The Nineteenth Century Law of the Sea and the British Abolition of the Slave Trade

This study focuses on British attempts during the nineteenth century to outlaw the Atlantic Slave Trade internationally, for which it was successful, after seventy-five years of effort. It considers the lack of willingness to allow Great Britain, at the Congress of Vienna and during the Concert of Europe, to establish a universal treaty outlawing the slave trade. As a result, this mandated a change in British tactics, which would ultimately prove to be successful – the establishment of a web of bilateral agreements which came to included all maritime powers. The study then moves on to consider the evolution of these bilateral agreements while highlighting the relationship between Great Britain and States (Brazil, France, Portugal and the United States) which were obstinate in their willingness to join this bilateral regime. Finally, consideration is given to the move towards the establishment of the 1890 General Act of Brussels; and thus the conclusion of the decades long British foreign policy objective of a universal instrument meant to suppress the Atlantic Slave Trade.

ARTICLE: On the Curious Disappearance of Human Servitude from General International Law

The following study considers the fragmentation of law which occurred in 1956 with regard to the law on servitude. As States were unwilling to go as far as the Universal Declaration on Human in establishing that "no one shall be held in [...] servitude", the negotiators of the 1956 Supplementary Conventions moved to expunge the very term 'servitude' from the text and to replace it with the phrase 'institutions and practices similar to slavery' which could then be abolished 'progressively and as soon as possible'. The negotiation history of the 1956 Convention clear demonstrate that the Universal Declaration on Human was the elephant in the room and that it ultimately lead to a fragmentation of the law as between general international law manifest in the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the one hand and international human rights law on the other. It is for this reason that, for instance the 2001 UN and 2005 Council of Europe trafficking conventions mention both 'practices similar to slavery' and 'servitude' as types of human exploitation to be suppressed in their definition of 'trafficking in persons'.

The Creative Life of Law: Improvisation, Between Tradition and Suspicion

Originally applying solely to chefs, waiters, dishwashers and the like, New York City (NYC) regulations governing cabaret employees were altered in 1943 to include musicians and entertainers, who until the late 1960’s would be required to hold a NYC Cabaret Employee’s Identification Card. The introduction of these notorious “police cards” occurred roughly contemporaneously to the emergence in after-hours night clubs in Harlem of a new and supposedly “wild”, improvisatory brand of jazz: bebop. This article adds to the many rather practical theories on why these cards were introduced a more abstract discussion coined in terms of the relationship between suspicion and tradition and focusing on differing essences of law and improvisatory jazz. While law breathes tradition and is suspicious of improvisation and unpredictability, the converse is true of jazz. Allusion to tradition in jazz improvisation is often viewed as a betrayal of its creative and spontaneous nature. And yet it is only through its departure from the stable transmission of past meaning that improvisation gains meaning. Law, in contrast, while appearing to be entirely composed of tradition, to transmit some sort of determinate and fixed meaning, is constantly betraying itself. As no two legal actions can be exactly the same, judges must improvise on tradition and past precedent every time they are asked to decide a case. Law can thus neither dispense with nor be completely determined by tradition. The legal decision instead lies on the border between what it “is” and what it otherwise could be and every judicial act is, in some sense, a species of improvisation. This article uses the cabaret cards to explore this uncertain terrain between law and improvisation, between tradition and suspicion.

When is the second local multiplier algebra of a C*-algebra equal to the first?

We discuss necessary as well as sufficient conditions for the second iterated local multiplier algebra of a separable C*-algebra to agree with the first.