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Review Essay: 'Seeing Beyond The Limits Of International Law,' Jack L. Goldsmith And Eric A. Posner, 'The Limits Of International Law', Paul Schiff Berman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In 'The Limits of International Law,' Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner use the simplifying assumptions of rational choice theory in an attempt to demonstrate that international law has no independent valence whatsoever. Rather, according to the authors, each state single-mindedly pursues its own rational interest and obeys international legal norms only to the extent that such norms serve those pre-existing interests. In this Review Essay, I argue that their vision of international law is deeply flawed. In particular, I take issue with the authors' assumption that states simply have pre-existing unitary interests that they then rationally pursue. First, I argue …

Post-Katrina Reconstruction Liability: Exposing The Inferior Risk-Bearer, Steven L. Schooner, Erin Siuda-Pfeffer

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article describes the doctrinal, functional, and moral flaws inherent in the Gulf Coast Recovery Act (GCRA), a United States Senate bill that would provide liability protection to government contractors engaged in disaster relief work in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, as well as in future disaster areas. First, the Article discusses the history of the government contractor defense and finds that the protection provided by the GCRA is quite unlike the traditional government contractor defense. This Article further argues that this doctrinal departure cannot be justified on grounds of efficiency or fairness, as the GCRA allocates risk away …

A Case Study In Comparative Procurement Law: Assessing Uncitral's Lessons For U.S. Procurement, Christopher R. Yukins

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) has commissioned a working group, with delegations from many industrialized and developing nations, to reform and update the UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services. The working group is currently reviewing reforms on a number of fronts. This essay focuses on three areas of reform in particular - electronic communications, electronic reverse auctions, and unrealistically low bidding - to gauge whether lessons from the UNCITRAL debate may be useful for reform in the U.S. procurement system. As the essay reflects, the international debate surrounding UNCITRAL reform does in …

Lost In Translation? Corporate Legal Transplants In China, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay examines an old question - why it is often so difficult for transplanted legal norms and institutions to take - with the hope of shedding a bit of new light on it through a specific focus on institutions for corporate governance in China. Foreign norms and institutions are borrowed because they seem to the borrowers to serve some need. Very often they are borrowed in a time of rapid social change in which the home culture, so to speak, is lagging behind. But the problem of fit is real and severe.

First, although the borrowers may imagine their …

Measuring Global Poverty Right: Mission Impossible?, M. G. Quibria

Research Collection School Of Economics

The international community is committed to millennium development goals which postulate a vision of global development that makes eliminating poverty and sustaining development the overriding objective of global development efforts. In the hierarchy of the MDGs, the first and foremost goal is to reduce by half, between 1990–2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than a dollar a day (a widely used yardstick to measure extreme poverty). However, estimating such poverty across developing countries and globally is by no means a simple exercise nor has it yielded unambiguous results. This article provides a brief summary of the state …

A Class Of Nonlinear Stochastic Volatility Models, Jun Yu, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a class of nonlinear stochastic volatility models based on the Box-Cox transformation which offers an alternative to the one introduced in Andersen (1994). The proposed class encompasses many parametric stochastic volatility models that have appeared in the literature, including the well known lognormal stochastic volatility model, and has an advantage in the ease with which different specifications on stochastic volatility can be tested. In addition, the functional form of transformation which induces marginal normality of volatility is obtained as a byproduct of this general way of modeling stochastic volatility. The efficient method of moments approach is used …

Singapore: The Missing Babies Problem, Kheng Boon, Eugene Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Other People's Country: A Memoir; And, Developing A Trustworthy Narrator: An Essay, Maureen Helen

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis comprises two interrelated sections. The first section is a substantial piece of creative writing, which l have cailed 'Other People's Country: A Memoir, in the genre of travel memoir, and an essay. The memoir borrows techniques from fiction, drama and poetry to tell a story of a middle-aged, middle-class city nurse, who travels to a remote settlement at the edge of the Western Desert of Western Australia to provide health care for a fluctuating population of around 400 people, for whom English is a third or fourth language.

Writing that includes stories about vulnerable people from another culture, …

Land Whisperings And A Poetics Of Newplace And Birthplace, Glenly R. Phillips

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The creative component of this doctoral submission, entitled Land Whisperings, comprises a selection of seventy-five poems, ten short stories and a novella. The connecting theme of this body of work is the emphasis on the landscapes of three continents: Australia, my birthplace, Italy, my wife Rita's birthplace, and China, where I have visited and taught for many years. These locations have also been the subject of substantial research and field experience over the past four years. Since I am an Australian, there is a natural predominance of Australian settings for the poetry and short stories. The selected creative works also …

An Investigation Into The Use Of Information And Communication Technology (Ict) By Senior Educators In Thailand, Nattavee Utakrit

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Information and Communication Technology (lCT) may not just be for younger people or people who are still working. This study shows that it can be of importance lar groups of senior people who are healthy and still have the desire to use their skills, abilities, and knowledge to assist or support our modern society. The particulnr groups of senior people concemed in this sludy were Thai senior educators above 60 from universities in Thailand living in Bangkok. The aims of this study concentrate on how they use lCT to attain their professional goals (research and teaching activities). It explores their …

L S Penrose's Limit Theorem: Tests By Simulation, Pao Li Chang, Vincent Chua, Moshe Machover

Research Collection School Of Economics

L S Penrose's Limit Theorem-which is implicit in Penrose (1952, p. 72) [Penrose, 1952. On the Objective Study of Crowd Behavior. H. K. Lewis and Co, London, p. 72] and for which he gave no rigorous proof-says that, in simple weighted voting games, if the number of voters increases indefinitely and the relative quota is pegged, then-under certain conditions-the ratio between the voting powers of any two voters converges to the ratio between their weights. Lindner and Machover (2004) [Lindner I., Machover M. 2004. L.S. Penrose's limit theorem: proof of some special cases. Mathematical Social Sciences 47, 37-49] prove some …

Realized Variance And Market Microstructure Noise - Comment, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.

Modeling The Firm-Size Distribution Using Box-Cox Heteroscedastic Regression, Zhenlin Yang, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

Using the Box-Cox regression model with heteroscedasticity (BCHR), we re-examine the size distribution of the Portuguese manufacturing firms studied by Machado and Mata () using the Box-Cox quantile regression (BCQR) method. We show that the BCHR model compares favourably against the BCQR method. In particular, the BCHR model can answer the key questions addressed by the BCQR method, with the advantage that the estimated quantile functions are monotonic. Furthermore, estimation of the BCHR model is straightforward and the confidence intervals of the BCHR regression quantiles are easy to compute.

Financial Liberalization In A Small Open Economy, Haiping Zhang, Jürgen Von Hagen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We address three related questions concerning financial liberalization in a small open economy. Does financial liberalization and the resulting capital inflow improve production efficiency in the domestic economy? Who benefits from financial liberalization in the long run and in the short run? Should financial liberalization be implemented gradually or hastily? Our main results are as follows. First, whether financial deregulation in one sector can improve production efficiency may depend on financial regulation in other sectors. Second, financial liberalization may have opposite welfare implications to domestic agents with different productivity in the long run. Third, although some domestic agents lose in …

Semi-Parametric Inference In A Bivariate (Multivariate) Mixture Model, Denis H. Y. Leung, Jing Qin

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider estimation in a bivariate mixture model in which the component distributions can be decomposed into identical distributions. Previous approaches to estimation involve parametrizing the distributions. In this paper, we use a semi-parametric approach. The method is based on the exponential tilt model of Anderson (1979), where the log ratio of probability (density) functions from the bivariate components is linear in the observations. The proposed model does not require training samples, i.e., data with confirmed component membership. We show that in bivariate mixture models, parameters are identifiable. This is in contrast to previous works, where parameters are identifiable if …

An Empirical Examination Of Ipo Underpricing In The Chinese A-Share Market, Ting Yu, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

Research in the literature shows that initial public offerings (IPOs) of common stocks are systematically priced at a discount to their subsequent initial trading price. The large underpricing magnitude in the Chinese IPO market has attracted much attention. We consider three hypotheses that may explain the IPO underpricing in China. These are the winner's curse hypothesis, the ex ante uncertainty hypothesis and the signaling hypothesis. Among these hypotheses, the winner's curse hypothesis has not been tested in the Chinese market. Using IPO data for online fixed-price offerings from November 1995 to December 1998, our results show that the winner's curse …

A Survey On Physical Delivery Versus Cash Settlement In Futures Contracts, Donald Lien, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

A futures contract may adopt physical delivery or cash settlement to liquidate open positions after the maturity day. While traditionally physical delivery specification is favored, exchanges have recently turned to examine cash settlement possibilities. This paper summarizes current literature on settlement specifications with emphases on market manipulation, cash index construction, and hedging effectiveness comparisons.

Coalition Formation Theories Revisited: An Empirical Investigation Of Aumann's Hypothesis, Vincent Chua, Dan S. Felsenthal

Research Collection School Of Economics

In one of the earliest attempts to examine the effect of a priori voting power on actual political phenomena, Riker (1959) looked at changes in party affiliation in the French National Assembly in 1953–54, and used these data to test the hypothesis that deputies who switched parties were seeking thereby to increase their a priori voting power. His findings were negative, or at best inconclusive.

Commune-Level Estimation Of Poverty Measure And Its Application In Cambodia, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

Cambodia is still suffering from the legacy of civil conflict after more than a decade. With over one-third of the population living below the poverty line, poverty remains one of the most serious problems in Cambodia. A number of governmental bodies, local and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and international organizations operating in Cambodia have made eradicating poverty a priority and have established many social programmes to this end. In designing such programmes, the efficient allocation of resources is essential for making poverty alleviation more cost-effective. Targeting is often helpful for this purpose because one can avoid wasting resources on the …

Aicpa Board/Council Briefing Synopsis, Updated As January 1, 2006, American Institute Of Certified Public Accountants (Aicpa)

Association Sections, Divisions, Boards, Teams

No abstract provided.

A Case Study Of Public School Secondary Teachers Of English, Supervisors Of English, And School Administrators Awareness And Implementation Of Issues Of Moral Education Within The Canon Of Literature Presented In The Classroom Setting, Dennis M. Flynn

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Claiming Agency: Edith Wharton's Public And Private Spaces In "The House Of Mirth", Lauren Del Polito

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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A Study Of New Jersey's Assessment And Accountability System For Students With Disabilities And Its Impact On Special Education Services, Julie Moul Gardner

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Use of high stakes assessment for special needs students is a key element in the current educational reform movement. State assessment systems use these tests to determine and report school accountability scores, distribute school funding, and assess school rewards and sanctions. The impact of including these students' test score on the district accountability reports has not yet been determined. Directors of special services, the primary individuals for supervising or coordinating district special education programs, have an extensive understanding of administrative and functional knowledge of special education services and are therefore able to provide insight concerning the impact of accountability on …

A Study Of The Qualities Of Effective Mentor Teachers, Eileen Mooney Cambria

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

A STUDY OF THE QUALITIES OF EFFECTIVE MENTOR TEACHERS The purpose of this study is to identify the attributes of teachers who are master teachers and exemplary mentors. This qualitative inquiry was designed to shed light on the values, attributes, beliefs and practices of these individuals as they relate to the art of teaching and mentoring novice teachers. A stable faculty provides schools with a strong support structure that enables students to achieve high levels of instruction and new teachers the high quality of mentoring needed during the first phase of their careers. Recruiting new teachers to fill the void …

A Study Of The Status Of The Strategic Planning Process As Used By Public School Districts In Six Suburban New York City Counties, Bartholomew Linehan

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Over the past two decades, strategic planning has emerged as a management tool to assist administrators in leading public school districts forward. If strategic planning is an important administrative tool in moving a school district toward its vision, how and in what form is it being utilized in suburban New York City school districts? The purpose of this study was to understand the utilization of strategic planning in suburban New York City school districts and to understand the constraints, training and technical needs regarding strategic planning. This study also discusses the relationship existing between strategic planning and the key district …

A Validation Study Of The Administrator Data Use Survey, Francis Nicholas Sheboy

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The purpose of this study was to create an original instrument, the Administrator Data Use Survey (ADUS), to assess practicing school administrators' perceptions of the importance of data to school improvement, the importance of data to their position, and the degree to which they feel their graduate preparation in educational administration adequately prepared them for the data use demands of their position. Validation panels were used to assess construct, content, criterion, and face validity of the ADUS. In addition, factor analysis was utilized for construct validation. The ADUS was sent to a random sampling of practicing administrators from New York …

Being Muslim In 21st Century America: Does Living In America Create An Identity Crisis For The Generation X Muslim Woman?, Laila Uddin

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Over the years, I've observed South Asian females and males alike struggling to fulfill religious and cultural obligations to their family while fitting in with the norms of society. I also learned of the term "ABCD" which stands for American Born Confused Desi. This refers to people of Desi or South Asian origin living in the United States. "Confused" refers to their confusion regarding their identity from either being born in America or living here since an early age and having been exposed to American culture more than their ancestral culture. That is when I realized that I was not …

Template-Based Metadata Extraction For Heterogeneous Collection, Jianfeng Tang

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

With the growth of the Internet and related tools, there has been a rapid growth of online resources. In particular, by using high-quality OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools it has become easy to convert an existing corpus into digital form and make it available online. However, a number of organizations have legacy collections that lack metadata. The lack of metadata hampers not only the discovery and dispersion of these collections over the Web, but also their interoperability with other collections. Unfortunately, manual metadata creation is expensive and time-consuming for a large collection, and most existing automated metadata extraction approaches have …

Buffy Never Goes In Alone: The Rhetorical Construction Of Feminism In Buffy And The Vampire Slayer's Final Season, Susan M. Payne-Mulliken, Valerie R. Renegar

Iowa Journal of Communication

This essay is a rhetorical criticism of the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) and examines how metaphor is used to rhetorically construct feminist concepts. The essay specifically analyzes the metaphoric construction of the patriarchy and the feminist concept of sisterhood in the final season of BtVS. A thorough analysis reveals that the above ideas, represented via metaphor, are frequent and crucial components of the final season's plot. By using metaphor as a way to shape reality, BtVS communicates feminist ideals to its audience, thereby contributing to their overall perception of the movement.

2006 Anatomy Of A Panther, Northern University High School

Malcolm Price Laboratory School Yearbooks

The student yearbook of the Northern University High School, part of the Malcolm Price Laboratory School of the University of Northern Iowa.