Law Constraints Research Articles

A bedtime story

A bedtime story

Matrix model description of Laughlin Hall states

We analyse Susskind’s proposal of applying the non-commutative Chern–Simonstheory to the quantum Hall effect. We study the corresponding regularized matrixChern–Simons theory introduced by Polychronakos. We use holomorphic quantization andperform a change of matrix variables that solves the Gauss law constraint. Theremaining physical degrees of freedom are the complex eigenvalues that can beinterpreted as the coordinates of electrons in the lowest Landau level with Laughlin’swavefunction. At the same time, a statistical interaction is generated among the electronsthat is necessary to stabilize the ground state. The stability conditions can beexpressed as the highest-weight conditions for the representations of the W∞ algebra in the matrix theory. This symmetry provides a coordinate-independentcharacterization of the incompressible quantum Hall states.

Barriers to cross-border trade union cooperation in Europe: the case of the graphical workers

This paper is concerned with exploring the barriers to cross-border trade union cooperation among graphical workers in Europe. Highlighting the increasing globalisation of graphical multinationals, the paper illustrates that graphical unions cannot restrict their activities to developments within national boundaries. As such it highlights some of the obstacles that unions face in attempting to instigate transnational cooperation strategies. These obstacles include: the role of employers, the prevailing practices of the unions, employee reticence, the role of the law and resource constraints. It concludes by stressing the continuing need to strengthen cross-border trade union networks with the ability to impose effective sanctions against the unbridled growth of multinational power.

Phonon thermodynamics versus electron-phonon models

Applying the path integral formalism we study the equilibrium thermodynamics of the phonon field both in the Holstein and in the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models. The anharmonic cumulant series, dependent on the peculiar source currents of the e-ph models, have been computed versus temperature in the case of a low energy oscillator. The cutoff in the series expansion has been determined, in the low $T$ limit, using the constraint of the third law of thermodynamics. In the Holstein model, the free energy derivatives do not show any contribution ascribable to the e-ph anharmonic effect. We find signatures of large e-ph anharmonicities in the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model mainly visible in the temperature dependent peak displayed by the phonon heat capacity.

The Jurisprudence of Enron: Professionalism as Interpretation

Jurisprudence can seem like a formidably esoteric field, with conceptual arguments carried on at a high level of abstraction, seemingly remote from the concerns of practicing lawyers. In fact, it is impossible to ignore jurisprudence when thinking about the role of lawyers in the wave of financial accounting scandals exemplified by the collapse of Enron. The Enron case is not about ethics so much as it is about the interpretation and application of a complex scheme of legal norms to innovative business transactions. The lawyers believed they were taking a legitimate, albeit aggressive interpretive attitude toward the law, by structuring the transaction to avoid as many legal restrictions as possible. It must have come as a surprise to these lawyers when they were criticized after Enron's collapse precisely for taking an aggressive stance toward legal and financial accounting standards. Many commentators criticized lawyers for Enron and other companies such as WorldCom and Global Crossing for neglecting their responsibilities to serve as gatekeepers and for facilitating their clients' evasion of law. The lawyers' typical response is that they were only doing what lawyers do - bringing their clients' actions into conformity with the law, pushing the boundaries of the law where it would be helpful to clients, and refusing to regard themselves as quasi-regulators of transactions. This article resolves this debate using the tools of analytic jurisprudence. The lawyers who defend creative, aggressive advice are essentially arguing for a Holmesian bad man interpretive attitude toward the law, in which the content of the law is identified by predicting when legal officials will impose sanctions on an individual. There are many problems with this approach, but one obvious one is that it reduces the law's constraint practically to a nullity, at least where the regulated actors are highly sophisticated companies with the resources to employ battalions of lawyers to create increasingly complex transactional structures. The Holmesian bad man stance, however, relies on a dubious account of the authority of law - one that prioritizes individual autonomy over all other values that bear on practical reasoning. But autonomy is not the only thing people value and, even if it were of paramount importance, there would still be conflicts between incompatible claims of liberty. The function of the law is to settle these first-order normative conflicts, and this settlement depends on the law having a relatively determinate, stable meaning. The function of law creates a second-order reason for lawyers to respect the settlement established by law and not to attempt to nullify it by creating elaborate structures to avoid penalties. Any interpretive strategy that undermines the capacity of law to resolve normative disagreement is ruled out by the second-order moral reasons that give the law legitimacy. The argument for treating the law instrumentally relies, often tacitly, on a highly suspect characterization of the nature and content of law, one that limits legal norms only to texts. Texts are not self-interpreting, however, and can acquire stable, determinate meaning only as they are situated within an interpretive community. In jurisprudential terms, this is an argument about what Hart would call the rule of recognition. My claim is that the rule of recognition in the U.S. legal system incorporates the practices and conventions of interpretive communities as criteria for identifying law. Conventions regulate the exercise of interpretative judgment and impart stability and determinacy to legal norms that would otherwise be subject to manipulation by lawyers. This article gives a number of examples of this process at work, from simple hypotheticals to a detailed consideration of some of the transactions that played a role in the collapse of Enron. The jurisprudential claim is not limited to Enron-style transactions, but has general applicability across the entire domain of legal counseling and transactional practice.

A Dynamical Model for the Coupled Inner Magnetosphere and Tail

WINDMI-RC is a family of physics-based models that range in dimensionality from low-order models of dimension d = 8, which model the flow of energy between the eight highest global energy components of the tail, to high-order models with dimension d /spl sim/ 100 or more, for models that resolve the nonlinear dynamics of the system into different latitude zones. The models are intrinsically three-dimensional in configuration space and use the basic geometry of the Tsyganenko magnetic field model to define the geometrical quantities. The models satisfy the constraints of the conservations laws of energy and electrical charge in their network of nodes and branches that follow from the structure of the system. These models describe the injection of plasma from the plasma sheet and across the Alfve/spl acute/n layer into the inner ring current. The transport uses the storm-time solar wind dynamo electric field as the driver for the network model coupled to the inner magnetospheric corotation electric field.

Confinement/deconfinement transition of large N gauge theories with [formula omitted] fundamentals: [formula omitted] finite

We consider large N zero-coupling d-dimensional U ( N ) gauge theories, with N f matter fields in the fundamental representation on a compact spatial manifold S d − 1 × time, with N f / N finite. The Gauss' law constraint induces interactions among the fields, in spite of the zero-coupling. This class of theories undergo a 3rd order deconfinement phase transition at a temperature T c proportional to the inverse length scale of the compact manifold. The low-temperature phase has a free-energy of O ( N f 2 ) , interpreted as that of a gas of (color singlet) mesons and glueballs. The high-temperature (deconfinement) phase has a free energy of order N 2 f ( N f / N , T ) , which is interpreted as that of a gas of gluons and of fundamental and anti-fundamental matter states. This suggests the existence of a dual string theory, and a transition to a black hole at high temperature.

Virtue and Markets

This essay proposes an interdisciplinary framework for teaching markets and morals by exploring the linkages between political economy, civil society, and culture. Free markets in capitalist mixed economies shape, and are shaped by, political institutions of representative democracy, the vibrancy of civil society, and the values, norms, and beliefs embedded in culture. The major challenge for liberal society and free markets is to reconcile individual and group interests with the common good. The cultural contradictions of capitalism reflect the inadequacy of commercial virtues to sustain a liberal society. External constraints of law and institutional checks and balances in all spheres need to be conjoined with internalized moral constraints of a well-ordered individual conscience. This, in turn, requires a normative order which transcends radically the selfishness of individual and group interests, thus preserving liberty and democracy while enhancing economic efficiency and the social beneficence of free markets. The essay thus confirms Alexis de Tocqueville's notion of the interdependence of liberty, morality, and faith.

Mathematical structure of the temporal gauge in quantum electrodynamics

The conflict between Gauss’ law constraint and the existence of the propagator of the gauge fields, at the basis of contradictory proposals in the literature, is shown to lead to only two alternatives, both with peculiar features with respect to standard quantum field theory. In the positive (interacting) case, the Gauss’ law holds in operator form, but only the correlations of exponentials of gauge fields exist (nonregularity) and the space translations are not strongly continuous, so that their generators do not exist. Alternatively, a Källen–Lehmann representation of the two point function of Ai satisfying locality and invariance under space–time translations, rotations and parity is derived in terms of the two point function of Fμν; positivity is violated, the Gauss’ law does not hold, the energy spectrum is positive, but the relativistic spectral condition does not hold. In the free case, θ-vacua exist on the observable fields, but they do not have time translationally invariant extensions to the gauge fields; the vacuum is faithful on the longitudinal field algebra and defines a modular structure (even if the energy is positive). Functional integral representations are derived in both cases, with the alternative between ergodic measures on real random fields or complex Gaussian random fields.

Generalized random phase approximation and gauge theories

Mean-field treatments of Yang–Mills theory face the problem of how to treat the Gauss law constraint. In this paper we try to face this problem by studying the excited states instead of the ground state. For this purpose we extend the operator approach to the Random Phase Approximation (RPA) well-known from nuclear physics and recently also employed in pion physics to general bosonic theories with a standard kinetic term. We focus especially on conservation laws, and how they are translated from the full to the approximated theories, demonstrate that the operator approach has the same spectrum as the RPA derived from the time-dependent variational principle, and give—for Yang–Mills theory—a discussion of the moment of inertia connected to the energy contribution of the zero modes to the RPA ground state energy. We also indicate a line of thought that might be useful to improve the results of the Random Phase Approximation.

Female playwrights and eighteenth-century comedy: negotiating marriage on the London stage

Misty G. Andersen. Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. New York and Hampshire UK: Palgrave, 2002. x + 262 pp. ISBN 0-312-23938-6. Cloth. $55. Indexed. Dust-jacketFunny women on the London stage usually steal the show. Misty G. Anderson, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and co-editor with John P. Zomchick of the journal Restoration, has written an important book on four successful English women playwrights of the Restoration and 18th century who evidently were funny and surely wrote funny. Over six chapters supported by 27 pages of endnotes and a 16-page bibliography, Anderson shows that her small cluster of women dramatists cleverly exploited the comic potential of contemporary marriage law and social beliefs about marriage, while also layering into their scripts bold feminist commentary on women's constraints in early-modern English law and society. Playgoers, one imagines, would leave the theatre both delighted and instructed. What they viewed on the stage would have the requisite comedic response, but there was also an intellectual impact; for behind the play's artifice, laughter was balanced by troubling questions about the conduct of real life.The principal strength of Anderson's inquiry is its economy and manageable focus. Her subject is four English women playwrights-Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald-who collectively achieved prominent commercial success during a 130-year timeframe, 1670-1800, as entertaining yet astute commentators on English marriage law and English marriage conventions. Wisely benefiting from the spadework of Lawrence Stone, Susan Staves, et al., Anderson has assembled an exposition on a complex social and legal subject, which she smartly approaches from a comedic angle. And how refreshing is this, especially against the humorless and severe feminist essays of Anna Maria Van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, Poulain de la Barre, Mary Astell, et al. Anderson's focus takes readers to a lively comic literature on women and marriage, an approach which makes her overall treatment all the more readable and entertaining. As Anderson writes at the outset:These playwrights and their heroines measure the disparity between idealized marriage narratives and the real circumstances of characters in history through the gendered scripts of comedy. They found in comedy a narrative where the economic future, erotic possibilities, and public visibility of women merge, and they were able to engage generations of theatergoers in their versions of that story... .1 treat comedy both as a generic market that describes a story about marriage and as a designation of a performance that the audience expected to find funny. My study examines the relationship between comic closure, which tends to be predictable, and comic events, where the more-local jokes and comic conflicts of the comedies play out. (1,2)Surprisingly unmentioned by other reviewers of this book is the perhaps understated motif of women's career formation at this time as public figures in the London theatre market. This was a new role for women writers, one which left them fully exposed and vulnerable to comparison with some of the best male playwrights in the early English theatre. Yet, in addition to the commercial success of Katherine Philips during the early years of the Restoration, Andersen's four women playwrights (especially Inchbald) did handsomely well on the boards for a time, and their plays have seen an energetic revival in recent years for new generations of theatergoers.Of Andersen's six chapters, four merit special attention. In Chapter Three, whose title, You Irreplaceable You, bows to a musical classic of 20th-century ballad repertory, Anderson considers Aphra Behn's comedic representations of marriage in four commercially successful plays: The Rover, The Emperor of the Moon, The False Count, and The Feign d Courtesans. …

ECOSYSTEM ADAPTATION: DO ECOSYSTEMS MAXIMIZE RESILIENCE?

The response of an ecological system to perturbation can be described in terms of its resilience, essentially a measure of the time the system takes to return to its prior state. The resilience of an ecosystem is the result of interactions of the biota and their environment and will therefore change as the biota evolve and environmental conditions change. Ecological systems exist within the constraints of thermodynamic laws that pre- scribe the transfer of energy. Ecologically defined ''thermodynamic imperatives,'' such as entropy, exergy, and ascendency, provide whole-ecosystem selection pressures that con- strain the evolution of individuals within an ecosystem in addition to the selection pressures of individual evolution. The essence of these whole-ecosystem selection pressures may be captured by metrics. We have used a ''genetic algorithm'' to optimize these metrics, sim- ulating the adaptation of a model ecosystem biota. Our simulations suggest the hypothesis that, within the constraints of the external environment and the genetic potential of their constituent biota, ecosystems will evolve to the state most resilient to perturbation.

'War'? Legal Semantics and the Move to Violence

The use of the word 'war' to describe the anti-terrorist efforts in the wake of the 11 September attacks has gone virtually unchallenged. The term, however, is not innocent and carries far-reaching implications for international law. The article examines how its use can be said to fit into a broader strategy of legitimization of armed violence. 'War', it is argued, prepares the ground for what is basically an ideal-typical state of exception, that which portrays the sovereign as the ultimate saviour of liberalism at home. But the domestic implications of the 'war rhetoric' are probably less important than the international ones, where 'war' can be manipulated to provide an escape route from the constraints of international law. This it does by reframing both the temporal and spatial coordinates of self-defence in a way that fundamentally loosens the framework of collective security. By the time the term's use has been ratified by law, it will have served to exclude or distort alternative ways of understanding and dealing with the problem of terrorism, namely, as a criminal and political issue. Whatever else military action against terrorist targets may achieve, it is far from clear that placing such action under the banner of 'war' will serve the cause of suppressing terrorism.

Motivations, objectifs et contraintes des opérations de végétalisation dans le domaine ferroviaire

Revegetation of railway’s embankments has to answer to an essential target : efficient protection of soils against surface erosion in order to protect infrastructure and to contribute to transport’s security. But there are other targets : landscape integration and extensive vegetation control. Some contradictions appear, due to many interests and numerous technical, general, specific or law constraints which make the work of experts more complex. In 1996, to increase useful knowledge, SNCF has launched researches whose first results were applied to the Mediterranean high speed train (TGV) project.

The Drafting of a Law against Discrimination on the Grounds of Racial or Ethnic Origin in Germany: Constraints in Constitutional and European Community Law

The Drafting of a Law against Discrimination on the Grounds of Racial or Ethnic Origin in Germany: Constraints in Constitutional and European Community Law

Developing a Drug Testing Policy at a Public University: Participant Perspectives

Employee drug testing has been around for more than 30 years. The practice was embraced by private employers early on and is now widespread, particularly among larger companies. The development of drug testing programs in the public sector, however, has been slower and more deliberate due to constitutional law constraints, and perhaps also to a more democratic, convoluted decision-making process. Intensity of interest in drug testing has long subsided with respect to the literature; there are, nevertheless, compelling reasons to revisit this issue. Much of the past literature focuses on drug testing in the private sector, and where public-sector issues were broached (primarily from the legal/constitutional perspective), many have not been resolved. Moreover, many issues confronted by public policymakers have not been identified or adequately discussed. Also, most treatment in the literature has been academic and explicit, whereas analysis in this article is more anecdotal and implicit. Increasingly, policymakers are finding value in qualitative analysis of this type of data, as such analysis fills in gaps and guides utilization of the more explicit data. This is especially true of policymakers in the public sector who are keenly aware that decision making in this arena is often a politically- or socially-sensitive process, and that the hard data alone is insufficient to assist them.

An improved solution of the gravity field of Mars (GMM‐2B) from Mars Global Surveyor

A spherical harmonic solution of the Mars gravity field to degree and order 80, Goddard Mars Model 2B (GMM‐2B), has been developed using X band tracking data of Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) from October 1997 to February 2000 and altimeter crossovers formed from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) data between March and December 1999. During the mapping mission, MGS was located in a near‐polar (92.9° inclination) and near‐circular orbit at a mean altitude of 400 km. The tracking data from this orbit provide a detailed, global, and high resolution view of the gravity field of Mars. Mars gravity solutions are stable to 60×60 even without application of a Kaula power law constraint. The Valles Marineris is resolved distinctly with lows reaching −450 mGals. Olympus Mons and its aureole are both separately resolved, and the volcano has a peak anomaly of 2950 mGals. The global correlation of the GMM‐2B gravity coefficients with MOLA‐derived topography is 0.78 through degree 60, and the correlation remains above 0.6 through degree 62. The global gravity anomaly error predicted from the GMM‐2B error covariance through 60×60 is 11 mGal. The global geoid error from GMM‐2B through 60×60 is 1.8 m. MGS orbit quality using GMM‐2B, as measured by overlapping orbital arcs, is 1 m in the radial direction and 10 m in total position.

Competition law constraints on access charges in the England and Wales water industry

Water industry regulation in the UK does not require a network owner to grant access to third parties. The regulator instead enforces common carriage on network owners through the application of the Competition Act 1998. This legislation, however, enables the regulator, the Director General of Water Services, to require only dominant companies to grant access; and gives the regulator no ex ante powers. The DGWS can intervene only when a dominant network owner has failed to grant access, and only in relation to aspects of the network that are “essential facilities”. The regulator will require access in these circumstances to be given on a non-discriminatory basis, at a price that is not “excessive”. Long run average incremental cost based prices will not be excessive. Prices calculated by reference to fully allocated cost or the efficient component pricing rule may on occasion be excessive.

The Role of the Lex Loci Arbitri in International Commercial Arbitration

THIS ARTICLE is concerned with the role of the lex loci arbitri in international commercial arbitration1 and the extent to which judgments or orders made by a court of one state2 should influence a foreign court of another state in which the arbitral award is sought to be enforced. Much has been written about the concept of international commercial arbitration as an autonomous, anational institution, the procedures of which are not subject to the constraints of national laws. If any excuse is needed for adding yet more to the literature on the subject, it is its relevance to the future development of international co-operation in cross-border dispute resolution. ### (a) The Genesis of the Autonomy Concept The relationship between courts and private tribunals has not always been as benevolent as it is today. In England the central courts for centuries jealously guarded their domain, watchful of encroachments on their jurisdiction. Even among the courts themselves there were strenuous turf battles as each sought to enlarge its jurisdiction at the expense of others. One unfortunate victim of this rivalry was commercial law, which lost much of its international character as the common law courts gradually usurped the powers of those institutions most responsive to external influences, notably the ecclesiastical courts, the courts of Admiralty and the merchant courts. Similarly, arbitration was for a long time viewed with disfavour, being seen as a private dispute settlement mechanism designed to oust the jurisdiction of the courts and to substitute private adjudication for public decision-making. This hostility to the private process of arbitration was not confined to English courts but was a widespread phenomenon. However, every action prompts reaction. The stricter the controls, the more vehement the demand for liberation. Ultimately, in England as elsewhere, pressures from the commercial community were not to be denied. Fierce judicial opposition to arbitration …

Democracy and the neo‐liberal promotion of arbitrary power

Liberal political thought has traditionally been hostile to the arbitrary power of rulers. It has, however, qualified this hostility through its promotion of what Locke calls ‘prerogative’, the need for rulers to act in defence of the public good — but on occasion outside the constraints of law. Liberal thought has tended to overlook the arbitrary powers of citizens and private organisations. This is due, first, to its commitment to individual liberty. But it is also due ‐more substantially — to the belief that private agents and corporations, even when not constrained by law, are none the less subject to the non‐legal sanctions and rewards imposed by the market and other aspects of civil society. Neo‐liberalism is not rendered distinctive by its promotion of arbitrary power, since this has always featured in liberal government. Neo‐liberalism is distinguished rather by its promotion of arbitrary powers across the full range of organs of governance ‐ from departments of government, through publicly and privately owned corporations, to ostensibly non‐governmental bodies like charities, churches and so on. This advance in liberal promotion of arbitrary power has significant implications for the evolution of contemporary democracy.