Causation in international protection from armed conflict

This chapter builds on the seminal work of James Hathaway and Michelle Foster on causation in the context of refugee protection under the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (Refugee Convention). Whereas the focus of Hathaway and Foster\u27s work has been on refugee protection under the Refugee Convention, particularly the nexus between \u27being persecuted\u27 and the five grounds listed in Article 1(A)2 of the Refugee Convention. The chapter expands the scope of enquiry to other forms of international protection of pertinence to victims of armed conflict, with an empirical focus on the practice of the UK courts. Causation has long been an issue of considerable interest for the UK courts and tribunals, particularly in tort law. A search on Westlaw UK, Keyword \u27causation\u27, found 4000 hits, all under Cases, none under Legislation, Journals, current awareness or EU

Family Business Succession Planning Opportunities

Family businesses account for over 50% of U.S. GDP, and 35% of Fortune 500 companies are controlled by families. These companies are vital to the economy, offering stability, a long-term commitment, and responsibility to their communities and employees. Although family-owned businesses are responsible for 60% of jobs in America, a recent family business survey done by the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Family Business Alliance indicates that despite succession being a critical issue for many family companies, only 15% of them have anything resembling a succession plan in place. Furthermore, businesses have a difficult time surviving through multiple generations; just making it to the second generation is a milestone event; only 30% make it through the second generation, and just 12% make it through the third (“The Family Business Sector in 2016: Success and Succession,” PricewaterhouseCoopers, https://pwc.to/2D3ftcF). This article explains how CPAs, as trusted advisors, can play a significant role in establishing prudent and functional succession plans for their business owner clients

5D Yang-Mills instantons from ABJM Monopoles

In the presence of a background supergravity flux, N M2-branes will expand via the Myers effect into M5-branes wrapped on a fuzzy three-sphere. In previous work the fluctuations of the M2-branes were shown to be described by the five-dimensional Yang-Mills gauge theory associated to D4-branes. We show that the ABJM prescription for eleven-dimensional momentum in terms of magnetic flux lifts to an instanton flux of the effective five-dimensional Yang-Mills theory on the sphere, giving an M-theory interpretation for these instantons.Comment: 29 pages, Latex; v2: added references and a comment on the graviphoton coupling in section 5; v3: typos corrected and references adde

Statelessness as a Human Rights Issue: A Concept Whose Time Has Come?

The protection of stateless persons has long been understood as a challenge for the international community, yet for many of the past sixty years a prioritised focus on refugees has dominated, indeed arguably eclipsed, the plight and protection needs of stateless persons. Guy Goodwin-Gill has long argued for a refocus of international attention and effort on the plight, predicament and protection needs of stateless persons. In a seminal contribution over two decades ago he observed that at that time, statelessness was perceived by many as a mere ‘technical problem,’ yet ‘statelessness is indeed a broad human rights issue, even as it retains a distinct technical dimension.’ In this contribution, we examine the challenge set by Goodwin-Gill for the international community, namely, the need for greater recognition and protection of stateless persons, in light of developments over the more than two decades that have passed since his incisive analysis. We celebrate the positive developments and identify areas of ongoing challenge. We focus on the key initiatives he identified as requiring attention, and assess progress that has been made in relation to each, while concentrating predominantly on the need for closer attention to the relevance of developments in human rights law

Orbital order in bilayer graphene at filling factor ν=−1\nu =-1

In a graphene bilayer with Bernal stacking both $n=0$ and $n=1$ orbital Landau levels have zero kinetic energy. An electronic state in the N=0 Landau level consequently has three quantum numbers in addition to its guiding center label: its spin, its valley index $K$ or $K^{\prime}$, and an orbital quantum number $n=0,1.$ The two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in the bilayer supports a wide variety of broken-symmetry states in which the pseudospins associated these three quantum numbers order in a manner that is dependent on both filling factor $\nu$ and the electric potential difference between the layers. In this paper, we study the case of $\nu =-1$ in an external field strong enough to freeze electronic spins. We show that an electric potential difference between layers drives a series of transitions, starting from interlayer-coherent states (ICS) at small potentials and leading to orbitally coherent states (OCS) that are polarized in a single layer. Orbital pseudospins carry electric dipoles with orientations that are ordered in the OCS and have Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions that can lead to spiral instabilities. We show that the microwave absorption spectra of ICSs, OCSs, and the mixed states that occur at intermediate potentials are sharply distinct.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figure