The Transformation of the Laws of War Into Humanitarian Law

This study undertakes a genealogy of crimes against humanity. It inquires into key historical transformations that preceded the official birth of crimes against humanity in positive international law. The study brings to light changes in understandings of law, politics, and human being-together that accompany the articulation of crimes against humanity. To speak of crimes against humanity is to speak the death of God. With the French Revolution, man displaces God as ground and measure of law and politics, leading to the articulation of crimes against humanity. The man who displaces God is “natural man,” a man who is naturally good, and for whom the good is wholly natural. Through the trial of Louis XVI, the medieval tyrant, the ruler who oppresses his own people, becomes the criminal against humanity. The duty of rulers to God gives way to the sovereignty of the nation. Paradoxically, the category of the “enemy” appears as the only way to recognize Louis XVI for what he was and to grant him his due. Subsequently, key transformations in the international law governing war also lead to the articulation of crimes against humanity. First, war itself becomes a crime against humanity when, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public law of Europe is dissolved into an abstract international law ostensibly encompassing the world. With this dissolution, the juridical category of the enemy (a category enabling mutual restraint in war) and the spatial character of law are lost. Engaging with the work of Carl Schmitt makes possible a consideration of these two important themes, including the impossibility of cosmopolitics without geopolitics. Second, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, humanitarian intervention appears as the potential exception to the prohibition against the use of force. Humanitarian intervention is justified on the basis of what we today call crimes against humanity. The jurists who justify humanitarian intervention ground it in a law of humanity. This law of humanity protects the rights of men as men and is administered by civilized states on the basis of a solidarity grounded in sheer humanity. More permanent tutelage of less civilized peoples and occasional interventions required by violations of laws of humanity belong to the same way of thinking. Third, the ground of this solidarity makes itself manifest as the laws of war are transformed into “humanitarian law.” Charity, love of God, is replaced by humanity, love of man. Sympathy, suffering-with, emerges as the ground of a human solidarity. Thus, the reduction of man to a “natural” or “mere” human being emerges as the principal ground of the articulation of crimes against humanity. However, and at the same time, this reduction of man to a mere specimen of the species humanity (to a being whose essence is given by nature) emerges as constitutive of the evil underlying crimes against humanity. Engaging with the work of Hannah Arendt makes visible this mirroring of the evils of crimes against humanity by the ground of the articulation of crimes against humanity

Sensing the nation's law historical inquiries into the aesthetics of democratic legitimacy : introduction

We are said to live in an age of democratic legitimacy. The rightfulness of a political and legal order is meant to reside in a widespread belief in the rightfulness of democracy. Contemporary democratic legitimacy is tied, among other things, to consent, to representation, to the identity of ruler and ruled, and, of course, to legality and the legal forms through which democracy is structured. The nation, its unity, and whatever democratic legitimacy its form of rule enjoys, become tangible and emerges as much in shared taste, in the pre-supposition and generation of aesthetic con-sensus, as in the formation or execution of a common will or the inculcation or reasoning of a common reason. This introduction presents the ten chapters of the edited volume, each of which engages with the intersection of aesthetics and law, and, more specifically with the question of how the nation – and its (fundamental) law – are ‘sensed’ by way of various aesthetic forms

Les lieux du droit

"Les textes du présent numéro spécial sur les lieux du droit ont été rassemblés à la suite d’un colloque organisé dans le cadre du 88e Congrès de l’Acfas (Association francophone pour le savoir) par le Groupe de recherche sur les humanités juridiques. Ce dernier est lui-même un lieu du droit tout récent. Inauguré en 2019, le Groupe réunit de jeunes chercheur·euses ainsi que des chercheur·euses établi·es de tous les horizons qui souhaitent réfléchir ensemble au droit comme activité culturelle et poétique. Partant de l’idée que le droit est une discipline tenant des arts et des lettres, cette manière d’aborder le droit met l’accent sur ses contextes, ses styles, ses genres, ses histoires, ses entrelacements dans toutes les activités culturelles d’une société. Ainsi, le droit n’y est pas compris simplement comme une discipline, mais plutôt comme une sensibilité, une manière d’être dans le monde, une manière de vivre et de penser les mondes. [...]

Capabilities of GPT-4 in ophthalmology: an analysis of model entropy and progress towards human-level medical question answering

Background: Evidence on the performance of Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4), a large language model (LLM), in the ophthalmology question-answering domain is needed. // Methods: We tested GPT-4 on two 260-question multiple choice question sets from the Basic and Clinical Science Course (BCSC) Self-Assessment Program and the OphthoQuestions question banks. We compared the accuracy of GPT-4 models with varying temperatures (creativity setting) and evaluated their responses in a subset of questions. We also compared the best-performing GPT-4 model to GPT-3.5 and to historical human performance. // Results: GPT-4–0.3 (GPT-4 with a temperature of 0.3) achieved the highest accuracy among GPT-4 models, with 75.8% on the BCSC set and 70.0% on the OphthoQuestions set. The combined accuracy was 72.9%, which represents an 18.3% raw improvement in accuracy compared with GPT-3.5 (p<0.001). Human graders preferred responses from models with a temperature higher than 0 (more creative). Exam section, question difficulty and cognitive level were all predictive of GPT-4-0.3 answer accuracy. GPT-4-0.3’s performance was numerically superior to human performance on the BCSC (75.8% vs 73.3%) and OphthoQuestions (70.0% vs 63.0%), but the difference was not statistically significant (p=0.55 and p=0.09). // Conclusion: GPT-4, an LLM trained on non-ophthalmology-specific data, performs significantly better than its predecessor on simulated ophthalmology board-style exams. Remarkably, its performance tended to be superior to historical human performance, but that difference was not statistically significant in our study

An integrated map of structural variation in 2,504 human genomes

© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. Structural variants are implicated in numerous diseases and make up the majority of varying nucleotides among human genomes. Here we describe an integrated set of eight structural variant classes comprising both balanced and unbalanced variants, which we constructed using short-read DNA sequencing data and statistically phased onto haplotype blocks in 26 human populations. Analysing this set, we identify numerous gene-intersecting structural variants exhibiting population stratification and describe naturally occurring homozygous gene knockouts that suggest the dispensability of a variety of human genes. We demonstrate that structural variants are enriched on haplotypes identified by genome-wide association studies and exhibit enrichment for expression quantitative trait loci. Additionally, we uncover appreciable levels of structural variant complexity at different scales, including genic loci subject to clusters of repeated rearrangement and complex structural variants with multiple breakpoints likely to have formed through individual mutational events. Our catalogue will enhance future studies into structural variant demography, functional impact and disease association

Contribution of copy number variants to schizophrenia from a genome-wide study of 41,321 subjects

Copy number variants (CNVs) have been strongly implicated in the genetic etiology of schizophrenia (SCZ). However, genome-wide investigation of the contribution of CNV to risk has been hampered by limited sample sizes. We sought to address this obstacle by applying a centralized analysis pipeline to a SCZ cohort of 21,094 cases and 20,227 controls. A global enrichment of CNV burden was observed in cases (OR=1.11, P=5.7×10−15), which persisted after excluding loci implicated in previous studies (OR=1.07, P=1.7 ×10−6). CNV burden was enriched for genes associated with synaptic function (OR = 1.68, P = 2.8 ×10−11) and neurobehavioral phenotypes in mouse (OR = 1.18, P= 7.3 ×10−5). Genome-wide significant evidence was obtained for eight loci, including 1q21.1, 2p16.3 (NRXN1), 3q29, 7q11.2, 15q13.3, distal 16p11.2, proximal 16p11.2 and 22q11.2. Suggestive support was found for eight additional candidate susceptibility and protective loci, which consisted predominantly of CNVs mediated by non-allelic homologous recombination

Schizophrenia-associated somatic copy-number variants from 12,834 cases reveal recurrent NRXN1 and ABCB11 disruptions

While germline copy-number variants (CNVs) contribute to schizophrenia (SCZ) risk, the contribution of somatic CNVs (sCNVs)—present in some but not all cells—remains unknown. We identified sCNVs using blood-derived genotype arrays from 12,834 SCZ cases and 11,648 controls, filtering sCNVs at loci recurrently mutated in clonal blood disorders. Likely early-developmental sCNVs were more common in cases (0.91%) than controls (0.51%, p = 2.68e−4), with recurrent somatic deletions of exons 1–5 of the NRXN1 gene in five SCZ cases. Hi-C maps revealed ectopic, allele-specific loops forming between a potential cryptic promoter and non-coding cis-regulatory elements upon 5′ deletions in NRXN1. We also observed recurrent intragenic deletions of ABCB11, encoding a transporter implicated in anti-psychotic response, in five treatment-resistant SCZ cases and showed that ABCB11 is specifically enriched in neurons forming mesocortical and mesolimbic dopaminergic projections. Our results indicate potential roles of sCNVs in SCZ risk