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Deep-water massive (featureless) sands are commonly interpreted as indicators of flow conditions during or shortly after deposition and are almost never interpreted to reflect post-depositional homogenization due to bioturbation. Deep-water deposits of the lower Rio Dell Formation (Pliocene), Eel River basin (NW California), however, reveal previously unrecognized cryptically bioturbated fabrics in massive sandstone and mudstone. This study represents the first detailed documentation of cryptically bioturbated massive-appearing sandstone in deep-water channelized environments. Although fluid escape contributed to some of the massive-appearing textures in the Rio Dell Formation, we present criteria for recognizing cryptic bioturbation fabrics: (1) tubes with lithologically distinctive concentric linings or infillings, (2) meniscate backfill in burrows, (3) lithologically distinctive spreite, (4) concentric grain orientations, and (5) grains realigned adjacent to tubular structures. Using biostratigraphic data, detailed stratigraphic descriptions, core photos, and photomicrographs, we document ichnofabrics associated with two main lithofacies and their bounding surfaces: (1) diffuse muddy siltstone lithofacies (e.g. Planolites, Phycosiphon, Schaubcylindrichnus), (2) massive sandstone lithofacies (e.g. cryptic bioturbation, Planolites), (3) lithofacies crossers, (4) burrows that prefer the top-of-sand/base-of-mud interface (e.g. Planolites, Skolithos), and (5) a Glossifungites-demarcated discontinuity at the base of the massive sand lithofacies. We also establish two main lithofacies associations with characteristic sedimentologic traits. We use relative percentages of the lithofacies associations to interpret slope-channel depositional facies: distal channel margin, proximal channel margin, and channel axis. By comparing ichnologic characteristics to depositional facies, we conclude that proximity to the channel axis appear to control the degree and type of bioturbation observed in the massive-appearing deposits. Distal channel margin deposits preserve the smallest burrows, highly developed cryptic bioturbation fabrics, and the most complete sequence of background bioturbation. Proximal channel margin and channel axis deposits record larger burrows but incomplete cryptic bioturbated fabrics and an overall smaller proportion of preserved background bioturbation.

In the case of Samantar v. Yousuf, the United States Supreme Court had to decide whether a former Somali Prime Minister, accused of torturing his own people while in office, should be immune from liability in U.S. courts on grounds of sovereign immunity (in particular, pursuant to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act). The sovereign immunity defense featured prominently in cases brought against former Nazi officials in the wake of the Holocaust, including the landmark Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. Modern international criminal tribunals have also relied on this precedent to reject the sovereign immunity defense for gross human rights violations committed in Rwanda, Darfur and the former Yugoslavia. This amicus brief illuminates the connection between the defense as asserted in the Samantar case and its treatment and rejection in the Holocaust and modern cases.

It is an article of faith among transnational penal experts that Sir Peter von Hagenbach's 1474 prosecution in Breisach for atrocities committed serving the Duke of Burgundy constitutes the first international war crimes trial in history. Hagenbach was tried before an ad hoc tribunal of twenty-eight judges from various regional city-states for misdeeds, including murder and rape, he allegedly perpetrated as governor of the Duke's Alsatian territories from 1469 to 1474. Though it remains obscure in the popular imagination, most legal scholars perceive the trial as a landmark event. Some value it for formulating an embryonic version of crimes against humanity. Others praise it for ostensibly charging rape as a war crime. And all are in agreement that it is the first recorded case in history to reject the defense of superior orders. Such a perspective has arguably helped invest the Nuremberg trials with greater historical legitimacy and lent subtle sanction to the development of international criminal law in the post-Cold War world. But the legal literature typically deals with the trial in very cursory fashion and its stature as pre-Nuremberg precedent may hinge on faulty assumptions. As the 1990s explosion of ad hoc tribunal activity is nearing its end and the legal academy is taking stock of its accomplishments and failures, it is perhaps time to look more closely at the Hagenbach trial. This piece does that by digging below the surface and revisiting some of the historical and legal premises underlying the trial's perception by legal academics. In the main, international law specialists have relied on older historical accounts to conclude that Hagenbach's service as Burgundy's Alsatian bailiff constituted a five-year reign of terror that culminated in a legitimate and ground-breaking atrocity conviction. But revisionist historians tend to see Hagenbach's ordeal not as a good-faith justice enterprise but rather as a show trial meant to rebuff the territorial ambitions of Sir Peter's master, Charles the Bold. They emphasize that liability was grounded on confessions obtained through torture. And while they concede that Hagenbach may have been boorish and autocratic, they note that the first few years of his rule were relatively pacific and the 1474 uprising against Sir Peter was primarily a reaction to attempted Burgundian regional encroachments and perceived feudal suppression of growing urban and bourgeois prerogatives. The trial itself, they point out, was not international at all as the men who sat in judgment of Hagenbach were all subjects of the Holy Roman Empire. Nor was it a war crimes trial, since there was no armed conflict at the time the alleged atrocities took place. But there are shortcomings in the revisionist analysis as well. The high level of animosity shown Hagenbach, as demonstrated by the severity of the torture and the stripping of his knighthood, indicate that the atrocity allegations may not be unfounded. Moreover, there is evidence that Burgundy's occupation of the territory was hostile and so the charges against Hagenbach may very well be considered war crimes. Finally, by 1474, the Holy Roman Empire was no longer a viable political entity and so the ad hoc tribunal may indeed have been international in nature. It is no coincidence that such a unique event took place between the erosion of medieval hegemony and the imminent establishment of Westphalian sovereignty. Not until the Westphalian veil was pierced by the Nuremberg trials nearly five hundred years later, did the subject of the Hagenbach trial take on contemporary relevance in the legal literature. In the end, the piece concludes that while some of its details may be lost in the mists of time and its legal status may remain muddled in theoretic gray zones, the Hagenbach trial should continue to play an important role as an historic and conceptual pillar of international criminal law's "pre-history."

These are the slides from my presentation at the AACSB meeting on 30 April 2011 in New York, NY. The session was titled "The Impact of Research" and my co-presenters were John Peters, President, GSE Research Limited and Howard Thomas, Dean and LKCSB Chair in Strategic Management, Singapore Management University.

In this paper, we show how the Eigenfactor(R) score, originally designed for ranking scholarly journals, can be adapted to rank the scholarly output of authors, institutions, and countries based on authorlevel citation data. Using the methods described herein, we provide Eigenfactor rankings for 84,808 disambiguated authors of 240,804 papers in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) — a pre and post-print archive devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities. As an additive metric, the Eigenfactor scores are readily computed for collectives such as departments or institutions as well. We show that a collective’s Eigenfactor score can be computed either by summing the Eigenfactor scores of its members, or by working directly with a collective-level cross-citation matrix. To illustrate, we provide Eigenfactor rankings for institutions and countries in the SSRN repository. With a network-wide comparison of Eigenfactor scores and download tallies, we demonstrate that Eigenfactor scores provide information that is both different from and complementary to that provided by download counts. We see author-level ranking as one filter for navigating the scholarly literature, and note that such rankings generate incentives for more open scholarship, as authors are rewarded for making their work available to the community as early as possible and prior to formal publication. NOTE: Because of the incompleteness of the SSRN CiteReader data at this time, please check back at this URL for updated versions of this paper for updated results over the next 2 years. In addition, when citing this paper please include the following: Data as of March 14, 2011.

Can singing a song constitute incitement to genocide? A 2009 decision by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in the case of Hutu extremist pop singer Simon Bikindi said it can. But in convicting Bikindi, it failed to apply, much less develop, the incitement law framework it had established, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, through a string of prior opinions (most notably in the famous 'Media Case'). That framework asks judges to consider the purpose, text, context, and relationship between the speaker and subject to determine if a speech constitutes criminal incitement. Critics have pointed to the test's piecemeal development, its supple contours, and the Tribunal's desultory application of it and proposed replacing it with an entirely new test. As African dictators have supposedly cited the ICTR framework to justify stifling legitimate dissent, such a drastic solution is necessary, they argue, to promote freedom of speech and prevent genocide. This Article acknowledges these concerns but proposes a middle-ground approach instead. Given doctrinal glitches in the proposed new tests, the existing framework should be preserved but elements of the new tests should be incorporated as 'evaluative factors' within the 'context' analysis. At the same time, additional contextual reference points (such as the outbreak of war and the personal history of the speaker) should be appended to the existing test. An entirely new element, 'channels of communication,' should be tacked on as well to help distinguish between written versus broadcast media (given that the latter is more effective at provoking imminent lawless violence). Similarly, as suggested by the Bikindi decision, two additional elements - temporality (was the speech uttered within the proper contextual time frame?) and instrumentality (was the speaker responsible for the speech's dissemination) - should be appended to the existing framework. Finally, an incitement-technique typology, which would explicitly recognize various indirect incitement methods (such as 'accusation in a mirror' and 'victim-sympathizer conflation'), should also be integrated into the analysis. This compromise approach will provide the necessary flexibility to permit nuanced incitement analysis while insuring greater degrees of normative coherence, free expression and, most importantly, effective genocide prevention.

Polyanilines containing sulphonic groups covalently bonded to the back bone were synthesized from parent polyaniline via sulphonation of the polymer utilizing differing sulphonation agents and differing means. The sulphonation conditions were studied as a function of several parameters including sulphonation time, starting forms of the precursor polymer, presence of oxidizer [(NH 4 ) 2 S 2 O 8 ] and temperature. The sulphonated polyanilines were characterized by FT i.r., elemental analyses, d.c. conductivity and electrochemical methods. It was found that using fuming sulphuric acid as the sulphonation agent gave both higher conductivity and higher sulphonation level for sulphonated polyaniline than implementation of other sulphonation agents and means.

Since 1998, 5.4 million citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been killed in what many refer to as "Africa's First World War" -- the deadliest armed conflict since World War II. Despite a 2003 peace deal and the country's first elections in 2006, a staggering 45,000 people continue to die each month and as many as 4,000 women per year are being raped. As Western Europe needed a massive infusion of American assistance to lift itself from misery after World War II, this article contends that the DRC needs such an infusion now. It posits that ending DRC atrocities will require launching an "African Marshall Plan" -- a gargantuan influx of aid and expertise that will stabilize the country and promote the rule of law. This will entail a series of suggested procedural and substantive changes to U.S. policy. The procedural changes involve greater agency inclusion and coordination, use of human rights benchmarks and an ombudsman, and establishment of a team of law and negotiation experts on the ground. The substantive changes focus on large-scale humanitarian assistance efforts supporting judicial and security sector reform that will eliminate the culture of impunity. Such reform would include: (1) setting up programs to curb and punish sexual violence and corruption; (2) preventing illegal resource exploitation through, inter alia, corporate sanctions; (3) backing the International Criminal Court and DRC domestic war crimes prosecution efforts; (4) possible establishment of a hybrid tribunal for crimes outside DRC and ICC jurisdiction; and (5) creating a "National Human Rights Office" with branches in Kinshasa and outlying provinces (especially in the troubled eastern DRC).

On October 25, 2005, at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran, Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called for Israel to "be wiped off the face of the map" -- the first in a series of incendiary speeches arguably advocating liquidation of the Jewish state. Certain commentators contend that these statements constitute direct and public incitement to commit genocide. This Article analyzes this assertion by examining the nature and scope of recent groundbreaking developments in incitement law arising from the Rwandan genocide prosecutions. It pieces together an analytical framework based on principles derived from these cases, including the Canadian Supreme Court's opinion in the Leon Mugesera matter. Using this framework, it demonstrates that while a successful prosecution would entail clearing significant substantive and procedural hurdles, it could include both incitement and crimes against humanity charges in light of the incitement's nexus with Iran's sponsorship of terrorist attacks against Israel. However, to take the case, the International Criminal Court would have to put aside political pressures related to the Middle East's toxic political environment and the absence of causation. The odds of this happening are long. As a result, the Article proposes that incitement law shift its focus from post-atrocity punishment to deterrence. This would permit early intervention and center incitement on its core mission of atrocity prevention. The Article also suggests that euphemisms employed to disguise incitement, such as "predictions" of destruction, when anchored to direct calls for violence, should also be considered acts of direct incitement. Finally, with respect to crimes against humanity, the Article explains that attacks on a civilian population carried out by a proxy at the insistence of the inciter, rather than directly by the actual inciter himself, should be sufficient to establish liability. At the same time, in the interest of protecting free speech, the crime should not be charged absent evidence of calls for protected-group violence, as opposed to mere hatred.

The breathtaking growth of international criminal law over the past decade has resulted in the prosecution of Balkan and Rwandan mass murderers, the development of a substantial body of atrocity law jurisprudence and the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The growth of international criminal procedure, unfortunately, has not kept pace. Among its shortcomings, critics have pointed to lengthy pre-trial detention without a real possibility of provisional release, the use of affidavits and transcripts instead of live witnesses at trial, the absence of juries, and the right of prosecutorial appeal. Existing literature has pointed out these deficits but has failed to offer a systematic or comprehensive explanation for them. While such literature is helpful in identifying the problem, it has failed to provide a conceptual framework necessary for formulating solutions. This article constructs such a framework and uses it to provide a starting point for expanding international due process protections. It contends that three separate phenomena contribute to the restriction of international due process growth: (1) fragmentation of enforcement; (2) integration of conflicting legal systems; and (3) gravity of the crimes involved. It also analyzes the interplay among these three restricting phenomena and argues that any future growth of due process will hinge on efforts to achieve greater degrees of structural globalization, procedural hybridization, and transnational public awareness.

These are the slides from my presentation at the AALS meeting on 7 January 2005 in San Francisco, CA. The session was 'Electronic Repositories for Legal Scholarship' and was moderated by Claire M. Germain.