The Internationalization of Tobacco Tactics

Recently, public health advocates struck a blow against tobacco companies by barring them from bringing challenges under some international trade deals. In this Article, I explain why other governments should adopt similar tobacco “carve-outs.” Specifically, I argue that it is mainly the industry’s aggressive litigation tactics—not the hazardous nature of this consumer product—that justifies treating it in an exceptional manner for the purposes of international litigation. To illustrate my point, first, I explain the nature of the carve-out in relation to a topology of legal forms used to exclude policy areas, economic sectors, and particular industries from obligations stipulated in international economic agreements. I follow with a case study of Phillip Morris International to explain how the industry, by relying on litigation before international courts and tribunals, has aimed at delaying, preempting, and weakening harmonized anti-smoking regulations. I finish by proposing modest ways to refine “Multinational Enterprise or MNE theory,” which aims at understanding the choices of extending control over subsidiaries operating abroad. In particular, I argue for increasing the recognition of international legal capacity and adjudicatory options in conceptualizing ownership, location, and internalization advantages

On the reduction of Alperin's Conjecture to the quasi-simple groups

We show that the refinement of Alperin's Conjecture proposed in "Frobenius Categories versus Brauer Blocks", Progress in Math. 274, can be proved by checking that this refinement holds on any central k*-extension of a finite group H containing a normal simple group S with trivial centralizer in H and p'-cyclic quotient H/S. This paper improves our result in [ibidem, Theorem 16.45] and repairs some bad arguments there

Equivariant Alperin-Robinson's Conjecture reduces to almost-simple k*-groups

In a recent paper, Gabriel Navarro and Pham Huu Tiep show that the so-called Alperin Weight Conjecture can be verified via the Classification of the Finite Simple Groups, provided any simple group fulfills a very precise list of conditions. Our purpose here is to show that the equivariant refinement of the Alperin's Conjecture for blocks formulated by Geoffrey Robinson in the eighties can be reduced to checking the same statement on any central k*-extension of any finite almost-simple group, or of any finite simple group up to verifying an "almost necessary" condition. In an Appendix we develop some old arguments that we need in the proof