Judicial Supervision of Executive Action in the Commonwealth Caribbean

The following text is taken from the first in a series of lectures in memory of the late Right Honourable Philip Telford Georges. The Right Honourable Mr Justice Michael de la Bastide was invited by the Dean of the Law Faculty, University of the West Indies, to deliver this inaugural lecture in Barbados on 31 March 2006.     

The London Agreement and the cost of patenting in Europe

This paper analyses the consequences for the European patent system of the recently ratified London Agreement, which aims to reduce the translation requirements for patent validation procedures in 15 out of 34 national patent offices. The simulations suggest that the cost of patenting has been reduced by 20–30% since the enforcement of the LA. With an average translation cost saving of €3,600 per patent, the total savings for the business sector amount to about €220 millions. The fee elasticity of patents being about −0.4, one may expect an increase in patent filings of 8–12%. Despite the translation cost savings, the relative cost of a European patent validated in six (thirteen) countries is still at least five (seven) times higher than in the United States.     

The geopolitics of Brazilian soybeans

Soybean plays a major role in the development of Brazilian agribusiness, and in turn in Brazilian geopolitical power as well. It is a pillar of Brazil's insertion into a ‘new multi-polar world order’ as basis for much Brazilian land ownership in neighboring countries, for the extension of political influence in Africa, and it is especially important for balancing trade with Brazil's new primary commercial partner, China. Yet the US dollar and North Atlantic transnational companies still control global soybean markets and production technologies. In a context marked by booming but volatile commodity prices, food crises, riots and revolutions in food-importing countries, a global rush for farmland, and severe droughts and climate change, the soybean agribusiness in Brazil takes on new and crucial geopolitical significance. I trace the geopolitical role it has served in consolidating the ‘green revolution’ in Brazil, and raise questions about the intersection between agroindustrial markets and currencies: could agricultural commodities serve geopolitical functions (and thus contestation) similar to those ‘petro-dollars’ have served since the 1970s? These considerations show how the political ecology of soybean shapes and is shaped by inter-regional and global-scale processes, and reveals new directions for research on the emerging geopolitical landscape of our century.     

Constructing Institutional Measures: Indicators of Political and Property Rights in Mozambique, 1900–2005

In this article, we focus on the role of political and economic institutions in Mozambique's development. We produce a set of institutional indicators for Mozambique for the period 1900–2005. The first index tracks political freedoms and is unique in its duration and complexity. The second index is a measure of property rights for Mozambique, and such a measure has not existed previously and certainly not for this length of time. The construction of these indices is a painstaking process through historical records but it provides us with a richness of institutional data previously not available. The new institutional indices will allow us to explore the role of the institutional environment in determining economic growth and development in Mozambique over time.     

After the Ivory Tower: Gender,Commodification and the ‘Academic’

This piece uses a feminist approach to explore various aspects of ‘commodification’ in the lives and work of those teaching and researching in UK universities, and in particular its gender dimensions. After setting a historical context for the radical transformation of UK universities during the 1980s, it considers how this transformation was experienced by academics in terms of alienation, anxiety and accountability. Key features of that experience are loss of autonomy and control to the external power of competition and managerialism, insecurity and casualization in employment, and exposure to increasing judgemental scrutiny. For women academics job insecurity and discrimination continue to be disproportionately important, although some of the challenges to old established academic convention and practice have opened up real possibilities to progress more pro-women agendas. In the future they will confront quite depressing developments in the reconstruction of academic identities and labour, but have the legacy of the gains/insights of feminist analysis and politics over the last twenty years with which to do so.     

Forensic value of 14 novel STRs on the human Y chromosome

We identified and characterized 14 novel short-tandem-repeats (STRs) on the Y chromosome and typed them in two samples, a globally diverse panel of 73 cell lines, and 148 individuals from a European–American population. These Y-STRs include eight tetranucleotide repeats (DYS449, DYS453, DYS454, DYS455, DYS456, DYS458, DYS459, and DYS464), five pentanucleotide repeats (DYS446, DYS447, DYS450, DYS452, and DYS463), and one hexanucleotide repeat (DYS448). Sequence data were obtained to designate a repeat number nomenclature. The gene diversities of an additional 22 Y-STRs, including the most commonly used in forensic databases, were directly compared in the cell line DNAs. Six of the 10 most polymorphic markers include the newly identified Y-STRs. Furthermore, these novel Y-STRs greatly improved the resolution of paternal lineages, above the level obtained with commonly used Y-STRs, in the European–American population.     

Famine and human rights

Famine is clearly and undeniably a terrible wrong, and famine is preventable. The occurrence of famine is an indictment of the ethics of the country in which it has occurred. Despite this, those claiming to represent ethical concerns in general and human rights in particular have had little impact on either understanding famine or dealing with it. This paper is an attempt to develop an agenda whereby human rights concerns can be brought to bear on the problem of famine.