Divergent Norms Research Articles

RECOGNIZING PUBLIC GOODS IN WTO DISPUTE SETTLEMENT: WHO PARTICIPATES? WHO DECIDES?: THE CASE OF TRIPS AND PHARMACEUTICAL PATENT PROTECTION

The question of how to produce ‘global public goods’ in a world of sovereign states with divergent norms and preferences, reflecting differences in economic development levels, is increasingly on the international policy agenda. This is an issue not only for political decision-making but also for judicial interpretation of existing international agreements. This article analyzes this fundamental question in the context of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), with particular emphasis on patent protection for pharmaceutical products. The TRIPS Agreement’s provisions raise concerns over at least three public (or quasi-public) goods in this area: the generation of new knowledge, the provision of public health, and the maintenance of rules fostering open trade and competition. WTO judicial panels charged with resolving disputes regarding medicines patents must determine whether to defer to national sovereignty, multilateral negotiations, or their own interpretations in balancing among these objectives. Thus, questions of ‘who participates’ and ‘who decides’ will be critical in this determination. The article notes structural weaknesses in the ability of developing countries to participate meaningfully in this process and offers suggestions for making their participation more meaningful so as to protect their interests.

The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis

In 1997, John Lott and David Mustard launched what has come to be one of the most remarkable tales in the history of public policy evaluation when they announced that laws permitting citizens to carry concealed handguns - so-called right-to-carry (RTC) laws - caused crime to fall. Hailed as heroes by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its supporters, while derided as scoundrels by their staunchest critics, Lott and Mustard precipitated a scholarly and political odyssey that can teach us much about the techniques and limitations of sophisticated empirical research and the divergent norms of the scholarly and political realms. The bottom line is that recent work by Kovandzic and Marvell confirms the growing consensus that the best evidence does not support the thesis that adoption of RTC laws reduces crime. Nonetheless, this now discredited thesis continues to influence public policy as John Lott continues to try to persuade state legislators that RTC laws will lower violent crime despite the great weight of the evidence to the contrary.

Family Law Issues in a Multicultural Setting: Abolishing or Reaffirming Sex as a Legally Relevant Category? A Human Rights Approach

In the Netherlands, and more generally in Western Europe, the influx of large immigrant groups brings along all kinds of multicultural challenges. In this contribution I will address the question how to deal with the divergent norms and values new groups bring along. Should newcomers be required to assimilate or should society, on the contrary, leave ample space for their divergent norms and values? And if the latter, how far should we go in this respect, especially in those situations where the imported norms and values clash with those prevalent in the host-society? This paper will focus on one of the areas where this problem is most keenly felt as problematic, the area of family law issues. Here, especially Islamic norms and values potentially clash with the fundamental right to equal treatment without discrimination on the basis of sex. The discussion how far we should go in accommodating and incorporating Islamic norms and values in our legal system is most of the time conducted in political/philosophical terms. Though this discussion is highly interesting and important, this contribution chooses a different, legal perspective, and more specifically, the perspective of human rights. The reason to do so lies in the fact that in the European legal setting human rights norms increasingly seem to set the framework for and provide the limits within which choices of accommodation or assimilation will have to be made. After presenting in more detail some of the problems and dilemmas involved in developing a more multicultural family law, the paper explores where international and European human rights law as it stands so far takes us in answering the question how far we should go in accommodating and/or incorporating Islamic norms and values. To conclude it will relate the conclusions to be drawn from this legal investigation to the political/philosophical discussions on the limits of multicultural approaches to law and society.

When Norms Collide: Learning under Organizational Hypocrisy

Most conceptualizations of organizational learning are generally underpinned by some notion of unitarism. Theories typically assume shared visions, values, conceptions or identities. This paper, however, considers the dilemmas faced in organizations where identities and visions are not shared, and where conceptions and ideologies are diverse and possibly in conflict. Such organizations, here called hypocrisies, are characterized by divergent norms and stakeholder identities. Seeing learning as changes in shared conceptions between actors at different levels, a case is presented of change in a multi–norm white–collar trade union. This shows the difficulty of promoting unitaristically conceived notions of organizational learning from the centre and that learning is problematic where power is dispersed within the organization. This challenges the view that learning organizations can be associated with empowerment. The paper concludes by arguing for the setting–aside of unitaristic assumptions of organizational learning and, instead, conceiving interventions in terms of local learning arenas for democratic dialogue in a context of organizational diversity.

Inversion of Upper Ocean Temperature Time Series for Entrainment, Advection, and Diffusivity

Abstract An inversion technique for estimating the terms of the oceanic near-surface heat transport is extended to include the vertical heat flux at the bottom of the surface mixed layer. The mixed-layer heat balance equation uses a conventional parameterization of the vertical heat flux via entrainment into the mixed layer of interior fluid during the mixed layer deepening. A heat conservation equation defined here for the sea temperature anomalies, deviations from the annual cycle, is driven by stochastic atmospheric forcing, thereby becoming essentially a stochastic partial differential equation. This equation is reduced to the regression estimator aimed on inversion of the sea temperature time series for the unknowns: vertical entrainment velocity, horizontal velocity and diffusivity, feedback factor, and atmospheric forcing parameter. The inversion scheme also involves the velocity divergence norm. The regression estimator is applied to the time series of vertical profiles of temperature anomalies co...

The spectrum of integral operators with logarithmically divergent norm

The spectrum and general characteristics of the solutions of non-Fredholm integral equations, which arise in the description of relativistic bound states, is investigated. An efficient method of numerical solution of such equations is suggested, which allows one to obtain accurate values of the solution for all physically relevant values of the coupling constant. The procedure is illustrated on specific examples.

An application of stress energy tensor to the vanishing theorem of differential forms

The author applies the stress energy of differential forms to study the vanishing theorems of the Liouville type. It is shown that for a large class of underlying manifolds such as the Euclidean n‐space, the complex n‐space, and the complex hyperbolic space form, if any vector bundle valued p‐form with conservative stress energy tensor is of finite norm or slowly divergent norm, then the p‐form vanishes. This generalizes the recent results due to Hu and Sealey.

Origins of Cigarette Smoking in Academic Achievement, Stress and Social Expectations: Does Gender Make a Difference?

This research is based on a panel study of urban black adolescents (N = 536) with six to eight years intervening between measuring the predictors and measuring subsequent smoking initiation. Prior research with white and largely school-drawn samples has demonstrated that poor school achievement has a significant influence on smoking initiation. The same relationship held in this black youth sample, with a stronger effect noted for females than for males. Two major competing explanations of this relationship then were tested: (1) psychogenic, which postulated smoking as a means of coping with school related stress and; (2) differential socialization, which postulated smoking as an outcome of adherence to divergent social norms. Separate prediction models were tested for males and females. Psychogenic variables (worry about school performance) significantly increased females' smoking risk, but not males'. Social expectancy (perceptions of one's chances in the opportunity structure), an indicator of differential socialization, added significantly to males' risk of smoking initiation, but not females'. Neither significantly reduced the poor academic achievement-smoking link.