The Twelve Years Truce (1609). Peace, Truce, War, and Law in the Low Countries at the Turn of the 17th Century

Book review of LESAFFER (Randall), ed., The Twelve Years Truce (1609) : peace, truce, war, and law in the Low Countries at the turn of the 17th century, Leiden/Boston, Martinus Nijhoff/Brill, 2014, IX + 297 p. (Legal History Library, 13; Studies in the History of International Law, 6) ISBN 9789004274914, discussing papers by Bram De Ridder and Violet Soen, Alain Wijffels, Werner Thomas, Georges Martyn and Beatrix Van Erp-Jacobs

Delenda est haec Carthago: the Ostend company as a problem of European great power politics (1722-1727)

The Ostend Company (1722-1731) is a symbol of present-day Belgium’s strangling by European Great Power politics in the Ancien Régime, and more specifically of the limitations imposed on the Southern Netherlands by the Dutch Republic in 1648. The present contribution analyses the right of Emperor Charles VI to send out ships to the East Indies. Pamphlets by Abraham Westerveen and Jean Barbeyrac, argued for the exclusion of the Southern Netherlands based on the Treaty of Munster. Against this, Patrice de Neny and Jean du Mont invoked the peremptory character of the natural law-rules governing free trade. However, the Treaty of Commerce concluded between Charles VI and Philip V, King of Spain, on 1 May 1725, constituted a strong basis to refute the Dutch attacks. Yet, norm hierarchy between the balance of power inscribed in the Peace of Utrecht and secondary bilateral treaties between sovereigns dominated multilateral diplomacy after 1713 and prejudiced the “Belgian” East India trade

Le droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle, 1757, Emer De Vattel (1714-1767)

Presentation of Emer de Vattel's Le droit des gens (London [Neuchâtel], 1758), a classic work on the law of nations. Vattel defended the principality of Neuchâtel's interests above all. He tried to combine the natural law tradition (Grotius, Pufendorf, must mostly Wolf, whom he acknowledges being in debt to) and state practice. The result is an often contradictory fundgrube, providing posterity with numerous arguments suitable to any position in trials. Hence Vattel's 19th century popularity and frequent use by the US Supreme court

PS: À qui la faute ?

Review of the French Parti Socialiste's ideological evolution at the occasion of three years Hollande presidency and the Party Conference in Poitiers

From contract to treaty: the legal transformation of the Spanish succession (1659-1713)

The problem of the Spanish Succession kept the European diplomatic system in suspense from 1659 until 1713. Statesmen and diplomats tackled the question. Their practical vision of the law is a necessary complement to legal doctrine. Louis XIV and Emperor Leopold I used incompatible and absolute claims, which started in private law and Spanish succession law. At the Peace of Utrecht, these arguments completely dissolved. The War of The Spanish Succession thus not only redesigned the political map of Europe. It altered the norm hierarchy in public law, strengthening international law as the framework of the “Société des Princes”

An extended Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) stable isotope record. Implications for paleoclimate and the nature of the K/T boundary event

In order to obtain a detailed single site record of marine productivity and temperature across the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) boundary, both delta C-13 and delta O-18 values were measured in paired surface and deep water microfossil and nannofossil samples of mid-latitude South Atlantic Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) Site 528. Additionally, the percent sedimentary carbonate content of the rock samples from which the analyzed fossil samples were taken, were determined. The analyzed interval spanned the last approximately 1 million years of the Cretaceous (the Abathomphalus mayaroensis foraminiferal zone) and the first approximately 9 million years of the Tertiary (the Paleocene). Paired samples were analyzed every 150 cm of the entire 165 m sampled interval (1 sample per recovered DSDP section), every 20 cm for 2.0 m below and 2.5 m above the K/T boundary, and every 0.25 cm immediately below, at, and above the K/T boundary clay. The Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary and earliest Paleocene record of DSDP Site 528 is marked by at least two strong decreases in the surface-to-deep delta C-13 gradient (one at the K/T boundary (66.4 mybp1) and one approximately 150,000 to 200,000 years later). Both of these decreases co-occur with radical decreases in percent carbonate content and appear to indicate not one, but two, strong decreases in marine primary productivity during the analyzed interval

Lifespan extension in Caenorhabditis elegans insulin/IGF-1 signalling mutants is supported by non-vertebrate physiological traits

The insulin/IGF-1 signalling (IIS) pathway connects nutrient levels to metabolism, growth and lifespan in eukaryotes ranging from yeasts to humans, including nematodes such as the genetic model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. The link between ageing and the IIS pathway has been thoroughly studied in C. elegans; upon reduced IIS signalling, a genetic survival program is activated resulting in a drastic lifespan extension. One of the components of this program is the upregulation of antioxidant activity but experiments failed to show a clear causal relation to longevity. However, oxidative damage, such as protein carbonyls, accumulates at a slower pace in long-lived C. elegans mutants with reduced IIS. This is probably not achieved by increased macroautophagy, a process that sequesters cellular components to be eliminated as protein turnover rates are slowed down in IIS mutants. The IIS mutant daf-2, bearing a mutation in the insulin/IGF-1 receptor, recapitulates the dauer survival program, including accumulation of fat and glycogen. Fat can be converted into glucose and glycogen via the glyoxylate shunt, a pathway absent in vertebrates. These carbohydrates can be used as substrates for trehalose synthesis, also absent in mammals. Trehalose, a non-reducing homodimer of glucose, stabilises intracellular components and is responsible for almost half of the lifespan extension in IIS mutants. Hence, the molecular mechanisms by which lifespan is extended under reduced IIS may differ substantially between phyla that have an active glyoxylate cycle and trehalose synthesis, such as ecdysozoans and fungi, and vertebrate species such as mammals

Measurement of plant growth in view of an integrative analysis of regulatory networks

As the regulatory networks of growth at the cellular level are elucidated at a fast pace, their complexity is not reduced; on the contrary, the tissue, organ and even whole-plant level affect cell proliferation and expansion by means of development-induced and environment-induced signaling events in growth regulatory processes. Measurement of growth across different levels aids in gaining a mechanistic understanding of growth, and in defining the spatial and temporal resolution of sampling strategies for molecular analyses in the model Arabidopsis thaliana and increasingly also in crop species. The latter claim their place at the forefront of plant research, since global issues and future needs drive the translation from laboratory model-acquired knowledge of growth processes to improvements in crop productivity in field conditions