Customary International Law: An Instrument Choice Perspective

Contemporary international lawmaking is characterized by a rapid growth of “soft law” instruments. Interdisciplinary studies have followed suit, purporting to frame the key question states face as a choice between soft and “hard” law. But this literature focuses on only one form of hard law—treaties—and cooperation through formal institutions. Customary international law (CIL) is barely mentioned. Other scholars dismiss CIL as increasingly irrelevant or even obsolete. Entirely missing from these debates is any consideration of whether and when states might prefer custom over treaties or soft law

Moving Mirrors and Thermodynamic Paradoxes

Quantum fields responding to "moving mirrors" have been predicted to give rise to thermodynamic paradoxes. I show that the assumption in such work that the mirror can be treated as an external field is invalid: the exotic energy-transfer effects necessary to the paradoxes are well below the scales at which the model is credible. For a first-quantized point-particle mirror, it appears that exotic energy-transfers are lost in the quantum uncertainty in the mirror's state. An accurate accounting of these energies will require a model which recognizes the mirror's finite reflectivity, and almost certainly a model which allows for the excitation of internal mirror modes, that is, a second-quantized model.Comment: 7 pages, Revtex with Latex2

Designing Non-National Systems: The Case of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy

The article critically assesses the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) as a potential model for solving the immense legal challenges presented by transborder activity. Inaugurated in late 1999 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the UDRP creates a fast, inexpensive online mechanism for trademark owners to recapture domain names held by persons who, in bad faith, register and use domain names that are confusingly similar to those marks. At present, the UDRP applies only to a narrow segment of disputes between trademark owners and domain name registrants. But the UDRP has been heralded by some as the model for a new non-national approach to lawmaking and dispute settlement applicable to a broader set of legal issues that transcend national borders. In this article, we describe the conditions that led to the UDRP\u27s formation and consider whether the UDRP can and should be replicated elsewhere. The process by which the UDRP was created, and the way in which it is structured, departs significantly from preexisting approaches to international lawmaking and dispute settlement. The UDRP is the product not of national legislation nor an international treaty, but rather of a web of contractual obligations imposed by a private, non-profit corporation with a monopoly over a valuable resource. Through its agreements with the U.S. Department of Commerce, ICANN serves as the gatekeeper for anyone seeking to acquire the most commercially valuable internet addresses. Exclusive control of access to the root server enables ICANN to dictate the terms and conditions for domain name ownership. This technological control also facilitates enforcement of UDRP panel decisions compelling domain name registrars to cancel ownership of contested domain names or transfer them from registrants to trademark owners. The UDRP deviates from preexisting lawmaking and dispute settlement paradigms in other ways that make its advantages considerable (and which may make it attractive for replication). For example, the UDRP is a hybrid dispute settlement system. It contains an amalgam of elements from three distinct decision making paradigms - judicial, arbitral and ministerial - and it draws inspiration from international, supranational, and national legal systems. The UDRP thus reveals how dispute settlement structures can be tailored to the needs of new technologies and new types of legal conflicts. The UDRP is also non-national. Neither its substantive content nor its prescriptive force necessarily depends upon the laws, institutions, and enforcement mechanisms of any single nation-state or treaty regime. It thus suggests ways to bypass the often slow and cumbersome mechanisms of national and international lawmaking and to fulfil the demand for effective dispute settlement mechanisms that, like so much current social activity, transcend national borders. Even assuming the UDRP can be applied to other situations where the conditions of monopolistic technological control do not subsist, however, we do not believe that it should be uncritically extended to other contexts without first questioning how non-national systems ought to be structured. In particular, while we applaud the effort to construct a non-national model that draws upon but is not constrained by existing paradigms, the current iteration of that model fails to incorporate appropriate checking mechanisms to control the scope and pace of lawmaking and the limited powers granted to dispute settlement decisionmakers. Moreover, the tensions between national and non-national values may be more difficult to reconcile in other settings; cybersquatting, in contrast, was universally condemned, and thus competing national values were less frequently implicated. We seek to identify these and other variables that should guide the authors of new checking mechanisms for new non-national structures

The electromagnetic field near a dielectric half-space

We compute the expectations of the squares of the electric and magnetic fields in the vacuum region outside a half-space filled with a uniform non-dispersive dielectric. This gives predictions for the Casimir-Polder force on an atom in the `retarded' regime near a dielectric. We also find a positive energy density due to the electromagnetic field. This would lead, in the case of two parallel dielectric half-spaces, to a positive, separation-independent contribution to the energy density, besides the negative, separation-dependent Casimir energy. Rough estimates suggest that for a very wide range of cases, perhaps including all realizable ones, the total energy density between the half-spaces is positive.Comment: Latex2e, IOP macros, 15 pages, 2 eps figure

Kant's philosophy of the aesthetic and the philosophy of praxis

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Association for Economic and Social Analysis.This essay seeks to reconstruct the terms for a more productive engagement with Kant than is typical within contemporary academic cultural Marxism, which sees him as the cornerstone of a bourgeois model of the aesthetic. The essay argues that, in the Critique of Judgment, the aesthetic stands in as a substitute for the missing realm of human praxis. This argument is developed in relation to Kant's concept of reflective judgment that is in turn related to a methodological shift toward inductive and analogical procedures that help Kant overcome the dualisms of the first two Critiques. This reassessment of Kant's aesthetic is further clarified by comparing it with and offering a critique of Terry Eagleton's assessment of the Kantian aesthetic as synonymous with ideology

NMA Survey of CO and HCN Emission from Nearby Active Galaxies

High resolution (a few arcseconds) observations of CO(1-0) and HCN(1-0) emission from nearby Seyfert galaxies have been conducted with the Nobeyama Millimeter Array. Based on the observed CO distributions and kinematics,we suggest that a small scale (a few 100 pc - a few kpc) distortion of the underlying potential seems to be necessary for Seyfert activity, although it is not a sufficient condition. We also find that the Toomre's Q values in the centers of Seyfert galaxies tend to be larger than unity, indicating the circumnuclear molecular gas disks around Seyfert nuclei would be gravitationally stable. The HCN/CO integrated intensity ratios (R_HCN/CO) range over an order of magnitude, from 0.086 to 0.6. The Seyfert galaxies with high R_HCN/CO may have an extended (r ~ 100 pc scale) envelope of obscuring material. The presence of kpc scale jet/ outflow might be also related to the extremely high R_HCN/CO.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 3rd Cologne-Zermatt Symposium, ``The Physics and Chemistry of the Interstellar Medium'

Dynamics of viscoelastic membranes

We determine both the in-plane and out-of-plane dynamics of viscoelastic membranes separating two viscous fluids in order to understand microrheological studies of such membranes. We demonstrate the general viscoelastic signatures in the dynamics of shear, bending, and compression modes. We also find a screening of the otherwise two-dimensional character of the response to point forces due to the presence of solvent. Finally, we show that there is a linear, hydrodynamic coupling between the in-plane compression modes of the membrane and the out-of-plane bending modes in the case where the membrane separates two different fluids or environments

HCN(1-0) enhancement in the bar of NGC 2903

We have mapped the \hcn emission from two spiral galaxies, NGC2903 and NGC3504 to study the gas properties in the bars. The HCN(1-0) emission is detected in the center and along the bar of NGC2903. The line ratio HCN(1-0)/CO(1-0) ranges from 0.07 to 0.12 with the lowest value in the center. The enhancement of HCN(1-0) emission along the bar indicates a higher fraction of dense molecular gas in the bar than at the center. The mass of dense molecular gas in the center (2.2x 10^7 Msun) is about 6 times lower than that in the bar (1.2x 10^8 Msun). The total star formation rate (SFR) is estimated to be 1.4 Msun/yr, where the SFR at the center is 1.9 times higher than that in the bar. The time scale of consumption of the dense molecular gas in the center is about 3x 10^7 yr which is much shorter than that in the bar of about 2 to 10 x 10^8 yr. The dynamical time scale of inflow of the gas from the bar to the center is shorter than the consumption time scale in the bar, which suggests that the star formation (SF) activity at the center is not deprived of fuel. In the bar, the fraction of dense molecular gas mass relative to the total molecular gas mass is twice as high along the leading edge than along the central axis of the bar. The \hcn emission has a large velocity dispersion in the bar, which can be attributed partially to the streaming motions indicative of shocks along the bar. In NGC3504, the HCN(2-0) emission is detected only at the center. The fraction of dense molecular gas mass in the center is about 15%. Comparison of the SFR with the predictions from numerical simulations suggest that NGC2903 harbors a young type B bar with a strong inflow of gas toward the center whereas NGC3504 has an older bar and has already passed the phase of inflow of gas toward the center.Comment: Acceoted for publication in A&A, 12 figure

Strong resonant tunneling, level repulsion and spectral type for one-dimensional adiabatic quasi-periodic Schr\"{o}dinger operators

In this paper, we consider one dimensional adiabatic quasi-periodic Schr\"{o}dinger operators in the regime of strong resonant tunneling. We show the emergence of a level repulsion phenomenon which is seen to be very naturally related to the local spectral type of the operator: the more singular the spectrum, the weaker the repulsion

Total angular momentum from Dirac eigenspinors

The eigenvalue problem for Dirac operators, constructed from two connections on the spinor bundle over closed spacelike 2-surfaces, is investigated. A class of divergence free vector fields, built from the eigenspinors, are found, which, for the lowest eigenvalue, reproduce the rotation Killing vectors of metric spheres, and provide rotation BMS vector fields at future null infinity. This makes it possible to introduce a well defined, gauge invariant spatial angular momentum at null infinity, which reduces to the standard expression in stationary spacetimes. The general formula for the angular momentum flux carried away be the gravitational radiation is also derived.Comment: 34 pages, typos corrected, four references added, appearing in Class. Quantum Gra