A Quantitative Criterion for Defining Planets

A simple metric can be used to determine whether a planet or exoplanet can clear its orbital zone during a characteristic time scale, such as the lifetime of the host star on the main sequence. This criterion requires only estimates of star mass, planet mass, and orbital period, making it possible to immediately classify 99% of all known exoplanets. All 8 planets and all classifiable exoplanets satisfy the criterion. This metric may be useful in generalizing and simplifying the definition of a planet.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal; 7 pages, 6 figure

Farming and Eating

This essay argues that the “us versus them” rhetoric that dominates food and agriculture policy today drives a wedge between farmers and food consumers. Together, farmers and food consumers could form a powerful coalition to challenge the true obstacle to sustainable and equitable food production: concentration of market and political power elsewhere along the food chain

Colonial gifts : family politics and the exchange of goods in British India, c.1780 –1820

This paper situates Anglo-Indian gifts within a spectrum of emotionally-charged exchange mechanisms through which material objects circulated in British India. At one end of this spectrum was the market, perhaps best exemplified by the public auctions at which the personal possessions of deceased Anglo-Indians were sold to any buyer who could pay the purchase price set at probate. At the other end of the spectrum of exchange were gifts, commissions and bequests, forms of exchange that offered the British colonial elite mechanisms for combating the powerful centrifugal forces that operated within Anglo-Indian families—most notably disease, death and distance

Law’s empire : English legal cultures at home and abroad [Review Article]

The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians’ understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock’s classic study. The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law’s pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law’s empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law