Framing the local and the global in the anti-nuclear movement: Law and the politics of place

This article examines the politics of place in relation to legal mobilization by the anti-nuclear movement. It examines two case examples - citizens' weapons inspections and civil disobedience strategies - which have involved the movement drawing upon the law in particular spatial contexts. The article begins by examining a number of factors which have been employed in recent social movement literature to explain strategy choice, including ideology, resources, political and legal opportunity, and framing. It then proceeds to argue that the issues of scale, space, and place play an important role in relation to framing by the movement in the two case examples. Both can be seen to involve scalar reframing, with the movement attempting to resist localizing tendencies and to replace them with a global frame. Both also involve an attempt to reframe the issue of nuclear weapons away from the contested frame of the past (unilateral disarmament) towards the more universal and widely accepted frame of international law.

English Contract Law and the Great War: the development of a doctrine of frustration

This article examines changes that occurred in English contract law as a result of the demands made upon Great Britain by the Great War. The focus is on the development of the doctrine of frustration in English law. In particular, it is argued that the development of the doctrine of frustration was fashioned from internal legal forces in the form of both existing case law and emergency legislation in response to the demands placed upon the nation by a global war. The way in which the doctrine of frustration developed during the Great War arose as a direct result of the way in which Britain chose to meet the logistical demands created by the way it fought the Great War.

Construction contracts: law and management. 5th edition

The fifth edition of this best-selling textbook has been thoroughly revised to provide the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage of the legislation, administration and management of construction contracts. It now includes comparison of working with JCT, NEC3 and FIDIC contracts, throughout. In line with new thinking in construction management research, this authoritative guide is essential reading for every construction undergraduate and is an extremely useful source of reference for practitioners.

The new Brazilian bankruptcy law and its impacts on the credit market

No início de 2005, uma nova Lei de Falências foi aprovada pelo Congresso Nacional, entrando em meados de junho do mesmo ano. A nova legislação ampliou o grau de proteção ao credor em muitos aspectos. Este artigo busca investigar algumas das consequências empíricas dessa nova lei sobre o mercado de crédito, utilizado dados de firmas argentinas, brasileiras, chilenas e mexicanas para estimar dois modelos para dados em painel: o primeiro com tendências específicas para cada firma e o outro com tendência macro comum às firmas de um mesmo país. A estimação dos dois modelos produziu resultados similares. Foram encontrados impactos significativos sobre a oferta de crédito, o custo da dívida e a oferta de crédito segurado, não-segurado e de longo prazo. Não foram encontrados impactos sobre o total de dívida de curto prazo.

The abuse of intellectual property rights and regulations in China: a law and economic analysis

From the institutional point of view, the legal system of IPR (intellectual property right, hereafter, IPR) is one of incentive institutions of innovation and it plays very important role in the development of economy. According to the law, the owner of the IPR enjoy a kind of exclusive right to use his IP(intellectual property, hereafter, IP), in other words, he enjoys a kind of legal monopoly position in the market. How to well protect the IPR and at the same time to regulate the abuse of IPR is very interested topic in this knowledge-orientated market and it is the basic research question in this dissertation. In this paper, by way of comparing study and by way of law and economic analyses, and based on the Austrian Economics School’s theories, the writer claims that there is no any contradiction between the IPR and competition law. However, in this new economy (high-technology industries), there is really probability of the owner of IPR to abuse his dominant position. And with the characteristics of the new economy, such as, the high rates of innovation, “instant scalability”, network externality and lock-in effects, the IPR “will vest the dominant undertakings with the power not just to monopolize the market but to shift such power from one market to another, to create strong barriers to enter and, in so doing, granting the perpetuation of such dominance for quite a long time.”1 Therefore, in order to keep the order of market, to vitalize the competition and innovation, and to benefit the customer, in EU and US, it is common ways to apply the competition law to regulate the IPR abuse. In Austrian Economic School perspective, especially the Schumpeterian theories, the innovation/competition/monopoly and entrepreneurship are inter-correlated, therefore, we should apply the dynamic antitrust model based on the AES theories to analysis the relationship between the IPR and competition law. China is still a developing country with relative not so high ability of innovation. Therefore, at present, to protect the IPR and to make good use of the incentive mechanism of IPR legal system is the first important task for Chinese government to do. However, according to the investigation reports,2 based on their IPR advantage and capital advantage, some multinational companies really obtained the dominant or monopoly market position in some aspects of some industries, and there are some IPR abuses conducted by such multinational companies. And then, the Chinese government should be paying close attention to regulate any IPR abuse. However, how to effectively regulate the IPR abuse by way of competition law in Chinese situation, from the law and economic theories’ perspective, from the legislation perspective, and from the judicial practice perspective, there is a long way for China to go!

An Instrument Design for Space-Based Optical Observation of Space Debris

Currently, observations of space debris are primarily performed with ground-based sensors. These sensors have a detection limit at some centimetres diameter for objects in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and at about two decimetres diameter for objects in Geostationary Orbit (GEO). The few space-based debris observations stem mainly from in-situ measurements and from the analysis of returned spacecraft surfaces. Both provide information about mostly sub-millimetre-sized debris particles. As a consequence the population of centimetre- and millimetre-sized debris objects remains poorly understood. The development, validation and improvement of debris reference models drive the need for measurements covering the whole diameter range. In 2003 the European Space Agency (ESA) initiated a study entitled “Space-Based Optical Observation of Space Debris”. The first tasks of the study were to define user requirements and to develop an observation strategy for a space-based instrument capable of observing uncatalogued millimetre-sized debris objects. Only passive optical observations were considered, focussing on mission concepts for the LEO, and GEO regions respectively. Starting from the requirements and the observation strategy, an instrument system architecture and an associated operations concept have been elaborated. The instrument system architecture covers the telescope, camera and onboard processing electronics. The proposed telescope is a folded Schmidt design, characterised by a 20 cm aperture and a large field of view of 6°. The camera design is based on the use of either a frame-transfer charge coupled device (CCD), or on a cooled hybrid sensor with fast read-out. A four megapixel sensor is foreseen. For the onboard processing, a scalable architecture has been selected. Performance simulations have been executed for the system as designed, focussing on the orbit determination of observed debris particles, and on the analysis of the object detection algorithms. In this paper we present some of the main results of the study. A short overview of the user requirements and observation strategy is given. The architectural design of the instrument is discussed, and the main tradeoffs are outlined. An insight into the results of the performance simulations is provided.

Not for Designers: On the Inadequacies of EU Design Law and How to Fix It

Design rights represent an interesting example of how the EU legislature has successfully regulated an otherwise heterogeneous field of law. Yet this type of protection is not for all. The tools created by EU intervention have been drafted paying much more attention to the industry sector rather than to designers themselves. In particular, modern, digitally based, individual or small-sized, 3D printing, open designers and their needs are largely neglected by such legislation. There is obviously nothing wrong in drafting legal tools around the needs of an industrial sector with an important role in the EU economy, on the contrary, this is a legitimate and good decision of industrial policy. However, good legislation should be fair, balanced, and (technologically) neutral in order to offer suitable solutions to all the players in the market, and all the citizens in the society, without discriminating the smallest or the newest: the cost would be to stifle innovation. The use of printing machinery to manufacture physical objects created digitally thanks to computer programs such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software has been in place for quite a few years, and it is actually the standard in many industrial fields, from aeronautics to home furniture. The change in recent years that has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting factor is a combination between the opularization of such technologies (price, size, usability, quality) and the diffusion of a culture based on access to and reuse of knowledge. We will call this blend Open Design. It is probably still too early, however, to say whether 3D printing will be used in the future to refer to a major event in human history, or instead will be relegated to a lonely Wikipedia entry similarly to ³Betamax² (copyright scholars are familiar with it for other reasons). It is not too early, however, to develop a legal analysis that will hopefully contribute to clarifying the major issues found in current EU design law structure, why many modern open designers will probably find better protection in copyright, and whether they can successfully rely on open licenses to achieve their goals. With regard to the latter point, we will use Creative Commons (CC) licenses to test our hypothesis due to their unique characteristic to be modular, i.e. to have different license elements (clauses) that licensors can choose in order to adapt the license to their own needs.”

An Optical Survey for Space Debris on Highly Eccentric MEO Orbits

Optical surveys for space debris in high-altitude orbits have been conducted since more than ten years. Originally these efforts concentrated mainly on the geostationary ring (GEO). Corresponding observation strategies, processing techniques and cataloguing approaches have been developed and successfully applied. The ESA GEO surveys, e.g., resulted in the detection of a significant population of small-size debris and later in the discovery of high area-to-mass ratio objects in GEO-like orbits. The observation scenarios were successively adapted to survey the geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) region; and recently surveys to search for debris in the medium Earth orbit (MEO) region of the global navigation satellite constellations were successfully conducted. Comparably less experience (both, in terms of practical observation and strategy definition) is available for eccentric orbits that (at least partly) are in the MEO region, in particular for the Molniya-type orbits. Several breakup events and deliberate fragmentations are known to have taken place in such orbits. Different survey and follow-up strategies for searching space debris objects in highly-eccentric MEO orbits, and to acquire orbits which are sufficiently accurate to catalogue such objects and to maintain their orbits over longer time spans were developed. Simulations were performed to compare the performance of different survey and cataloguing strategies. Eventually, optical observations were conducted in the framework of an ESA study using ESA’s Space Debris Telescope (ESASDT) the 1-m Zeiss telescope located at the Optical Ground Station (OGS) at the Teide Observatory at Tenerife, Spain. A first series of surveys of Molnjya-type orbits was performed between January and April 2013. During these four months survey observations were performed during nine nights. A basic survey consisted of observing a single geocentric field for 10 minutes. If a faint object was found, follow-up observations were performed during the same night to ensure a save rediscovery of the object during the next nights. Additional follow-up observations to maintain the orbits of these newly discovered faint objects were also acquired with AIUB ́s 1m ZIMLAT telescope in Zimmerwald, Switzerland. Eventually 195 basic surveys were performed during these nine nights corresponding to about 32.5 hours of observations. In total 24 uncorrelated faint objects were discovered and all known catalogue objects in the survey fields were detected. On average one uncorrelated object was found every 80 minutes. Some of these objects show a considerable brightness variation and have a high area-to-mass ratio as determined in the orbit estimation process.

Space-based space surveillance and tracking demonstrator: mission and system design

This paper presents the capabilities of a Space-Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) demonstration mission for Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) based on a micro-satellite platform. The results have been produced in the frame of ESA’s "Assessment Study for Space Based Space Surveillance Demonstration Mission" performed by the Airbus Defence and Space consortium. The assessment of SBSS in an SST system architecture has shown that both an operational SBSS and also already a well- designed space-based demonstrator can provide substantial performance in terms of surveillance and tracking of beyond-LEO objects. Especially the early deployment of a demonstrator, possible by using standard equipment, could boost initial operating capability and create a self-maintained object catalogue. Furthermore, unique statistical information about small-size LEO debris (mm size) can be collected in-situ. Unlike classical technology demonstration missions, the primary goal is the demonstration and optimisation of the functional elements in a complex end-to-end chain (mission planning, observation strategies, data acquisition, processing, etc.) until the final products can be offered to the users and with low technological effort and risk. The SBSS system concept takes the ESA SST System Requirements into account and aims at fulfilling SST core requirements in a stand-alone manner. Additionally, requirements for detection and characterisation of small-sizedLEO debris are considered. The paper presents details of the system concept, candidate micro-satellite platforms, the instrument design and the operational modes. Note that the detailed results of performance simulations for space debris coverage and cataloguing accuracy are presented in a separate paper “Capability of a Space-based Space Surveillance System to Detect and Track Objects in GEO, MEO and LEO Orbits” by J. Silha (AIUB) et al., IAC-14, A6, 1.1x25640.

Virtue, Law and Mercy

The attribution of responsibility in world society is increasingly a field of contestation. On the one hand, the perception of causal and moral links reaching far in space and time are ever more explicitly pronounced; on the other hand, the very complexity of these links often engenders a fragmentation of responsibility both in law (Veitch 2007) as well as in moral commitment. Moreover, those institutions of legal responsibility attempting to reflect some of these interrelations are often criticised as insufficient by those who follow alternative narratives of causation and moral community. Current institutions of responsibility in law appear to abstract from what could be called enabling contexts; they perform their cuts in the chains of enabling interactions at very brief intervals (Strathern 2001). The result is often “organised irresponsibility” (Veitch 2007; Beck 1996), producing appeals to a global community of concern in time and space without corresponding obligatory commitments. This talk explores alternative conceptualisations of responsibility, and enquires into their notion of the person, their temporal and socio-spatial dimensions, and their notion of liability.

Optical Light Curve Observations to Determine Attitude States of Space Debris

The currently proposed space debris remediation measures include the active removal of large objects and “just in time” collision avoidance by deviating the objects using, e.g., ground-based lasers. Both techniques require precise knowledge of the attitude state and state changes of the target objects. In the former case, to devise methods to grapple the target by a tug spacecraft, in the latter, to precisely propagate the orbits of potential collision partners as disturbing forces like air drag and solar radiation pressure depend on the attitude of the objects. Non-resolving optical observations of the magnitude variations, so-called light curves, are a promising technique to determine rotation or tumbling rates and the orientations of the actual rotation axis of objects, as well as their temporal changes. The 1-meter telescope ZIMLAT of the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern has been used to collect light curves of MEO and GEO objects for a considerable period of time. Recently, light curves of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) targets were acquired as well. We present different observation methods, including active tracking using a CCD subframe readout technique, and the use of a high-speed scientific CMOS camera. Technical challenges when tracking objects with poor orbit redictions, as well as different data reduction methods are addressed. Results from a survey of abandoned rocket upper stages in LEO, examples of abandoned payloads and observations of high area-to-mass ratio debris will be resented. Eventually, first results of the analysis of these light curves are provided.