Dangers to democracy

He was a leading critic of the Communist regime in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s. Forced to leave his country, he is now the Western representative of the Polish Independent Committees for Culture, Science, and Education.     

Oil and territory in Putin's relations with China and Japan

Abstract

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has centralized decision making in Moscow and has reduced the role of domestic actors. He has demonstrated his own personal management of foreign policy in relation to China and Japan. He has used negotiations over oil and territory to place Russia in a more favourable position between them. In relation to oil, he has overruled the oil company Yukos and others within his own government and decided in favour of the Japanese pipeline route, which includes a branch line to China. Putin decided on the Japanese route because it promised access to wider markets in the Asia Pacific, besides China. It also entailed deeper Japanese involvement in Russia's development and reduced Russian dependence upon China. In terms of territory, Putin undermined the power of local opposition and offered territorial settlements to both China and Japan, to remove sources of future tension. With China he compromised over the river islands which had been left outstanding since the main border agreement was signed in 1991. To Japan he again offered a compromise over the disputed islands based on the 1956 agreement to improve relations. Russians may hope that energy dependence would induce the Japanese to become more willing to compromise over the territorial issue. The Japanese, however, expect that Russia's need for funding for the pipeline would allow them to resist that pressure and to demand a return of all disputed islands. If Russia emerges as an energy supplier to both China and Japan its influence and its regional role would be enhanced. Much depends upon the prospects for the oil pipeline and its branch line, whose feasibility has been questioned.     

Extra-Legal Values in Judicial Interpretation of Law: A Model Reasoning and Few Examples

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The aim of the paper is to analyze the types of interpretative reasoning determining the content...     

Man Does Not Live by Reason Alone

Leszek Kolakowski, who died in 2009, was professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and a fellow of All Souls College at Oxford University. His critical, magisterial study of the history of Marxism and his perpetual doubt and self-questioning, which led to a preoccupation with "the revenge of the sacred" in secular life, earned him a reputation as modern Europe's Erasmus.
Just after he published Modernity on Endless Trial in 1991, Kolakowski sat down with me in his study at All Souls College. The following conversation was also published in Kolakowski's last book, My Correct Views on Everything.     

Russia's priorities in the Pacific

While Japan’s increased use of the WTO dispute settlement system since 1995 is now widely acknowledged, much less clear are the reasons and motivations behind the specific complaints filed by the Japanese government. An examination of Japan’s complaints between 1995 and 2002 reveals that they have been undertaken almost exclusively on behalf of two sectors, namely automobiles and especially steel. What accounts for the concentration of Japan’s complainant activity in these sectors and not others? In drawing a direct link from domestic politics to the heart of the WTO dispute settlement system, this essay stresses the importance of sectoral lobbying and pressures. It shows concretely how politically organized and institutionally privileged sectors such as Japanese steel have become a major driving force in Japan’s WTO strategy overall. These results are important for considering why there may be far more interaction between state, sectoral, and electoral interests than is normally suspected in the WTO dispute settlement processes.     

Sudden death after exercise in an adolescent with hemoglobin SE

Hemoglobin (Hb) S and Hb E are the most common variant hemoglobins, but because of the geographical separation of the areas where they are prevalent, the combination of the 2 is uncommon. Approximately 46 cases of hemoglobin SE compound heterozygosity have been reported. No deaths from the condition have been reported previously, whereas death after vigorous physical activity in individuals with sickle cell trait (hemoglobin AS) has been described in a few case reports. Here we report previously undiagnosed hemoglobinopathy SE in a 12-year-old American boy who collapsed during football practice and had a cardiac arrest on the field after a brief lucid interval. The autopsy was significant only for postmortem intravascular sickling. A postmortem hemoglobin electrophoresis test revealed 57% S, 34% E, and 1% F hemoglobins. The death is attributed to cardiac ischemia from functional vaso-occlusion by sickled erythrocytes.     

Assessment of bone age based on morphometric study of the upper end of the humerus

Assessment of changes in the spongy bone structure of the upper end of the humerus is one of the common methods of age estimation. This method was devised many years ago (1894) and has never been verified in an objective numerical testing. We projected an objective morphometric method assessment of the upper end of the humerus. The study was carried out on humeri from cadavers of 88 men and 84 women. The surface area of atrophy of the spongy structure (medullary cavity) was calculated on the longitudinal section of the humerus. A new morphometric method was applied, which allowed numerical presentation of results. The results of the study show a lack of statistical correlation between atrophy of the spongy structure within the upper end of the humerus and the chronological age. Therefore, it can be concluded that the assessment of humerus structure should be omitted in the forensic medical age estimation.     

Implementing Prior Judicial Decisions as Precedents: The Context of Application and Justification

The paper concerns the conditions and methods of using previous judicial decisions as a kind of precedents in the processes of application of law within the statutory legal order. The use of such decisions, not announced by the legislator, depends on the courts, undertaking such actions on the grounds of similarity of cases or of decisional processes. Such decisions do not become an exclusive validation argument and may create a situation of their potential conflict with legal regulations as well as an inferential supplementation of their content. Dissemination of such activity of the courts leads to the development of precedential practice (relevant to the statutory legal order), though, its actual jurisdictional role depends on proper justification of decisions, within which reference to these decisions should be adaptive (in relation to the elements of the current case), generalizing (forming elements of ratio decidendi) as well as argumentative and discursive (in respect of the way in which the decisional reasoning and arguments expressed in the prior justification are used).

     

波兰、中东欧国家体制转轨的深层次原因

转轨的核心是摈弃原社会主义制度 人们普遍认为，中东欧国家后社会主义转轨始于1989年，首先出现在波兰。随后“现实社会主义的衰落”，或者有些人认为是“共产主义的垮台”遍及整个地区。随之而来的问题便由此产生。在欧洲及亚洲广大地区上运转了几十年的体制是因为自身运转不利而轻而易举地衰落，还是被外力推翻？如果是被推翻，是谁一手造成的，是内因，还是迫于外界压力？