Search

Retrospective cost optimization was originally developed for adaptive control. In this paper, we show how this technique is applicable to three distinct but related problems, namely, state estimation, input estimation, and model refinement. To illustrate these techniques, we give two examples. In the first example, retrospective cost model refinement is used with synthetic data to estimate the cooling dynamics that are missing from a model of the ionosphere-thermosphere. In the second example, retrospective cost adaptive state estimation is used with data from a satellite to estimate a solar driver in the ionosphere- thermosphere, with performance gauged by using data from a second satellite.

Motivated by passive health monitoring applications, we consider blind identification where only sensor measurements are available. The goal is to identify a pseudo transfer function (PTF) between two sensors in the presence of an unknown initial state and unknown exogenous input. For this problem, we choose one sensor to be the pseudo input to the system and we delay the second sensor, treating it as the pseudo output.We show that the order of the pseudo-transfer function is no larger than one higher than the order of the system. We demonstrate this method on a two-degree-of-freedom mass-spring-damper system and validate the identified PTFs by comparing them with analytical results.

In this paper we use retrospective cost optimization to identify linear fractional transformations (LFTs). This method uses an adaptive controller in feedback with a known system model. The goal is to identify the feedback portion of the LFT by adapting the controller with a retrospective cost. We demonstrate this method on numerical examples of increasing complexity, ranging from linear examples with unknown feedback terms to nonlinear examples. Finally, we examine methods for improving the retrospective cost optimization performance.

Changes in material use, energy use and emissions profiles of industry are the result of complex interrelationships among a multitude of technological and economic drivers. To better understand and guide such changes requires that attention is paid to the time-varying consequences that technology and economic influences have on an industry's choice of inputs and its associated (desired and undesired) outputs. This paper lays out an approach to improving our understanding of the dynamics of large industrial systems. The approach combines engineering and econometric analysis with a detailed representation of an industry's capital stock structure. A transparent dynamic computer modeling approach is chosen to integrate information from these analyses in ways that foster participation of stakeholders from industry and government agencies in all stages of the modeling process-from problem definition and determination of system boundaries to generation of scenarios and interpretation of results. Three case studies of industrial energy use in the USA are presented-one each for the iron and steel, pulp and paper, and ethylene industry. Dynamic models of these industries are described and then used to investigate alternative carbon emissions and investment-led policies. A comparison of results clearly points towards two key issues: the need for industry specific policy approaches in order to effectively influence industrial energy use, fuel mix and carbon emissions, and the need for longer time horizons than have typically been chosen for the analysis of industrial responses to climate change policies.

The US iron and steel industry consists of two main sectors—integrated firms producing outputs predominantly from virgin materials and fossil fuels, and electric arc furnaces operating mainly on scrap and electricity. Capacity and market shares of the former have declined for more than three decades, leading to reductions in energy use and emissions as the existing capital stock is retired. In contrast, electric arc furnace production not only continues to expand along with its capacity expansions but is also able to adopt advanced technology and improve energy efficiencies and carbon intensities. This paper investigates implications of changes in the cost of carbon for output, energy use and carbon emission profiles of the two sectors of the industry, and compares the results for different climate change and technology policies. Special attention is given to the dynamics of the industry's capital vintage structure. The analysis indicates that for the case of the US iron and steel industry, an increase in cost of carbon would result in emission reductions by accelerating the shift to electric arc furnaces. The same emissions reductions as those from cost of carbon increases can be achieved by technology-led policies only under the assumption that very sizeable gaps exist between current and possible energy efficiencies for electric arc furnaces and that their existing capital stock can be rapidly turned-over in favor of less carbon intensive technologies.

Anglo-Saxon law is the name generally used to refer to the legal system that prevailed in Britain for approximately the five centuries before the Norman Conquest in 1066. It was the law of the Germanic tribes that ruled the nation following their victory over the Danes. It had much in common with the jurisprudence of related peoples on the Continent, and many customs of Anglo-Saxon law evolved into a form that survives in English and American common law.

The Israeli air strike on Qana that killed over 60 Lebanese civilians has set the stage not only for possible war crimes prosecutions but also for a potentially-robust UN Security Council resolution imposing a UN peacekeeping force on the parties in an effort to stop the violence.

The customary practice of states includes practices that reinforce the international legal system as well as practices that are harmful to the system. According to natural law, disputes between these two types can be sorted out by conflict resolution with the help of third party adjudication.

Teachers of courses in INTRODUCTION TO LAW and JURISPRUDENCE may be looking for a one-class introduction/exercise in formal logic. This short essay covers the basic logic symbols, truth tables, and the question of justifying logic. It is offered free of copyright to my law-school colleagues.

The question presented is “whether and under what circumstances the Alien Tort Statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1350, allows courts to recognize a cause of action for violations of the law of nations occurring within the territory of a sovereign other than the United States.” In this Amicus Brief we argue from a historical perspective going back to the Middle Ages that when the law of nations is in issue, not only is there no presumption against extraterritoriality, but jurisdiction over causes of action arising abroad is in many cases required. More specifically, we argue that Congress affirmatively conferred universal jurisdiction in the Alien Tort Statute [“ATS”] under the law of nations, and that to refuse such jurisdiction in cases of denial of justice would be contrary to longstanding principles of the law of nations. In short, limiting the ATS to claims arising in U.S. territory would contravene both the statute’s clear indication of universal jurisdiction and the Charming Betsy canon of construction that statutes should not be construed to violate the law of nations.

Machiavelli leaves one with both an optimistic and a pessimistic prognostication for the post-Cold War world. On the one hand, the end of that conflict has opened the way for the spread of liberal, constitutional regimes, which he would say are inclined to be more and more meticulous in honoring their commitments. On the other, the temptation to use force to create new facts and thereby force international law into new paths will remain as long as politics is practiced. The contemporary relevance of Machiavelli may be seen in that he urged both realities upon us. I focus on a single incident that postdated the end of the Cold War—the show of force by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the Taiwan Strait in March 1996.

The question for us international lawyers is how, and how much of, public sentiment for human rights has been transformed into binding international law.

What follows from the following two propositions? Legal positivism views law as a command writ large. The commander is the person or group with the most power. Answer: this pernicious mind-set is responsible for our abandonment of personal liberty. For there can be no limit to the imagination and will power of the commander. The plenary jurisdiction of the commander paves the way for Big Government to move in and regulate every aspect of our lives and our privacy. The world wasn't always like this. Prior to the servility that positivism has induced, there was a now-forgotten secular natural law that was inherently limited to the needs of society and had no power beyond the outer edge of a person's zone of privacy.

Holmes's famous 1897 theory that law is a prediction of what courts will do in fact slowly changed the way law schools taught law until, by the mid-1920s legal realism took over the curriculum. The legal realists argued that judges decide cases on all kinds of objective and subjective reasons including precedents. If law schools wanted to train future lawyers to be effective, they should be exposed to collateral subjects that might influence judges: law and society, law and literature, and so forth. But the standard interpretation has been a huge mistake. It treats law as analogous to weather forecasting: a meteorologist predicts tomorrow's weather the way an attorney predicts a future decision by a judge. But Holmes said that what a judge decides in the future is inconsequential; a person (such as a bad man) must plan his affairs on the basis of present law. Present law is nothing other than the prediction itself. It is like quantum theory: what we see is not solid matter but rather the probability of solid matter. The law that influences our behavior is itself only a probability. In consequence, the legal realists' focus on the judge is misplaced; the focus should be on the attorney.

A rule of law is a norm coupled with coercive power. International soft law is only the norm. There is a vast number of such non-coercive norms, and many recent papers have been preoccupied with their apparent normative tilt toward respect for human rights and democracy. In criticizing the entire soft-law enterprise, I feel like the Grinch who stole Christmas. But I do try to put in a good word or two for the time-honored sources of the 4000 year-old public international law. This paper will be a chapter in the forthcoming The Philosophy of International Law, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Judge Richard Posner locates his moral theory between moral absolutism and the "anything goes" kind of moral relativism. He analyzes whether five contested topics are subject to useful moral debate: infanticide, slavery, suttee, female genital mutilation, and the Holocaust. Each topic presents a different perspective on his own moral theory. But each one fails in a different way to place his own moral theory on a sound footing.

Many writers believe that international law is precatory but not "binding" in the way domestic law is binding. Since international law derives from the practice of states, how is it that what states do becomes what they must do? How do we get bindingness or normativity out of empirical fact? We have to avoid the Humean fallacy of attempting to derive an ought from an is. Yet we can find in nature at least one norm that is compelling: the norm of survival. This norm is hardwired into our brains through evolution. It is also hardwired into the international legal system that has survived for four thousand years. In every dispute or controversy, the international legal system weighs in on the side of peaceful and stable resolution - simply because that is in the system's interest of self-perpetuation. In sum, it is international law itself that selects from state actions those actions most conducive to the peaceful resolution of disputes and formulates them as rules and precedents of the system.

Israel cannot obtain legal title to any territory by conquest. Thus Israel's borders were legally established by the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947, which ended Great Britain's power as a trustee on condition that an Arab State and a Jewish State would be established with borders as demarkated in the text of the resolution. Those borders remain the legal boundary of the State of Israel.

As international criminal law continues to grow in importance, defenses to charges of war crimes are taking on a generic standardization that covers prosecutions in national courts as well as in international tribunals. This paper briefly discusses the most important defenses and their theoretical interconnections. Substantive defenses include superior orders, command responsibility, tu quoque, military necessity, proportionality, and reprisals. Jurisdictional defenses applicable in national tribunals include personal jurisdiction, subject-matter jurisdiction, and double jeopardy.

The nature of law and legal practice is changing with the addition of interdisciplinary scholars to law-school faculties and interdisciplinary studies to the law curriculum. However, the accessibility of non-law disciplinarians in the rest of the university raises the question of the cost-effectiveness and opportunity costs of importing them directly into the law school. This Article criticizes the interdisciplinary turn on three grounds. First is the unlikelihood that the joint-degreed persons who join the law faculty will happen to be the ones that their colleagues will end up collaborating with. Second is the even greater unlikelihood that any given discipline can communicate usefully with another discipline. Third is the opportunity-cost factor: that the new interdisciplinary courses will crowd out an essential part of the legal discipline, namely, an understanding of the foundations and dialectical evolution of its forms of language.

A coherent theory of international law would have explanatory power. It should indicate where international rules come from, how they are changed, and how they are enforced. The theory could usefully employ theoretical advances from other disciplines, such as systems theory, n-person games, network theory, emergence, complexity, and inference to the best explanation.

The UN Security Council's resolution on North Korea's nuclear weapon test is a magnificent achievement. The US State Department deserves much of the credit not only for the text of the resolution but also for the skillful diplomacy, headed by Secretary Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador John Bolton, that has resulted in the fifteen-nation Security Council's unanimous vote.

Logic does not permit contradictions. Ordinary language sometimes uses contradictions meaningfully. Examples are provided of logical derivations. Yet one might ask how one might prove that logic itself is rational. Gottlob Frege answered that logic constitutes rationality.

The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.

The Kaplow/Shavell thesis can be simply stated: If courts or legislatures pursue any value other than general public welfare, then welfare is to that extent diminished. Justice is one of those values that detract from welfare. But so too is injustice. Hence their entire thesis is a tautology.

The Lanec (short for Law and Economics) movement of the 1970s hit the legal landscape like a nuclear device and permanently irradiated it. A couple of decades later, as we sift through the fallout, we are entitled to ask whether anything fundamental has changed. Every contributor to this Symposium seems to answer yes. Maybe they're like the book reviewer who believes deep in her heart that the book is worthless, but if she reveals it the editor will conclude that there is no point in printing her review. Let me put my own biases on the table. In general I applaud the greater precision that has come to legal studies through economics. But has Lanec changed the nature of the law? I'm not sure that it has lived up to the hopes or hypes of its original enthusiasts.

A nation's influence upon the content of international law is largely a function of the complete and rapid dissemination of its state papers and the sophistication of the international legal practitioners in its foreign office. The positions a state takes on international legal matters, and the manner in which it describes and justifies its positions, constitute the most readily accessible evidence of its state practice as a component of customary law. Therefore, one would imagine that all states would place a high premium upon the dissemination of their official practice in the international community.

With each international crisis inevitably come the self­-styled "realists" proclaiming that there is no such thing as public international law. The Vietnam war is no exception, although here, due to the unusual complexity of the facts and the controversy over the applicable rules of international law, many of the published replies to the "realist's" positions have themselves been insubstantial and unconvincing. Let us look first, briefly, at the arguments of one of the realists, and then, with equal brevity, at some of the counterclaims. The remainder of this comment will be addressed to the larger issues involved and some suggested avenues for coping with the implementation of the ideal of world peace through world law.