I argue that if a special science satisfies certain key assumptions that are familiar from physicalist accounts of the special sciences and from physics, then its causal regularities have an associated notion of entropy, and that this causal entropy cannot decrease from a robust cause to its effect. Due to its analogy with the second laws of thermodynamics and statistical physics, I call the latter conclusion the causal second law. In this paper, I clarify the key assumptions, prove the causal second law, give sufficient conditions for causal entropy increase, relate the causal second law to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, and argue that the reversibility objection does not threaten it. In addition, I claim that the causal second law is compatible with a non-metaphysical understanding of supervenience and the open systems view, argue that it does not imply a causal time arrow, reflect on relaxing the robustness condition, question whether it is necessary to invoke thermodynamics to show that special sciences' time arrows exist, and discuss a transition-relative-frequency-based, special-science-internal characterization of causal regularities.
In this Article, I explore the impending conflict between the protection of civil rights and artificial intelligence (AI). While both areas of law have amassed rich and well-developed areas of scholarly work and doctrinal support, a growing body of scholars are interrogating the intersection between them. This Article argues that the issues surrounding algorithmic accountability demonstrate a deeper, more structural tension within a new generation of disputes regarding law and technology. As I argue, the true promise of AI does not lie in the information we reveal to one another, but rather in the questions it raises about the interaction of technology, property, and civil rights. For this reason, I argue that we are looking in the wrong place if we look only to the state to address issues of algorithmic accountability. Instead, we must turn to other ways to ensure more transparency and accountability that stem from private industry, rather than public regulation. The issue of algorithmic bias represents a crucial new world of civil rights concerns, one that is distinct in nature from the ones that preceded it. Since we are in a world where the activities of private corporations, rather than the state, are raising concerns about privacy, due process, and discrimination, we must focus on the role of private corporations in addressing the issue. Towards this end, I discuss a variety of tools to help eliminate the opacity of AI, including codes of conduct, impact statements, and whistleblower protection, which I argue carries the potential to encourage greater endogeneity in civil rights enforcement. Ultimately, by examining the relationship between private industry and civil rights, we can perhaps develop a new generation of forms of accountability in the process.
The research analyzes the economic and geopolitical ramifications of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on Russia’s energy exports and financial resilience, utilizing the Interdependence Theory as a guiding framework. The eruption of war and subsequent Western sanctions disrupted Russia’s longstanding energy trade with Europe, driving a strategic pivot toward Asian markets, specifically China and India. This evolution has presented considerable barriers, including infrastructural constraints, diminished profit margins, and increased military costs, which have amplified domestic economic pressures. By examining the erosion of mutual economic dependencies, the research illustrates how geopolitical tensions can alter interdependence into vulnerability, fundamentally changing global energy safety and eco relations. The determinations underscore that while Russia has managed to redirect some exports, losing its primary European market and the complexities of new trade partnerships have weakened its economic position. This research contributes to broader debates on the resilience and adaptability of interconnected economies during geopolitical crises, offering insight into the evolving structure of international energy markets in an era marked by shifting alliances and persistent uncertainty. The study underscores the importance of understanding how external shocks can reshape national economies and the broader global order.
Political science (General), International relations
El Reino Unido se ha consolidado como un referente en el Arbitraje Marítimo, convirtiéndose en foro principal de procedimientos a nivel mundial, y planea mantenerse en ese sitial de honor a través de la revisión de su legislación en esta materia. Por ello, en 2024 se tiene previsto que se publique una Reforma a la Ley de Arbitraje de 1996 que contribuya al fortalecimiento de esta institución dentro del sistema británico.
Son variados los tópicos que incluye esta enmienda, sin embargo, uno de los que más puede impactar en los casos con componentes marítimos es justamente el tema jurisdiccional, asunto de obligatoria revisión siempre que se plantea un litigio marítimo con componentes de extranjería relevantes.
De ahí, que se haga obligatorio escudriñar los cambios que se proponen en este ámbito, que básicamente se componen de una serie de condiciones, dirigidas a los órganos judiciales, para poder admitir impugnaciones jurisdiccionales sobre procesos o decisiones arbitrales.
Al condicionarse o limitarse la esfera de influencia que tienen los jueces sobre los procedimientos arbitrales, se robustece el arbitraje como medio autónomo de resolución de controversias, a la par que se incentiva a los litigantes a acudir al mismo, puesto que se garantiza el respeto al procedimiento, la celeridad y la economía procesal, puntos claves en la estrategia de Reino Unido en su deseo de conservar su liderato como sede del arbitraje internacional.
This research paper explores the Hindutva ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by analysing its implications for Pakistan. BJP’s ascension to power led the Hindu Nationalist government to implement the Hindutva ideological rhetoric. With a substantial Muslim population living in India and rivalry with Pakistan, such policies have significant implications for the Indian Muslim community as well as for Pakistan. These Hindutva-driven policies have not only raised concern regarding minorities' rights in India, affecting Kashmiri Muslims but also raising security challenges for Pakistan. In the past decade, the legislative and executive bodies have been actively engaged in promoting this ideology, as evidenced by the amendment of national citizenship law, growing riots against Muslims, and the Indian government's policy towards Pakistan. By analysing the recent minorities-related events, this paper seeks to assess the impact of the policies of the BJP government towards the Indian Muslim community and its interaction with Pakistan.
Bibliography Entry
Xiaolian, Shi and Uzma Siraj and Alla Ud Din. 2024. "Modi’s Hindutva Policy and Its Impact on Indo-Pak Relations." Margalla Papers 28 (1): 1-15.
International relations, Private international law. Conflict of laws
This text introduces the monograph “Critical Theories and Social Injustice: Human Rights in Times of Weak Democracies and Neo-Capitalisms”. It presents a large part of the debates that took place at the workshop of the same name held at the Oñati Institute for the Sociology of Law in September 2020. The workshop originated from the work of the Seminar on Critical Theories organized by the Gregorio Peces-Barba Human Rights Institute of the Carlos III University of Madrid. It presents and contextualizes the 14 contributions included here, which aim to contribute to the collective construction of responses and approaches to social injustices from contemporary critical theories. All this is from the interdisciplinary and committed viewpoints of researchers in different parts of the world.
In this paper, we establish an explicit higher reciprocity law for the polynomial ring over a nonprincipal ultraproduct of finite fields. Such an ultraproduct can be taken over the same finite field, which allows to recover the classical higher reciprocity law for the polynomial ring $\mathbb{F}_q[t]$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ that is due to Dedekind, Kühne, Artin, and Schmidt. On the other hand, when the ultraproduct is taken over finite fields of unbounded cardinalities, we obtain an explicit higher reciprocity law for the polynomial ring over an infinite field in both characteristics $0$ and $p >0$ for some prime $p$. We then use the higher reciprocity law to prove an analogue of the Grunwald--Wang theorem for such a polynomial ring in both characteristics $0$ and $p > 0$ for some prime $p$.
We study the probability that certain laws are satisfied on infinite groups, focusing on elements sampled by random walks. For several group laws, including the metabelian one, we construct examples of infinite groups for which the law holds with high probability, but the group does not satisfy the law virtually. On the other hand, we show that if an infinite group satisfies the law $x^2=1$ with positive probability, then it is virtually abelian.
Large, general purpose language models have demonstrated impressive performance across many different conversational domains. While multi-domain language models achieve low overall perplexity, their outputs are not guaranteed to stay within the domain of a given input prompt. This paper proposes domain privacy as a novel way to quantify how likely a conditional language model will leak across domains. We also develop policy functions based on token-level domain classification, and propose an efficient fine-tuning method to improve the trained model's domain privacy. Experiments on membership inference attacks show that our proposed method has comparable resiliency to methods adapted from recent literature on differentially private language models.
We apply recent ideas about complexity and randomness to the philosophy of laws and chances. We develop two ways to use algorithmic randomness to characterize probabilistic laws of nature. The first, a generative chance* law, employs a nonstandard notion of chance. The second, a probabilistic* constraining law, impose relative frequency and randomness constraints that every physically possible world must satisfy. The constraining notion removes a major obstacle to a unified governing account of non-Humean laws, on which laws govern by constraining physical possibilities; it also provides independently motivated solutions to familiar problems for the Humean best-system account (the Big Bad Bug and the zero-fit problem). On either approach, probabilistic laws are tied more tightly to corresponding sets of possible worlds: some histories permitted by traditional probabilistic laws are now ruled out as physically impossible. Consequently, the framework avoids one variety of empirical underdetermination while bringing to light others that are typically overlooked.
Differentially private (DP) stochastic convex optimization (SCO) is ubiquitous in trustworthy machine learning algorithm design. This paper studies the DP-SCO problem with streaming data sampled from a distribution and arrives sequentially. We also consider the continual release model where parameters related to private information are updated and released upon each new data, often known as the online algorithms. Despite that numerous algorithms have been developed to achieve the optimal excess risks in different $\ell_p$ norm geometries, yet none of the existing ones can be adapted to the streaming and continual release setting. To address such a challenge as the online convex optimization with privacy protection, we propose a private variant of online Frank-Wolfe algorithm with recursive gradients for variance reduction to update and reveal the parameters upon each data. Combined with the adaptive differential privacy analysis, our online algorithm achieves in linear time the optimal excess risk when $1<p\leq 2$ and the state-of-the-art excess risk meeting the non-private lower ones when $2<p\leq\infty$. Our algorithm can also be extended to the case $p=1$ to achieve nearly dimension-independent excess risk. While previous variance reduction results on recursive gradient have theoretical guarantee only in the independent and identically distributed sample setting, we establish such a guarantee in a non-stationary setting. To demonstrate the virtues of our method, we design the first DP algorithm for high-dimensional generalized linear bandits with logarithmic regret. Comparative experiments with a variety of DP-SCO and DP-Bandit algorithms exhibit the efficacy and utility of the proposed algorithms.
Abstract
This article discusses the enforceability of Article 9 of Law No. 42 of 1999 on Fiduciary Guarantee that allows the use of receivables as debt collateral in business practices in Indonesia. Receivables bound by fiduciary collateral is deemed as a special collateral— in the context of civil law, a special collateral will be prioritized in case the debtor does not voluntarily make when due. In business practices, long-term receivables will be established following an agreement between a debtor and a third party, and the receivables that the debtor is entitled to receive from the third party will be provided as collateral to secure the debtor’s obligations under his loan agreement with the creditor. The issue discussed in this paper is the fact that although theoretically special collateral in the form of receivables should be able to increase the creditor’s assurance of getting repaid, in practice long-term receivables put higher risk on the creditor instead. As comparison, this paper uses the accounts receivables fiduciary in the United Kingdom. The Writing Method used in this paper is the normative juridical approach with a focus on conducting juridical studies regarding the creditors' risk in the use of receivables, specifically long-term debt collateral. This paper shows that receivables that are used as collateral in fiduciary agreements actually put the greatest risk on the creditor; especially if the agreement between the debtor and the third party stipulates that in case the debtor fails to fulfil his obligations, all receivables that he is supposed to receive from the third party will be aborted and become non-existent.
Private international law. Conflict of laws, Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law
رهگیری و بازگرداندن کشتی حامل پناهجویان در مناطق مختلف دریایی از اقدامهای شایع دولت ساحلی در سالهای اخیر است. این وضعیت در تقابل با تعهد دولت ساحلی بر کمکرسانی به کشتی حامل پناهجویان است که بررسی ابعاد آن از اهداف و موضوع این نوشتار است. اتکای پژوهش بر مقررات کنوانسیون حقوق دریاها، سولاس و سار، و سؤال اصلی آن این است که مؤلفههای تعهد بینالمللی دولت ساحلی در کمکرسانی به پناهجویان و احتراز از رهگیری و بازگرداندن کشتی حامل آنها در مناطق مختلف دریایی چیست؟ یافتههای پژوهش نشان میدهد که دولت ساحلی بر همکاری با فرماندة کشتی و دولت صاحب پرچم آن در نجات افراد در حالت اضطرار در دریاها، تخلیة پناهجویان و تأمین محل امن برای اسکان آنها در قلمرو سرزمینی متعهد است. با وجود این، بازگرداندن کشتی حامل پناهجویان از منطقة نظارت و دریای سرزمینی دولت ساحلی با مقررات کنوانسیون حقوق دریاها، و از دریاهای آزاد و منطقة انحصاری اقتصادی با توسل به موافقتنامههای دوجانبه موجهه است اما مقبولیت ندارد.
In “Judicialization of the Sea: Bargaining in the Shadow of UNCLOS,” Sara Mitchell and Andrew Owsiak make a valuable contribution to an expanding body of scholarship that considers whether and how international courts have out-of-court “shadow effects.” The authors argue that, in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) regime, the threat of binding international dispute settlement (IDS)—which entails high costs for states—encourages rational potential litigants to settle out of court through other peaceful and less costly IDS mechanisms. In this essay, I challenge the narrow focus of Mitchell and Owsiak's analysis, considering the diverse aims and processes of judicialized international cooperation in two key ways. First, the authors’ focus on peaceful IDS as the sole outcome of interest overlooks other important cooperation goals driving judicialization and delegation to international courts. An emphasis on out-of-court IDS, even when achieved peacefully, can actually undermine other objectives for judicialized international cooperation, including the development of international law and greater compliance with international law. Second, Mitchell and Oswiak's theoretical mechanism assumes that an international court contributes to its out-of-court influence through its case law, but this discounts how international courts can engage in a range of out-of-court, non-adjudicative activities that can affect potential litigants’ cost-benefit analyses regarding judicialized versus non-judicialized IDS. Indicating its preference for increasing its “direct effects” through adjudicating disputes, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) has developed capacity-building and training programs to encourage judicialized IDS under UNCLOS and states’ litigation at the ITLOS. Overall, I highlight how there is a broad range of actors and processes underpinning international courts’ out-of-court effects, and how these actors and processes can work towards multiple, at times conflicting, aims for judicialized international cooperation.
Comparative law. International uniform law, Private international law. Conflict of laws
We propose a reparametrization scheme to address the challenges of applying differentially private SGD on large neural networks, which are 1) the huge memory cost of storing individual gradients, 2) the added noise suffering notorious dimensional dependence. Specifically, we reparametrize each weight matrix with two \emph{gradient-carrier} matrices of small dimension and a \emph{residual weight} matrix. We argue that such reparametrization keeps the forward/backward process unchanged while enabling us to compute the projected gradient without computing the gradient itself. To learn with differential privacy, we design \emph{reparametrized gradient perturbation (RGP)} that perturbs the gradients on gradient-carrier matrices and reconstructs an update for the original weight from the noisy gradients. Importantly, we use historical updates to find the gradient-carrier matrices, whose optimality is rigorously justified under linear regression and empirically verified with deep learning tasks. RGP significantly reduces the memory cost and improves the utility. For example, we are the first able to apply differential privacy on the BERT model and achieve an average accuracy of $83.9\%$ on four downstream tasks with $ε=8$, which is within $5\%$ loss compared to the non-private baseline but enjoys much lower privacy leakage risk.
Article 139 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which restricts and binds the referral of litigation regarding public and State property to arbitration, for obtaining an approval from the government and the parliament, has led to different views and legal opinions. In general, they can be categorized into “literalist” and “realist” theory”. The result of literalist theory is that article 139 applies to any dispute that on the one hand, there is the State, and it has been agreed upon by arbitration and thus if any dispute exists, it will be resolved by arbitration in which, it should obtain an approval from the government and the parliament, otherwise, the arbitration will not be valid. According to this view, article 139, in general, is not economically beneficial for the State and therefore it must be thought upon. In contrast, there is the realist theory which can be a response to the literalist theory and holds that, with a rational and principled interpretation, the principle can be freed from the problems which are arisen by former theory and also the dynamics of principle 139 is useful for the State in terms of national interest
As he searches for differences in how democratic and authoritarian governments use international law, Tom Ginsburg highlights—perhaps inadvertently—the fact that both kinds of regime use law as a tool to advance their goals. Governments’ goals may differ, both within and across regime types, but the instrumental use of law in the service of political ends does not. Ginsburg's article permits three distinct readings: it is an effort to show a correlation between regime-type and uses of international law; it is also an argument that the historical-normative core of international law included the promotion of “liberal” goals such as human rights and democracy; and third, it is a defense of the meta-claim that law follows the political purposes of society's powerful actors. This third contribution is the quietest in the article but is arguably the most important. Because the methodological difficulties in correlating regime type with attitude toward international law are insuperable, Ginsburg's contribution is that he directs attention to the substantive goals that governments pursue through law and to the tradeoffs that follow as one goal wins over others. The normative valence of international law depends on how one feels about these practical tradeoffs; those whose interests are harmed by international law have good reason to feel disadvantaged.
Comparative law. International uniform law, Private international law. Conflict of laws