This paper reconstructs a set of expectations, that is, what a subject or a group of subjects expects in terms of fundamental rights with respect to the Chilean constituent process 2023. To do so, it analyses the foundations of the popular initiatives by means of the content analysis method. In this way, it is shown that what is pursued by some of the actors outside the world of legal operators reflects a set of historical demands, but also a series of disagreements regarding what constitution Chileans need in the face of what recent reform processes have shown.
Ecocide, defined as the destruction of ecosystems with knowledge of its enduring effects, lacks recognition as an autonomous offence in international criminal law. The Rome Statute limits liability under Article 8(2)(b)(iv) to wartime conduct causing environmental damage that is widespread, long-term, and severe relative to anticipated military advantage. This schema excludes slow-onset harm, such as anthropogenic climate change. Using case studies of Ukraine and Tuvalu, this article juxtaposes two divergent yet equally poignant scenarios: the wartime devastation of habitats and the prospective risk of statehood impairment through sea-level rise. First-person accounts from the countries highlight Radbruch’s contention that law forfeits validity when it no longer guarantees the minimum conditions of life, and Alexy’s thesis that principles lose normative force when proportionality cannot justify ensuing harm. This article argues that a self-standing Ecocide Convention, equipped with universal jurisdiction, would not merely supplement the Rome Statute but offer the necessary framework to translate ecocide into enforceable criminal responsibility.
Today, after the closure of a large number of international space projects, states are focusing on the development of a national space industry, in connection with which there is a need to form a national space law, the presence of which is especially relevant when creating conditions for the functioning of private space activities. The paper analyzes the domestic law of the United States of America in the field of space activities in general, commercial use of space in particular as an example of the most developed, and comprehensive codified national legislation, which has gradually been formed in the United States, starting from the 80s of the 20th century. The system of sources of national space law of the United States is considered, as well as individual regulatory legal acts directly aimed at creating favorable conditions for the participation of the private sector in space projects, including the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, the American Space Commerce Free Enterprise Act of 2018. The paper further analyzes the relationship between the norms of US national space legislation and their international legal obligations, in particular with the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, by determining the place of international treaties in the US legal system and the method for resolving conflicts between statutes and international treaties. The issues of space resource extraction and military use of space, which are firmly rooted in US national policy and legislation, remain controversial from an international legal point of view.
Erdal Dursun, Mohammad Ekram Yawar, Anwarulhaq Amani
The present article seeks to evaluate the international effects of the establishment of national economic law rules and the conditions for their application based on the principles of public international law. Considering the emergence of national economic law, which is a response to the social and internal developments of countries and in response to the shortcomings of private law, and considering the phenomenon of globalization and the fading of national borders and the intertwining of many social and economic relations at the international level, the application of national economic law has caused tensions and conflicts between different countries. This problem must be dealt with either through the coordination and unification of national economic law rules or through the resolution of disputes between the countries involved based on the basic principles accepted internationally. This article seeks to examine and present a framework of public international law based on which the limits of jurisdiction of states in the application of national economic law can be applied.
Code Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing software engineering. However, scaling laws that guide the efficient training are predominantly analyzed on Natural Language (NL). Given the fundamental differences like strict syntax between code and NL, it is unclear whether these laws are directly applicable to code. To address this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of scaling laws for code, comprising 117 experimental runs with model sizes from 0.2B to 3.8B and training tokens from 2B to 128B. We fit the Chinchilla law and the Farsser law. First, the results show that the more expressive Farseer law offers greater accuracy. Second, the analysis reveals that Code LLMs scale effectively with model size. Crucially, code represents a more data-hungry regime, requiring a substantially higher data-to-parameter ratio than NL. Finally, two additional sets of experiments on code-NL mixtures show that NL benefits resource-constrained scenarios, but becomes a detriment at higher compute budgets.
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the widespread adoption of third-party inference services, raising critical privacy concerns. Existing methods of performing private third-party inference, such as Secure Multiparty Computation (SMPC), often rely on cryptographic methods. However, these methods are thousands of times slower than standard unencrypted inference, and fail to scale to large modern LLMs. Therefore, recent lines of work have explored the replacement of expensive encrypted nonlinear computations in SMPC with statistical obfuscation methods - in particular, revealing permuted hidden states to the third parties, with accompanying strong claims of the difficulty of reversal into the unpermuted states. In this work, we begin by introducing a novel reconstruction technique that can recover original prompts from hidden states with nearly perfect accuracy across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs. We then show that extensions of our attack are nearly perfectly effective in reversing permuted hidden states of LLMs, demonstrating the insecurity of three recently proposed privacy schemes. We further dissect the shortcomings of prior theoretical `proofs' of permuation security which allow our attack to succeed. Our findings highlight the importance of rigorous security analysis in privacy-preserving LLM inference.
Surrogacy is one of the most prominent issues in reproductive rights, at its core it interferes with fundamental rights and the integrity of the most intimate human choice, the procreation of the human species. Surrogacy or “reproductive tourism” is said to be an artificial conception made possible through scientific techniques employed through the direct or indirect involvement of a surrogate mother. Surrogacy is permitted in some countries such as Canada, Georgia, India, Mexico, the Netherlands and the United States, while it is barred by law in others such as Norway, Italy, Sweden, Germany and France. The legal rivalry towards surrogacy raises an essential issue: what is the legal effect when a child enters a country that prohibits such an agreement? This question becomes even more difficult when confronted with the multiplication of the states’ respective laws and their interstellar reach. The paper analyzes these questions through case studies found in both French and Arab legal systems. This interest in jurisdictions that historically approach the same coldness towards procreative contract is heightened by their recent growth in international commercial law. However, while there are common points in the analysis of the outcomes, the rigidity of the French State is contrasted with the enduring flexibility in Arab states. The final question this paper endeavors to answer is whether such flexibility is ideal. What does the future hold in a world befuddled by state confrontations and travel bans
In the Italian context, the first law directly affecting the urban planning and building sector dates back to approximately 160 years ago, precisely Law 2248/1865. It established the administrative unification of the Kingdom of Italy, empowering municipal councils to deliberate on ‘hygiene, building and local police regulations’, and was followed a few months later by Law 2359/1865 on expropriations for public purpose. By contrast, the first regulations for the protection of artistic, historical, archaeological and ethnographic heritage (1089/1938), and natural beauty (1497/1939), are just over 80 years old. From that time onwards, the rules governing planning and design actions have been considerably enriched and developed. Hence, it is worth reflecting on the effectiveness and efficiency of a regulatory framework that has been governing territorial, urban and building transformations in an increasingly articulated and specialised manner with a view to improving the quality and sustainability of natural and anthropic habitats. Moreover, its ability to govern the ways, times and cultural and technical contents of the project production process to carry out high quality creations is worthy of consideration.
Perhaps the issue of standardisation has never been the centre of attention in all sectors of civil life as today: in public administration and scientific research, among economic operators, planners, and citizens themselves. Regulatory systems are increasingly pervasive in regulating design activity and the characteristics of works in response to a general «increase in the variety and complexity of public interests that appear worthy of protection, such as the quality of the environment, the safeguarding of the natural and historical-artistic heritage, the protection of health, the safety of persons, and security […]» (Bassanini et al., 2005). Changing interests require frequent updates to adapt regulations to rapid socio-economic, cultural, and technological changes.
The centres of regulatory production have also multiplied, breaking up into different levels and sectors of regulation, namely with multi-level (international, EU, national, regional, local), sectoral (economy, environment, territory, landscape, infrastructure, cultural heritage, health, etc.) and institutional governance structures, with corresponding different interests (public/private, collective/individual) and complicated relationships of interconnection, conditionality and/or competition (Raveraira, 2009). The scenario is even more complex, if we broaden the scope to include, in addition to prescriptive and binding rules, the vast universe of guiding principles, voluntary standards, guidelines, best practices, etc.
Moreover, also due to the nature of the legal system model of reference (civil law derived from Roman law, as opposed to the common law of English-speaking countries, founded on the binding force of practice and judgements), Italian legislation has been stratified by an anomalous number of rules, which are often not mutually coordinated, sometimes contradictory or bearing inconsistent definitions. They are either incapable of producing the desired results, or are not the cause of effects even diametrically opposed to those expected. The attempt to solve every problem through a special regulation results in limiting the free and responsible action of citizens (and planners). Indeed, as Marco Romano points out, «to reduce people’s desires to rights codified in the doctrine of planning, imposed by enlightened and pedagogical governments on rebellious citizens unaware of their own good, is to erase what makes them citizens: the diversity of their individual life projects» (Romano, 2013).
On the other hand, the discrepancy between this regulatory approach and the reality that surrounds us is evident. On Alessandro Pizzorno’s death, Fabrizio Schiaffonati recalled how, back in the 1960s, the doyen of Italian political sociology had already warned that in Italy «everything must be regulated so that everything can be conceded», pointing out that «this is still the case nowadays, more than half a century later, with good peace for the quality of the project, which is overwhelmed by constraints and contradictory procedures that are obstructive to a necessary qualitative transformation of the anthropic environment within proper time and costs» (Schiaffonati, 2019).
This hypertrophic growth of laws and regulations (a true ‘legislative inflation’ or ‘regulatory pollution’) is accompanied by their rapid variability over time, so much so that a building intervention begun within a given legislative framework risks being completed in the presence of a different regulatory framework, which would not have allowed its execution, and vice versa. Not to mention the «badly written, lengthy regulations that are difficult to read and even more difficult to apply, (which) now represent a constant factor with which even the most prepared and motivated operator must come to terms» (Gorlani, 2022), which lead to confusion and interpretative doubts. This makes bureaucratic formalities unnecessarily complex, overloads administrative action, and increases the regulatory and management costs for citizens, businesses and the public institutions themselves, including those dedicated to monitoring and control actions (which, in a context of shrinking public resources, are often the first to be lacking…).
Legal uncertainty leads to opaque, if not arbitrary decisions, facilitates corruption, increases discrimination and social conflict, and limits economic development, sometimes to the point of inhibiting it (Bassanini et al., 2005). A vulnus with dramatic effects, if it is true that certainty does not have to be of the law, but: «certainty is law, just as, vice versa, law is certainty, if it is true that law […], is constituted for the specific purpose of giving certainty, or rather: certainties» (emphasis added; Ruggeri, 2005).
The body of urban planning legislation has expanded considerably, imposing on city and regional planning new objectives and constraints aimed at protecting and improving the quality of the environment and landscape. Strategic environmental and impact assessments, regulations to limit land consumption, to increase climate resilience and to regenerate the built environment have been in use for many years now, with their rich set of analyses and tools to manage knowledge, build scenarios, compare alternatives, and quantify their effects through indicators (environmental, socioeconomic, etc.). And yet, all this does not seem to have produced the expected effects, as witnessed by the continuing degradation of urban suburbs, the continuous increase in soil erosion by new urbanisations and infrastructures, the abandonment of ‘inland areas’, and the hydrogeological instability of the most ‘fragile’ territories. Instead, by moving more and more on the level of so-called policies, planning seems to have lost its technical capacity to conform the quality of spaces, even in their cultural value and use, in a sort of throwback of illiteracy forgetting the grammatical and syntactical rules of construction of the European city. The disciplinary crisis of the plan is evident, incapable of governing land uses and built forms, as well as the quality of public space, relying, instead, on the abstraction of ‘tactical squares’ and social streets totally inadequate to determine an organic configuration of the urban structure.
There is no large city that does not have a plan for climate resilience or sustainable mobility, nor is there a major project that cannot boast top-level environmental and/or energy performance, duly certified even when it plans to replace a tree-lined park of more than 50,000 square metres with green roofs on a shopping centre (for example, San Siro in Milan). Greenwashing operations often characterise the private actions of real estate operators, in the absence of checks and controls by the public authorities.
The public works sector has long been searching for a better balance of time, cost and quality of works. «A long journey, which has allowed for advances […] and regulatory innovations during the Nineties» (Schiaffonati, 2006) and which, after thirty years of conjunctural measures (suspensions, temporary derogations, emergency decrees, special procedures and competences, variations of thresholds, etc.1) has led to the new Procurement Code (legislative decree no. 36/2023). It features a text of more than 150,000 words, to which the regulatory and procedural innovations introduced by the PNRR must be added, with the related set of regulations, guidelines, explanatory circulars, protocols and technical instructions2.
It is a seemingly unstoppable process of continuous correction and integration to reform the reform, in the absence of the indispensable monitoring activity that should, instead, verify and assess the effects of the application of the regulation to correctly finalise its amendment. Nevertheless, there has been no lack of significant precedents in this regard, as in the case of the French experimentation of the Spinetta Law on construction insurance systems3.
If we apply to the standard the historical notion of “quality as fitness for intended use” (Juran, 1951), or to the more recent notion of «the set of properties and characteristics of a product or service that provide the capacity to satisfy expressed or implicit needs» (UNI EN ISO 8402:1995), it clearly appears that the challenge to be faced concerns not so much or only regulatory and administrative simplification, or the replacement of redundant, obsolete or unjustified regulations, but precisely the “quality of regulation”. A direction undertaken since 2001 by OECD and Apec countries with a Regulatory Reform (reference criteria to ensure quality and transparency in regulatory activity), in line with the obligation to formulate rules that are conceptually and semantically precise, clear and comprehensible in the terms used, in the objectives set, in the required behaviour (Constitutional Court, ruling no. 364 of 1988) and, above all, with contents derived from consensual and shared planning (Raveraira, 2009).
Responsibility, consensus and collaboration are, I believe, the key words to possibly rethink the relationship between design and regulation. In fact, I agree with Marco Dugato’s observation in this Dossier when he argues that «the fault of normative hypertrophy cannot be attributed to the omnipotence of the regulator by itself, rather it is attributable to the contribution of the ones regulated». If it is true that architectural design is constrained by regulations, it certainly cannot be mechanically determined by them for mere reasons of conformity. Conversely, as Maria Chiara Torricelli emphasises again in the Dossier, the norm is a tool that provides valid and shared knowledge to the project; and the project itself, as a projective activity, contributes proactively to its definition. There are many examples spanning technical directives regulating the implementation cycles of the INA Casa, the result of design research in support of the political project, and the various procedural and meta design regulations derived from research in the Architectural Technology Field. Such design experiences have unfolded in an experimental manner, in derogation of the regulations and leading to their renewal.
Instead, deductive design approaches seem to prevail today, due to the growing availability of algorithmic procedures that do not merely support the design process, but develop it in an almost automated manner through conditioning and prevailing indicators and parameters. These tools legitimise choices where conformity to the standard acts as a screen for the assumption of precise responsibilities.
There is a conceptual and operational reversal with respect to creative, responsibly inductive design action, which experiments and innovates, putting the principles of adequate performance and compliance with needs over the criteria of formal conformity. This is evident in the relationship between technical regulations and techno-typological innovation for evolutions that move the parameters of regulatory congruity “forward”, but sometimes even “sideways”. This also counteracts the phenomena of norm obsolescence.
In consideration of the pervasiveness of the regulatory systems that rule design action, it is, finally, disturbing to observe the very limited importance assigned to this subject in the education of new designers. The didactics of design, which have long been the focus of Architecture studies, rarely envisage a structured discussion on regulatory and normative aspects, leaving them to the discretion of professors. Hence, at the end of the course, a large proportion of students have never heard about the Code of Procurement, environmental impact assessment or minimum environmental criteria… Whereas it is, instead, essential to solicit, from the first year, critical attention to the normative paradigm, also for the ethical, social and professional responsibilities it entails, and to encourage the assumption of norms and constraints as factors that nourish the entire design process. The norm thus becomes a «tool for guiding and controlling design choices», which as such «must be assumed in the organisation of the starting data» (Del Nord, 1992).
Not to mention the need for qualifying training programmes, as Mario Avagnina points out, so that all those involved in the process, particularly public clients, are able to carry out their tasks. The objective is far from being achieved, and «necessarily passes through the training of the figures involved, starting with the RUPs». Figures characterised not only by technical knowledge of the building process and its rules, but also by a culture of standards and conscious responsibility that can only derive from a design practice, which is continually verified in the real context, and by design actions based on an experimental method that aims to face the issues of society. Figures characterised not only by technical know-how of the building process and its rules, but also by a culture of standards and conscious responsibility, which can only derive from a practice continually verified by comparison with reality, and by design actions marked by an experimental method that finds its arguments in taking on the problems of society.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
The European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) was announced as a new platform for advancing social policy in the European Union. Among the principles and rights enshrined in the EPSR, the Commission has included the right of workers to be paid fair wages. However, in the context of EU Economic Governance, the EU country-specific recommendations steer national wage-setting institutions in the opposite direction. The outcomes sought by EU Economic Governance and the EPSR thus produce a paradox. This paper presents the Spanish case as an example of this paradox. More specifically, it assesses the reforms the Spanish Government made to minimum wage rules and the collective bargaining system during the financial crisis. In the end, all those reforms have led to wage stagnation and devaluation, causing an increasing number of working poor.
We present a limited empirical study of scaling laws for transfer learning in transformer models. More specifically, we examine a scaling law that incorporates a "transfer gap" term, indicating the effectiveness of pre-training on one distribution when optimizing for downstream performance on another distribution. When the transfer gap is low, pre-training is a cost-effective strategy for improving downstream performance. Conversely, when the gap is high, collecting high-quality fine-tuning data becomes relatively more cost effective. Fitting the scaling law to experiments from diverse datasets reveals significant variations in the transfer gap across distributions. In theory, the scaling law can inform optimal data allocation strategies and highlights how the scarcity of downstream data can bottleneck performance. Our findings contribute to a principled way to measure transfer learning efficiency and understand how data availability affects capabilities.
I argue that generative AI will have an uneven effect on the evolution of the law. To do so, I consider generative AI as a labor-augmenting technology that reduces the cost of both writing more complete contracts and litigating in court. The contracting effect reduces the demand for court services by making contracts more complete. The litigation effect, by contrast, increases the demand for court services by a) making contracts less complete and b) reducing litigants' incentive to settle, all else equal. Where contracts are common, as in property and contract law, the change in the quantity of litigation is uncertain due to offsetting contracting and litigation effects. However, in areas where contracts are rare, as in tort law, the amount of litigation is likely to rise. Following Rubin (1977) and Priest (1977) generative AI will accelerate the evolution of tort law toward efficiency.
Recently, Elouard and Lombard Latune [PRX Quantum 4, 020309 (2023)] claimed to extend the laws of thermodynamics to "arbitrary quantum systems" valid "at any scale" using "consistent" definitions allowing them to "recover known results" from the literature. I show that their definitions are in conflict with textbook thermodynamics and over- or underestimate the real entropy production by orders of magnitude. The cause of this problem is traced back to problematic definitions of entropy and temperature, the latter, for instance, violates the zeroth law. It is pointed out that another framework presented in PRX Quantum 2, 030202 (2021) does not suffer from these problems, while Elouard and Lombard Latune falsely claim that it only provides a positive entropy production for a smaller class of initial states. A simple way to unify both approaches is also presented.
Our overriding thesis is that nuclear security measures are required in Indonesia as a matter of urgency given Indonesia’s current plans for the construction of nuclear power plants (NPP) and all the physical infrastructure and supply chains wherein nuclear materials is exposed to the general public and a target for terrorist attack. This work is divided into two parts: (1) an analysis and close reading of the existing nuclear regulatory regime of Indonesia, with the view of determining whether the existing regulations are sufficient to provide nuclear security measures that protect the general public, and (2) based on our analysis what kind of policies and legislative provisions should we have in order to better protect the public. The headline of our assessment is that there is a complete lack of legal basis for security measures and that it is recommended. From an international perspective the nuclear operating organization is within the penumbra of nuclear security standards established by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). However, while within the penumbra of the international standard for nuclear security, our assessment finds the Indonesian security measure is inadequate and potentially dangerously in effective and thus, in its current state behooves the Indonesian government to undertake a deep reformation of the legal framework of nuclear security in Indonesia.
Private international law. Conflict of laws, Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law
Infracțiunile de război, până mai ieri - circumstanțe descrise în cărțile de istorie, astăzi - evenimente sângeroase care șochează și amenință întreg mapamondul. Securitatea de orice natură a întregii lumi este amenințată de evenimentele din Ucraina. În aceste circumstanțe, este cu atât mai important să discutăm astăzi despre SECURITATE, cu cât, ne aflăm într-o perioadă în care evenimentele sociale, politice, geopolitice, planează o amenințare reală la sistemul de securitate al Republicii Moldova. Sistemul de securitate al țării noastre, pe lângă amenințările de ordin economic, social, politic, corupţional, este amenințat și de fenomenul mercenariatului, în special în situația intensificării războiului din Ucraina și a preexistenței regiunii separatiste din stânga Nistrului.
Private international law. Conflict of laws, Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law
The utilization of coastal space for marine tourist destination has developed very rapidly; unfortunately, this marine tourism management potentially results in conflict. Marine tourism managed by villagers in Bangkalan Regency is the example of potential conflict in its implementation. In Labuhan Village, Sepulu Sub District, Bangkalan Regency mangrove tourism has resulted in conflict of management between the communities in a village. It is well established that public participation is one of variables that can affect supportability of coastal environment for marine tourism development, but non-participative management will affect the sustainability of tourism business itself. The objective of research was to formulate the model of marine tourism management policy through Village-Owned Enterprises (BUMDes). Such policy model is expected to minimize the conflict of spatial management. To achieve this objective of research, a Socio Legal Research type was used with factual and conceptual approaches. The result of research showed that the marine tourism management policy in Madura coastal area is managed more in group by mangrove farmer group, tourism consciousness group (pokdarwis) and community supervisor group (pokwasmas), and only very few have been managed by BUMDes. BUMDes is selected to be a legitimized institution in managing the marine tourism in coastal areas, because BUMDes can stimulate and activate the rural economic wheel managed fully by villagers. Juridical construction of marine tourism management through BUMDes can be legitimized based on Village Act. Village Regulation and legal entity-organization are legal figures underlying the marine tourism management through BUMDes as governed in Village Act and Minister of Village, Transmigration, and Disadvantaged Region’s Regulation about the establishment, the administration and management, and the dismissal of Village-Owned Enterprises.
Private international law. Conflict of laws, Jurisprudence. Philosophy and theory of law
Let $α\in (0,1)_{\mathbb{R}}$ be irrational and $G_n = G_{n,1/n^α}$ be the random graph with edge probability $1/n^α$; we know that it satisfies the 0-1 law for first order logic. We deal with the failure of the 0-1 law for stronger logics: $\mathbb{L}_{\infty,k},k$ large enough and the inductive logic.
We describe various relations between Bhargava's higher composition laws, which generalise Gauss's original composition law on integral binary quadratic forms, and extremal black hole solutions appearing in string/M-theory and related models. The cornerstone of these correspondences is the identification of the charge cube of the STU black hole with Bhargava's cube of integers, which underpins the related higher composition laws.
Sophia Potoczak Bragdon, Daniel Cargill, Jacob Grosek
A new scaling law model for propagation of optical beams through atmospheric turbulence is presented and compared to a common scalar stochastic waveoptics technique. This methodology tracks the evolution of the important beam wavefront and phasefront parameters of a propagating Gaussian-shaped laser field as it moves through atmospheric turbulence, assuming a conservation of power. As with other scaling laws, this Lagrangian scaling law makes multiple simplifying assumptions about the optical beam in order to capture the essential features of interest, while significantly reducing the computational cost of calculation. This Lagrangian scaling law is shown to reliably work with low to medium turbulence strengths, producing at least a 2x computational speed-up per individual propagation of the beam and >100x memory reduction (depending on the chosen resolution).