Principal Claims Research Articles

The Co-Ontological Securities of Gated Lifeworlds: Atmospheres and Foamed Immunologies under Late Modernity

Abstract This article returns to the existentialist roots of ontological security theory (OST) and proposes a phenomenological re-reading of ontological security through the theoretical language of spherology and immunology in order to bring OST into a more substantive engagement with the spatial and immunological realities and practices of the globalizing world. Departing from the work of Peter Sloterdijk, the article advances three principal claims. Firstly, it shows that under the spatio-immunological dislocations of late modernity, the processes of ontological security are better understood as matters of “co-ontological security,” reflecting the highly relational and co-dependent character by which human lifeworlds are organized and juxtaposed. Secondly, it explores the ways in which technologies and life-support systems of ontological security may have negative ramifications for the ontological integrities of other neighboring lifeworlds. And lastly, the article investigates the autoimmunological processes that are at work in all immunological systems and that are capable of turning the mechanisms of ontological security into the very sources of insecurity. In exploring these themes, the text examines the retirement community known as The Villages to show how protected living in an expanding and gated lifestyle community produces the very conditions of ontological insecurity for the self and for others.

Enabling 100% Renewable Power Systems Through Power Electronic Grid-Forming Converter and Control: System Integration for Security, Stability, and Application to Europe

In accordance with European plans, dynamic controls are developed to allow for system-wide integration of 100 % renewable energy sources (RESs) interfaced through power electronic converters while maintaining security. At the heart of the development is the concept of the grid-forming resource (GFR) which brings together both the technologies of renewable energy resource and grid-forming converter. Extending on an extensive review, a grid-forming converter control and protection scheme is presented to ensure operation under small-and large-signal transients as needed for overall system security. The scheme is shown to be practical in offering inertial response emulation and frequency control based on droop characteristics to maintain power balances rapidly, to control voltages, as well as to support transient stability enhancement under grid faults. The integration with the control of wind energy conversion systems (WECSs) creates a grid-forming wind park as the prototype of the GFR. Feedforward signals exchanged between grid and resource-side controls enhance fast overall controllability. The principal claims are substantiated based on a scenario developed in the European project initiative MIGRATE with a focus on the Irish power transmission system. The model comprises more than 2000 individual WECSs grouped into wind parks, where ten wind parks are GFRs. The transient behavior of this scenario comprising 100 % converter-interfaced generation is shown to be superior compared with a counterpart case comprising synchronous machinery. The results validate the fact that GFRs with their proposed controls are expected to be key elements in creating a renewable and secure electric power system.

Kant’s anti-naturalism: The foundations of sociability in Max Weber and Sergey Hessen

The principal claims of Max Weber and Sergey (Sergius) Hessen are an extension of Kant’s anti-naturalistic tendency in ethics, in which an individual acquires his own freedom by actualising the autonomy of will as obedience to a duty. The moral justification of freedom leads to an explanation of the development of mankind as a process of interaction between culture and many individuals. The analyses of the principles of sociability showed the crucial role of the neo-Kantian paradigm in the development of Weber and Hessen’s social philosophy. My task is to analyse the socio-philosophical views of Hessen and Weber to show up affinities in determining the particularity of sociability. The foundation of this comparative study is the affinity in the interpretation of mankind’s progress as a socio-cultural process, which includes a specific functionality of each individual as a co-participant in the formation of culture as an ontology of freedom. Neo-Kantian philosophy of culture can be used as a foundation for identifying trends and interactions in the philosophy of Russia Abroad that were not even previously studied. The results of this investigation make it possible to prove that neo-Kantian ideas led to similar solutions in the works of both European philosophers and Russian émigré philosophers.

The Future Taxation of Private Business Firms

© 1998 by George K. Yin. This article represents a continuation of work I have done as reporter to the American Law Institute's Federal Income Tax Project on the Taxation of Private Business Enterprises. Portions of this article have been drawn from drafts and discussions undertaken in connection with that project as well as from a prior article, George K. Yim, The Taxation of Private Business Enterprises: Some Policy Questions Stimulated by the "Check-the-Box" Regulations, 51 SMU Law Rev. 125 (1997).This article was prepared for presentation at a February 1998 symposium and research for it was completed in May 1998. A final ALI Reporters' Study is scheduled to be published in June 1999.Recent federal and state law developments liberalizing the permissible forms of business organizations and the classification of such organizations for tax purposes have underscored the need to reexamine the current system of taxing the income of private businesses. This article, which undertakes that reexamination, makes two principal claims. First, current law ought to be replaced by a system whereby all private business firms, no matter what their form of organization and organizational characteristics, are taxed as conduits for income tax purposes. Second, because conduit taxation is so complicated, the system should be implemented through a "two-track" approach in which a subset of private business firms would, at their election, be subject to a simplified set of tax rules. In general, the simplified version would be available to firms which have only individuals as owners and which have surrendered some flexibility in their economic dealings. Part II of this article briefly explains why current law merits reexamination and Parts III and IV correspond to the two main claims being made. A final part contains a brief summary and conclusion.

Précis: Concern, Respect, and Cooperation

Précis: <i>Concern, Respect, and Cooperation</i>

19. Yüzyıl Ruhçuluğunun Topluma Asimilasyonu Olarak Bilim

Spiritualists in the 19th century have endeavored to prove their assessments by using science itself which tried to debunk their field’s phenomena. The most principal claims of spiritualism have been the possibility of communicating with spirits through the agency of mediums and visioning a close person who has been in the moment of dying or far away. Scientific studies have not only been used to prove these assessments but to create new concepts and perceptions about psychic experiences. The aim of this article is to determine that spiritualists have assimilated themselves into society by using science apart from being denounced as superstitious. Hereby, what spiritualists have suggested in terms of science will be documented within a historical process and the terms which they have coined will be examined. It will be clarified that the people who have evaluated these phenomena consisted of scientists, scholars and literary figures. SPR (The Society for Psychical Research), which was completely formed by scientists and scholars, investigated the mediums and put them under multiple psychical experiments. These researches were published in their anthology named as Phantasms of The Living and their periodicals named as “The Proceedings”. The terms which were coined in order to scientificate spiritualism have been “psychic force”, “telepathy”, “hallucination” and “ectoplasm”. It will be concluded that these terms have enabled to categorize the assessments of spiritualism which were communicating and visioning spirits, and also accommodated the psychic researchers and mediums to express themselves subjectively by assimilation into society.

Shifting Presence: Giorgio Agamben’s and Karen Barad’s Reflections on Quantum Mechanics

ABSTRACT This essay centres on two contributions—Giorgio Agamben’s What is Real? (2018) and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)—that deal with what they see as the import the quantum turn has had for their respective notions of metaphysics and its history. Notwithstanding the difference in their views, the discussion focuses on two principal claims: Barad’s claim as to the overcoming and dismissal of a certain metaphysical trajectory, and Agamben’s claim as to the full accomplishment and completion of the history of metaphysics. The aim of the essay is to question whether the horizon of constant presence (beständige Anwesenheit) that determines the domain of metaphysics in the classical Heideggerian account is overcome, fulfilled or shifted by the perspective introduced by quantum mechanics.

Dynamic Evaluation Design

A principal owns a firm, hires an agent of uncertain productivity, and designs a dynamic policy for evaluating his performance. The agent observes ongoing evaluations and decides when to quit. When not quitting, the agent is paid a wage that is linear in his expected productivity; the principal claims the residual performance. After quitting, the players secure fixed outside options. I show that equilibrium is Pareto efficient. For a broad class of performance technologies, the equilibrium wage deterministically grows with tenure. My analysis suggests that endogenous performance evaluation plays an important role in shaping careers in organizations. (JEL D21, D82, D83, J24, J31, J41, M51)

Epistemic Obligations of the Laity

AbstractVery often when the vast majority of experts agree on some scientific issue, laypeople nonetheless regularly consume articles, videos, lectures, etc., the principal claims of which are inconsistent with the expert consensus. Moreover, it is standardly assumed that it is entirely appropriate, and perhaps even obligatory, for laypeople to consume such anti-consensus material. I maintain that this standard assumption gets things backwards. Each of us is particularly vulnerable to false claims when we are not experts on some topic – such falsehoods have systematic negative impacts on our doxastic attitudes that we can neither prevent nor correct. So, when there is clear expert consensus on a given scientific issue, while it is permissible for experts to consume anti-consensus material, laypeople have an epistemic obligation to avoid such material. This argument has important consequences for philosophical discussions of our epistemic obligations to perform or omit belief-influencing actions. Such discussions typically abstract away from the important differences between experts and laypeople. Accordingly, we should reject this typical practice as problematic, and insist instead that laypeople and experts have fundamentally different epistemic obligations.

Participation of Third Parties not Making Independent Claims Regarding the Subject Matter of the Dispute in Civil Proceedings in the Light of Procedural Economy

The author explores the issue of participation of third parties not making independent claims regarding the subject matter of the dispute in the context of achieving procedural efficiency in civil proceedings. It is noted that the current rules of civil and arbitration procedural legislation concerning third parties that do not make independent claims regarding the subject matter of the dispute are imperfect and, on the one hand, they have some potential to ensure the true implementation of the principle of procedural economy, and, on the other hand, to enhance the effectiveness of civil proceedings and the scope of safeguards applied to secure judicial protection. Joint consideration and resolution of principal and recourse claims may be treated as a key and promising technique in this regard. The author, using various methodological techniques, conducts a critical analysis of the domestic doctrine and legislation of pre-revolutionary, Soviet and modern periods, and examines foreign experience on the subject at hand. The paper substantiates the conclusion about the possibility and expediency of joint consideration and resolution of the principal and recourse claims. It proposes to apply a mechanism for considering such claims jointly with due regard to the balance of interests of persons involved in the case. It is also noted that in a number of cases it is expedient to consider the principal and recourse claims in separate court proceedings. Summing up, the author expresses the opinion that the expansion of the judicial activity of the judicial activity should be permissible not only in the case of approval by the court of the settlement agreement, but also when the judicial activity results in making a court decision. In conclusion, it is noted that the mechanism of joint consideration and resolution of principal and recourse actions proposed by the author does not infringe the safeguards of civil procedural form and allows us to eliminate “defeat in rights” for the principal respondent (regredient).

Examining the Structure of Remedial Law

Examining the Structure of Remedial Law

Tax Benefits, Higher Education and Race: A Gift Tax Proposal for Direct Tuition Payments

A tax system should be fair. According to conventional wisdom, this fairness mandate means that similarly situated taxpayers should pay similar taxes. Notably absent from most discussions about tax fairness or equity is any consideration of race. This makes sense, if one focuses on the tax laws’ facial neutrality, as well as the Internal Revenue Service’s failure to collect official data about the race of taxpayers. But if one is interested in equity among taxpayers, we must also examine to what extent different groups of taxpayers benefit from a Code section that reduces their tax liability. In the context of distributional equity, race and other identity characteristics must inform any analysis. This Article intervenes in this discussion with three principal claims: one descriptive, one normative, and one utilitarian. First, the Article uses data from the higher education sector to demonstrate that primarily wealthy, white taxpayers capture the most generous educational tax benefits. Black taxpayers appear to benefit the least from these tax provisions. Black college graduates have greater education-related debt (both in incidence and quantum) than any other group of their peers. Furthermore Black college graduates have lower average wages and higher rates of unemployment compared to their Asian, Hispanic/Latinx counterparts. Black families are the least likely to be able to contribute to a 529 college tuition savings program or to make tax-free, direct tuition payments. While Black college graduates and families can take advantage of some tax benefits for higher education, the greatest tax expenditures are for those that benefit whites. The Article next argues that achieving a more racially just society requires attention to the ways that tax laws exacerbate existing race-based economic inequality. This Article uses the example of the gift tax exemption for direct tuition payments to illustrate the ways that tax rules can exacerbate the racial wealth gap. In the context of any tax benefit statute, there are abundant opportunities for future research at the intersection of race and taxation. That work is made more difficult by the absence of readily available tax data on the basis of race, but other data sources can help fill the gaps. Finally, the Article proposes a test for evaluating the distributional equity of any tax exclusion or deduction that results in an understatement of the donor’s or decedent’s transfer of wealth. Unlike a wealth transfer that is considered an item of consumption, a wealth transfer that has concomitant lifelong benefits, such as direct tuition payments for education, should not be allowed to reduce the donor’s transfer tax base. In the case of wealth transfer taxes, a particular tax benefit is inequitable if (1) it has disparate impacts on the basis of race and (2) the benefit is inconsistent with the overall policy objective of imposing a gift tax on inter vivos transfers that create substantial capital-like advantages to the donee while simultaneously reducing the value of the transferor’s estate. The gift tax exemption for direct tuition payments fails both parts of this test and should be repealed.

A World of Distrust

In District of Columbia v. Wesby, the Supreme Court recently considered whether a prudent officer had probable cause to make warrantless arrests at a festive house party. While reactions from scholars of criminal law are beginning to emerge, this Essay is the first to conceive of the decision through the lens of property theory. In this regard, the Essay offers two principal claims. First, on interpretive grounds, it contends that Wesby generated a de facto reallocation of property interests by abolishing both (a) the right held by the general public to access without fear of arrest those properties to which they reasonably believe they are welcome, and (b) the correlative duty of titleholders to respect reasonably mistaken access until the mistake is revealed. Second, on normative grounds, it questions the justificatory nature of this shift from an allocation that vindicates trust one person has placed in another to an allocation that allows someone else to violate that trust. The Essay concludes that perceiving Wesby as a dispute over property interests not only will deepen the developing assessments of the decision by scholars of criminal law, but, more broadly, prompt reflection on matters across the property spectrum as to the oft-concealed implications that allocative choices regarding property interests bring to bear on our ability to trust one another in the marketplace and in myriad social settings.

The Socioeconomics of Twenty-First Century Wills Formalities

Individuals have executed wills the same way for centuries. But over time, traditional traditional requirements have relaxed. This Article makes two principal claims, both of which disrupt fundamental assumptions about the purposes and functions of wills formalities. First, the traditional requirements that a will must be in writing and signed by the testator in the presence of (or acknowledged before) witnesses have never adequately served the stated their stated purposes. For that reason, strict compliance with formalities cannot be justified by their cautionary, protective, evidentiary and channeling functions. Reducing or eliminating most of the long-standing requirements for execution of a will is consistent with the true purpose of wills formalities – authenticating a document as the one executed by the testator with the intention of having it serve as the binding directive for the post-mortem distribution of the testator’s property. This Article’s account has important implications for the way that legal scholars, lawmakers and lawyers think about wills. The Article’s second claim is that the substantive standard of the harmless error rule – that the decedent intended a particular document to be the decedent’s last will and testament – should be the only threshold that must be satisfied for a court to admit the document to probate. Widespread adoption of such an intent-based rule is preferable to one that is overly formalistic. Current formalism leads both to false positives (i.e., grant of probate to a document not intended by the decedent as the decedent’s will) and false negatives (i.e., denial of probate of document clearly intended by the decedent as the decedent’s will). An intent-based rule would make more likely the valid execution of wills by poor and middle-income people who typically cannot or do not consult attorneys. An intent-based standard also sets the stage for widespread recognition of electronic wills, if states are able to address concerns about authentication, fraud and safekeeping of electronic documents. Technological developments could make estate planning in the twenty-first century more accessible than ever before to people of all wealth and income levels if the legal profession is prepared to embrace new ways of executing wills.

Machine Performance and Human Failure: How Shall We Regulate Autonomous Machines?

Machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are on the rise. In many use cases, their performance today already exceeds human capabilities. In this essay, I explore fundamental regulatory issues related to such “autonomous machines”. I adopt an analytical perspective that highlights the importance of what I call the “deep normative structure” of a particular society for crucial policy choices with respect to autonomous machines. I make two principal claims. First, the jargon of welfare economics appears well-suited to analyse the chances and risks of innovative new technologies, and it is also reflected in legal doctrine on risk, responsibility and regulation. A pure welfarist conception of “the good” will tend to move a society into a direction in which autonomous systems eventually will take a super-prominent role. However, such a conception assumes more than the welfarist calculus can yield, and it also ignores the categorical difference between machines and humans characteristic of Western legal systems. Second, taking the “deep normative structure” of Western legal systems seriously leads to policy conclusions regarding the regulation of autonomous machines that emphasize this categorical difference. Such a humanistic approach acknowledges human weaknesses and failures and protects humans, and it is characterized by fundamental human rights and by the desire to achieve some level of distributive justice. Welfaristic pursuits are constrained by these humanistic features, and the severity of these constraints differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I illustrate my argument with legal applications taken from various issues in the field of contract and tort.

Научные парадигмы в современной отечественной и зарубежной лингвистике: сущность, динамика, философские основания

The author discusses the category of paradigm introduced by Thomas Kuhn, systematizes and summarizes the principal claims advanced by home and foreign scholars, reveals the most common trends in understanding paradigms in modern humanities, specifically in linguistics. It is demonstrated that the category of paradigm remains popular, but it has undergone some transformations. Considering the review, it can be assumed that the strict understanding of paradigms as incompatible model problems and solutions to them is being replaced by more flexible statements about a greater or lesser importance of a given paradigm over a specific period. Scholars admit the possibility to return to old research problems and tackle them at a higher level, focus on building a universal paradigm that would incorporate various directions of studies and views of language. The author characterizes paradigm arguments in Western research methodology as constructed on the basis of different philosophical approaches to knowledge (admitting or rejecting the possibility to learn the objective truth). It is shown that the methodological compromise has resulted in ‘compatibility principle’, mixed-method research, and a combination of qualitative and quantitative research in humanities, including linguistics.

Artificial womb technology and the frontiers of human reproduction: conceptual differences and potential implications

In 2017, a Philadelphia research team revealed the closest thing to an artificial womb (AW) the world had ever seen. The ‘biobag’, if as successful as early animal testing suggests,...

Warfare, Imperialism, and the Making of Modern Chinese History: A Review Essay

This historiographic essay contends that warfare made and unmade the Qing dynasty between 1644 and 1911, and its study has helped to create the field of modern Chinese history during the past seventy years. It advances three principal claims. First, the literature on war, especially interstate conflict, can serve as a synecdoche for the development of the modern China field as a whole since the 1950s. The research interests of late Qing specialists have oscillated along an “external-internal-external” axis that corresponds with three distinct periods of intellectual inquiry, scholarly production, and generational dominance. Second, historians have reached inaccurate conclusions about the state capacity of the Qing Empire after 1840 through a crude analysis of the First Sino-Japanese War, a mistake they can rectify by adopting a longer-term perspective on the state-making process. Third, scholars have deftly traced the changing role of military power in modern Chinese politics but have also adopted the interpretive categories of wen and wu from literati discourse without sufficient critical reflection. In the future, researchers may seek to explore the intersection of warfare and the environment, technology, and ethnic identity, approaches that will continue to move the field in comparative, global, and Inner Asian directions.

Fair Winds, Heavy Burdens: The Limitations of India's Turn East

Fair Winds, Heavy Burdens:The Limitations of India's Turn East Andrew Small (bio) Where many authors set out to magnify the importance of their subject matter, Frédéric Grare's India Turns East: International Engagement and U.S.-China Rivalry aims to define its limits. The book is a comprehensive look at the confluence of factors that have both driven and constrained India's efforts to regain its historic status as a player on the wider Asian strategic stage. It traces the shift from India as a "politically suspect, economically unimportant, and, at times, even militarily threatening" (p. 181) power in Southeast Asia, skeptical of ASEAN, aligned with the Soviet Union, and distant from the United States and its allies, to the current "unprecedented degree of goodwill [India] is receiving" (p. 215). Yet perhaps the book's central concern is that India risks failing to capitalize on this shift. Grare is a natural skeptic, and much of the book's value comes from his digging beneath the surface of supposed diplomatic and economic breakthroughs to find the persistent divergences in strategic outlook, the failures of execution, and the structural issues that still prevent India's Act East policy from achieving as much as the benign conditions for it merit. India Turns East was largely written before the ascendancy of Donald Trump, but developments over the last year have amplified rather than undermined the book's principal claims. Grare's overarching contention is that while regional anxieties about China's rise have provided the crucial impetus for India's burgeoning relationships, New Delhi's countervailing efforts fall far short of the stakes, both militarily and economically. On the security front, this is partly attributed to India's caution. Grare cites Japanese officers complaining that "it is almost impossible to plan for any meaningful naval exercise with their Indian counterparts since they refuse to consider any scenario that appears confrontational towards China" (p. 147). The criticism only partly holds true. The intensification of Sino-Indian competition in the last couple of years has already resulted in some of that caution being cast off. More importantly, as Grare notes earlier in the text, it has been New Delhi's deftness in navigating relations with Beijing that has made it possible for many Asian states to deepen ties with India without facing a zero-sum political choice. A sharp acceleration in [End Page 150] the competitive dynamics between Beijing and New Delhi will make India a more attractive partner to some, but most states in the Asia-Pacific are still trying to navigate a healthy relationship with all the region's major powers. If that proves impossible, ties with India will more often than not be the ones that suffer. In that sense, New Delhi's current efforts to reach a revised modus vivendi with Beijing in the aftermath of the Doklam standoff are also a way to ensure that India's influence in East Asia can continue to grow unimpeded. Given the limitations of India's current capacity to project power in the Asia-Pacific, gaining real leverage over China through an expanded security role is still a long-term goal. In the short term, India remains "unlikely to solve the challenges presented by Beijing to China's other neighbors" (p. 205) and is focused on fending off the growing Chinese strategic presence in its traditional sphere of influence in South Asia. The principal thrust of Grare's critique, however, is directed at the economic underpinning of the Act East policy. Some of the obstacles that India faces are the residue of older strategic choices. After the war with China on the two states' border in 1962, India's leadership "deliberately decided not to develop the region in order to better ensure its defense against Chinese penetration," meaning that "until recently, the Indian northeast has been more a buffer zone…than a gateway" (p. 92), all the more so given the insurgencies that have racked the region. This at least is in the process of being remedied, with the Modi government making even more significant efforts than its predecessors to place the northeast at the heart of regional connectivity initiatives. India...

The Hague Choice of Law Principles, CISG, and PICC: A Hard Look at a Choice of Soft Law†

The Hague Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Contracts are “soft” private international law rules. They empower parties to choose either State law or soft “rules of law” to govern their contract, regardless of whether they litigate or arbitrate. This article investigates the relationship between the Hague Principles and two sets of rules of law which parties may choose: the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts (PICC) or the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). It makes three principal claims. First, the nature of the Hague Principles and their relationship with the PICC or the CISG gives rise to several normative ambiguities which need clarification. Second, the Hague Principles do not limit the parties' ability to divide their contract at a choice of law level (horizontal depecage): parties can influence not only which rules of law govern the contract but also their content. This is undesirable as a matter of principle. It may also facilitate results which the PICC and the CISG do not intend. Third, the Hague Principles provide that the law which the parties purportedly chose determines whether the parties agreed on a choice of law. They also provide a mechanism which designates the law which the parties purportedly chose in standard contract terms. Applied to rules of law, the suitability of these provisions is questionable: alternatives should be explored.