to increase significantly with age. A follow-up questionnaire study indicated that about 65% of teachers in Eskimo villages noted the unusually high ability of Eskimo students in recalling visual detail or mentioned their high performance in tasks depending partly upon this ability.La mémoire visuelle chez les enfants d’un village esquimau et chez des enfants caucasiens vivant à la ville.  L’auteur a étudié l’hypothèse selon laquelle les caractéristiques écologiques et culturelles de la société esquimaude donnent aux enfants d’un village esquimau une mémoire visuelle plus grande que celle d’enfants caucasiens vivant à la ville.  Elle a administré un test de mémoire visuelle à 501 enfants caucasiens de milieu urbain et à 125 enfants d’un village esquimau.  Les enfants esquimaux ont fait montre de niveaux significativement plus élevés de mémoire visuelle.  On a aussi constaté que la mémoire visuelle augmentait de façon significative avec l’âge.  Un questionnaire complémentaire a indiqué qu’environ 65 pour cent des instituteurs des villages esquimaux ont noté une habileté peu commune des élèves esquimaux à se rappeler des détails visuels ou ont mentionné leurs commune des élèves esquimaux à se rappeler des détails visuels ou ont mentionné leurs grands succès dans des tâches qui dépendent partiellement de cette habileté

A Critical Evaluation of U.S. Fair Trade Policy

This article utilizes economic analysis to critique fair trade rhetoric and expose the inconsistencies and protectionist consequences of United States antidumping and antisubsidy laws. Proposed reforms deemphasize the ambiguous concept of fair trade, and focus instead on balancing the conflicting economic interests at issue in most trade disputes. Between the elusive, impractical ideal of unfettered free trade and the protectionist objective of strict fair trade sanctions, lies a principled middle ground toward which trade policy-makers should be urged to gravitate

Improving Development Aid Design and Evaluation: Plan for Sailboats, Not Trains

The reality is that most development involves politics in some way. Sometimes development projects engage in bureaucratic or small-scale politics, such as deciding where to place a village well -- near the chief 's home, where he has kindly donated land but could then control use, or near the poorer people of the village. This is not the level of politics under discussion.Instead, this report is concerned with larger-scale political and policy engagement. It applies to the subset of the development world that is engaged in democratization, a community that it has long been clear is involved in politics. But it also has a broader ambit. The development community has more recently become involved in governance, anticorruption, transparency, and rule of law programs. These efforts universally affect laws and policies, and nearly all face opposition -- and thus all are political. Finally, many, perhaps most, large-scale socioeconomic development programs also require political engagement. Politics is the process of making decisions about the rules that govern a society and the use of public resources. These decisions are never purely technical. Even if the end goal is not to affect a regime or a political party -- but simply to build a road, help girls get education, or reduce child mortality -- interventions that affect how public resources are produced, who gets those resources, who makes allocation decisions, and what rules govern relations between those who make decisions and those who don't are all political interventions.This report concerns program design and evaluation for all three types of engagement: in other words, most of development work. As the fight over the 2015 Millennium Development Goals illustrates, the decisions that funding agencies make about what to measure can determine their activities and their program designs. It's important to measure the right things in order to incentivize programming that works

Unternehmensethik auf dem Vormarsch: ISO 26000 macht Ethik zur Norm globalen Wirtschaftshandelns

Die konsensuell erarbeitete ISO 26000 ist ein Leitfaden zur Umsetzung von gesellschaftlicher Verantwortung. Sie sorgt nicht nur für ein klareres Verständnis des Beitrags, den alle Arten von Organisationen zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung der Gesellschaft leisten können, sondern führt die verschiedenen CSR-Themen zusammen, denen sich alle Organisationen, unabhängig von ihrem Zweck, ihrer Größe oder ihrem Standort heute gegenübersehen. Dabei integriert die ISO 26000 als Produkt eines einzigartigen, weltweiten Normungsprozesses bereits bestehende Normen und CSR-Standards zu einem international akzeptierten Leitfaden. Der Aufsatz beleuchtet die Entstehungsgeschichte des Leitfadens und seine Inhalte, mit dessen Hilfe Organisationen das Ziel gesellschaftlicher Wohlfahrt verfolgen können und sollen