How the court made a federation of the EU

We analyze the European institutional integration that took place in the 1950s and 1960s as a two-stage process. Firstly, an explicitly political project aims at establishing a European political community. The project is abandoned in the mid-1950s and political integration stops. At that time, the institutions of the Union take the form of a confederation. In a second stage, because of the failure of the European political community, a legal process of integration driven by the European Court of Justice takes place. This second stage of unification is more centralizing and in effect leads to a federalization of the European institutional structure. The transformation of the political structure of the European Union thus appears to result from the actions and decisions of a legal entity, the European Court of Justice.      

Connecting consumer choice to the healthcare system

American healthcare needs to be reformed into competing, efficient, comprehensive care systems. To get there from here, we need a health insurance market in which each person or household has a wide, responsible, informed, individual multiple choice of health care financing and delivery plans. The point of this is competing delivery systems, not just competing carriers. To compete, some carriers will create or contract with selective delivery systems or doctors selected for their quality and cost-effectiveness. Others will already be teamed up with large multispecialty group practices. On the other hand, high deductible plans will not help us get to a reformed delivery system.     

Evolution of the content of THC and other major cannabinoids in drug-type cannabis cuttings and seedlings during growth of plants

In Europe, authorities frequently ask forensic laboratories to analyze seized cannabis plants to prove that cultivation was illegal (drug type and not fiber type). This is generally done with mature and flowering plants. However, authorities are often confronted with very young specimens. The aim of our study was to evaluate when the chemotype of cannabis plantlets can be surely determined through analysis of eight major cannabinoids content during growth. Drug-type seedlings and cuttings were cultivated, sampled each week, and analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection. The chemotype of clones was recognizable at any developmental stage because of high total Δ(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentrations even at the start of the cultivation. Conversely, right after germination seedlings contained a low total THC content, but it increased quickly with plant age up, allowing chemotype determination after 3 weeks. In conclusion, it is not necessary to wait for plants' flowering to identify drug-type cannabis generally cultivated in Europe.     

The UN Security Council,normative legitimacy and the challenge of specificity

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how the general and abstract concept of legitimacy applies to international institutions, using the United Nations Security Council as an example. We argue that the evaluation of the Security Council’s legitimacy requires considering three significant and interrelated aspects: its purpose, competences, and procedural standards. We consider two possible interpretations of the Security Council’s purpose: on the one hand, maintaining peace and security, and, on the other, ensuring broader respect for human rights. Both of these purposes are minimally morally acceptable for legitimacy. Second, we distinguish between three different competences of the UNSC: 1) the decision-making competence, 2) the quasi-legislative competence, and 3) the referral competence. On this basis, we argue that different procedural standards are required to legitimise these competences, which leads to a more differentiated understanding of the Security Council’s legitimacy. While maintaining that the membership structure of the Council is a severe problem for its legitimacy, we suggest other procedural standards that can help to improve its overall legitimacy, which include broad transparency, deliberation, and the revisability of the very terms of accountability themselves.     

L'informatique dans les administrations purlieu's et para-publiques quebecoises

Sommaire. Cet article est le résultat d'une enquête effectuée auprès des services informatiques fonctionnant au sein des principales administrations publiques et para-publiques du Québec. L'auteur souligne dès le départ le rôle de pannier joué par le CTED (Centre de Trait merit Electronique des Données) dans le développement du parc informatique et met l'accent sur le haut degré de mécanisation atteínt par I'administration publique québécoise. Après avoir indiqué le caractère indispensable de la coordination en matière d'informatique au sein des organizations gouvernementales, l'auteur décrit le travail réalisé dans ce domaine par divers organismes centraux tels que le CCCAM (Comité Consultative de Coordination des Activités Mécanographiques), le CCI (Comité Consultatif de 1'Informatique) et la DI (Direction de I'Informatique) du secrétariat du Conseil du Trésor. Cette analyse met en évidence les insuffisances de la politique informatique telle que menée jusqu'à la fin de 1972 et croit déceler depuis 1973 les signes avant-coureurs d'une politique d'ensemble en cette matière, au sein de l'administration québécoise. S'attaquant ensuite aux problèmes structurels et humains entraínés par l'introduction des ordinateurs, l'auteur insiste sur la grande diversité des situations existantes ainsi que sur les changements et les résistances enregistrés ces dernières années. Abordant en dernier lieu le problème de I'informatique et des droits de l'homme, l'article rappelle combien l'ordinateur risque de devenir un instrument d'oppression et fait état des mesures que le Québec semble vouloir adopter, afin dassurer la protection de la vie privée que tous les québécois sont en droit de réclamer. Abstract. This article presents the conclusions of an inquiry into data processing departments within the main Quebec public and quasi-public administrations. It underlines at the outset the pioneer role played by the CTED (Electronic Data Processing Centre) in the development of data processing and emphasizes the high degree of automation reached by Quebec public administration. After having indicated the absolute necessity of coordinating data processing in government agencies, the author describes the work done in this area by various central bodies such as the CCCAM (Electronic Data Processing activities consulting and steering committee). the CCI (Electronic Data Processing consulting committee), and the DI (Electronic Data Processing management directorate) of the Treasury Board Secretariat. The analysis points out the deficiencies of data processing policies up to the end of 1972 and detects, since 1973, the first signs of a comprehensive policy in this area within the Quebec administration. Turning to the structural and human problems created by the introduction of computers, the author insists on the great number of different situations existing at the present time as well as on the changes and the opposition encountered in the last few years. Finally, in considering the problem of data processing versus human rights, he reminds us that the computer could be used as a means of oppression and states the measures that Quebec seems willing to adopt in order to guarantee the privacy to which all Quebeckers are entitled.     

Automated detection of regions of interest in cartridge case images using deep learning

This paper explores a deep-learning approach to evaluate the position of circular delimiters in cartridge case images. These delimiters define two regions of interest (ROI), corresponding to the breech face and the firing pin impressions, and are placed manually or by an image-processing algorithm. This positioning bears a significant impact on the performance of the image-matching algorithms for firearm identification, and an automated evaluation method would be beneficial to any computerized system. Our contribution consists in optimizing and training U-Net segmentation models from digital images of cartridge cases, intending to locate ROIs automatically. For the experiments, we used high-resolution 2D images from 1195 samples of cartridge cases fired by different 9MM firearms. Our results show that the segmentation models, trained on augmented data sets, exhibit a performance of 95.6% IoU (Intersection over Union) and 99.3% DC (Dice Coefficient) with a loss of 0.014 for the breech face images; and a performance of 95.9% IoU and 99.5% DC with a loss of 0.011 for the firing pin images. We observed that the natural shapes of predicted circles reduce the performance of segmentation models compared with perfect circles on ground truth masks suggesting that our method provide a more accurate segmentation of the real ROI shape. In practice, we believe that these results could be useful for firearms identification. In future work, the predictions may be used to evaluate the quality of delimiters on specimens in a database, or they could determine the region of interest on a cartridge case image.     

Displacing your Principal. Two Historical Case Studies of Some Interest for the Constitutional Future of Europe

The framework of public decisions, and particularly the provision of law, is seen here as an agency contract. What distinguishes this contract is the nature of the right delegated to the agent: The capacity to make law gives the opportunity to take advantage of the incompleteness of the constitutional contract. The agency relationship may be loosened or even reversed. This article tries to draw some lessons from the English and American history in that matter and applies them to the making of the future European State.     

Seeking rents through class actions and legislative lobbying: a comparison

This article analyzes class actions as a technology that groups may use in their rent-seeking activity, in addition to other rent-seeking methods such as legislative investment within the political market, when they seek to achieve favorable decisions from decision-makers—courts and legislators. It claims that groups may make their choice between various rent-seeking technologies according to their sensitivity to the problem of free riding. Therefore, it analyzes the effect of the legal instruments that facilitate class action lawsuits and collective litigation in most countries upon the rent-seeking strategies of groups, as compared to rent-seeking through legislation.     

Validated method for the simultaneous determination of Delta9-THC and Delta9-THC-COOH in oral fluid, urine and whole blood using solid-phase extraction and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry with electrospray ionization

A fully validated, sensitive and specific method for the extraction and quantification of Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and 11-nor-9-carboxy-Delta(9)-THC (THC-COOH) and for the detection of 11-hydroxy-Delta(9)-THC (11-OH THC) in oral fluid, urine and whole blood is presented. Solid-phase extraction and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) technique were used, with electrospray ionization. Three ions were monitored for THC and THC-COOH and two for 11-OH THC. The compounds were quantified by selected ion recording of m/z 315.31, 329.18 and 343.16 for THC, 11-OH THC and THC-COOH, respectively, and m/z 318.27 and 346.26 for the deuterated internal standards, THC-d(3) and THC-COOH-d(3), respectively. The method proved to be precise for THC and THC-COOH both in terms of intra-day and inter-day analysis, with intra-day coefficients of variation (CV) less than 6.3, 6.6 and 6.5% for THC in saliva, urine and blood, respectively, and 6.8 and 7.7% for THC-COOH in urine and blood, respectively. Day-to-day CVs were less than 3.5, 4.9 and 11.3% for THC in saliva, urine and blood, respectively, and 6.2 and 6.4% for THC-COOH in urine and blood, respectively. Limits of detection (LOD) were 2 ng/mL for THC in oral fluid and 0.5 ng/mL for THC and THC-COOH and 20 ng/mL for 11-OH THC, in urine and blood. Calibration curves showed a linear relationship for THC and THC-COOH in all samples (r(2)>0.999) within the range investigated. The procedure presented here has high specificity, selectivity and sensitivity. It can be regarded as an alternative method to GC-MS for the confirmation of positive immunoassay test results, and can be used as a suitable analytical tool for the quantification of THC and THC-COOH in oral fluid, urine and/or blood samples.