States and the Interpretation of Treaties opens with a provocative reconsideration of a debate on the subject of comparative international legal obligations by the United Nations’s International Law Commission. In this book, distinguished Tufts University legal scholar Dimitris Liakopoulos identifies and explores relevant considerations in the work of the Commission and offers an overview of the status of international law as defined by the United Nations authority responsible for its codification and development.

In the 400 years since the first known execution was carried out for treason in Virginia, American jurisdictions have debated both the appropriateness and methods of capital punishment. Over that time, courts have placed varying restrictions on its application, excluding categories of citizens (for example the insane or the underaged) and evaluating and excluding methods of execution by the U.S.

In Debtor Protection in American and European Union Bankruptcy Law, international law scholar Dimitris Liakopulos raises a delicate issue at the foundations of the modern banking system by analyzing US bankruptcy law with a focus on the concept of automatic stay. His work identifies legal sources and authorities having repercussions in terms of operational protection. It then examines their functional profiles, with specific regard to procedure.

Command responsibility, or executive accountability, assumes that leaders are responsible for the actions of their subordinates. If subordinates misbehave, violate basic moral laws, transgress international law, or thwart international standards of behavior, their leader may be called before to justice. Standards that set the boundaries of human action have been evolving for many millennia, with some degree of precision arriving after the post-World War II international war crimes prosecutions.

Colonialism led to the importation, or better still imposition, of European administrative systems on the indigenous people of Africa. France specialized in this, practicing direct rule and an assimilation policy in their colonies up to the time of independence. In Cameroon, French administrative law (“droit adminstratif”) became part of the national legal system.

Soon after a series of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, African-American protestors there and Palestinian protestors in the West Bank began to include the slogan “From Ferguson to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime” in their public statements. In Neither Thugs nor Terrorists, Randa Serhan uses cutting edge first-hand research to explore how these two distant communities found common cause in protesting the militarization of the forces that policed and criminalized them.

By 2015, four years after the dawn of the Arab Spring, the prospects of a unifying political reform narrative in the Arab World were noticeably dwindling. The unprecedented opportunity for a regional workshop of reform and state building had stalled, with Islamist movements more anxious about questions of identity and religious ethics, and with the old guards of the “deep state” establishments (mainly military or religious personnel) countering the revolutions, rather than being concerned with constitutionalism.

Edited by veteran Czech diplomat and senior religion scholar Glenn Hughes, The Presence of the Past presents new insights from a conference hosted by the Václav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy at Florida International University, in cooperation with the Czech non-profit organization Post Bellumand the Vaclav Havel Library. Its fundamental topic is memory, the human capacity to retain its contents in the flux of time, which is explored and discussed both theoretically and in terms of current action-oriented public discourse.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Much of humanity’s basis for existence is becoming subordinate to software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations that comprise what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data collection threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with software processes in order to allow a profound upgrade of our own ontological understanding.

Translator:
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick