Stephen Martin Leake: a Victorian's view of the Common Law

This article considers the life and work of Stephen Martin Leake and seeks to locate his work within the wider context of the procedural and substantive transformation of the mid-to-late Victorian legal world. In particular, the article attempts to rescue Leake from obscurity and emphasise his importance in this process. It is argued that Leake’s work began the process whereby common lawyers conceived of their law as organised in a principled rather than procedural manner. Later common law jurists built upon this work. Consideration is also given to the philosophical and jurisprudential sources upon which Leake drew in constructing his treatises.

The international law implications of the Turkish/Kurdish conflict

This article considers the threaties and customs governing armed conflict in the context of the long standing insurgency in southeast Turkey. The first part of the article analyzes the existing treaty and customary law concerning the threshold of an armed conflict and concludes that the insurgency in Southeast Turkey existing since 1984 rises to the level of an armed conflict based on criteria identified both in treaty and customary international law. The next consideration is the classification of this conflict and this part concludes that this situation is a non-international armed conflict due to lack of involvement of forces of another country. Finally, this article considers international humanitarian law applicable to this non-international armed conflict and reveals that as a result of the monumental International Committee of the Red Cross customary humanitarian law study, particularly with respect to the law of targeting, that the rules applicable to international and non-international armed conflict have never been closer.

Affective trajectories: locating diegetic velocity in the cinema experience

Films that feature high-speed diegetic motion, and present those high speeds through fast mobile framing and fast cutting, are frequently charged with generating a sensory overload which empties out meaning or any sense of spatial orientation. Inherent in this discourse is a privileging of optical-spatial intelligibility that suppresses consideration of the ways cinema can represent diegetic velocity, and the spectator’s sensory experience of the same. This paper will instead highlight the centrality of the evocation of a trajectory for movement for the spectator’s experience of diegetic speed, an evocation that does not depend on optical-spatial legibility for its affective force.

A Precise Formulation of the Third Law of Thermodynamics

The third law of thermodynamics is formulated precisely: all points of the state space of zero temperature I""(0) are physically adiabatically inaccessible from the state space of a simple system. In addition to implying the unattainability of absolute zero in finite time (or ""by a finite number of operations""), it admits as corollary, under a continuity assumption, that all points of I""(0) are adiabatically equivalent. We argue that the third law is universally valid for all macroscopic systems which obey the laws of quantum mechanics and/or quantum field theory. We also briefly discuss why a precise formulation of the third law for black holes remains an open problem.