bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Legal Regulation of Campaign Financing in American Federal Elections
Authors: Ewing K. D.
Published: January 2009

1988 is a presidential election year in the United States. As in previous presidential and congressional campaigns, millions of dollars will be spent by candidates seeking elected office. Campaign financing in the United States, as in other western democracies, raises a question which strikes at the moral basis of the system of government. Thus, how do we secure and guarantee political equality in a society of deep-rooted economic inequality? It may well be that de Tocqueville was right when he wrote that “Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.” Yet the integrity of these institutions demands that control of economic resources does not permit domination of the political process on the simple expedient of unrestrained liberty for all in the political arena. If political equality is to mean anything in practice, the political machine must not be the preserve of the few who are ready, willing, and able to exploit private or personal economic resources. The purpose of this paper is to consider how this problem has been addressed in the United States. The paper traces the origins of the modern legislation and examines the tension between the legislative and the judicial branches of government. A particularly disturbing tendency has been the unwillingness on the part of the courts to sustain the legislation in the face of constitutional challenge, thereby facilitating the continued domination of the political process by moneyed interests. Given the growing movement for a Bill of Rights in Britain, these developments may yet be of some practical significance in this country.
Credibility, Morality and the Corroboration Warning
Authors: Jackson John D.
Published: January 2009

The rule of practice that requires judges to direct juries that it is dangerous to act on the uncorroborated evidence of certain categories of witness, namely accomplices, the alleged victims of sexual offences and children, has been diluted in certain jurisdictions, and subjected to rigorous criticism by a number of academic commentators. In this article it is proposed to consider whether a mandatory corroboration warning can ever be justified in respect of a particular category of witness. Rather than consider in detail the arguments in favour of retaining the warning for each of the present categories of witness, it is proposed to examine the case for the very idea of a corroboration warning in respect of any category of witness. We shall approach this question by first considering what it is that a corroboration warning requires a jury to do, over and above their ordinary task of determining the credibility of the evidence against the accused and deciding whether the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Attention has focused on the “enormous superstructure” that has been erected on the basic proposition that the evidence of some witnesses should be approached with caution and on the heavy burden that this imposes on a trial judge summing up to the jury. But another matter to consider is the demands that a corroboration warning imposes on the jury and whether it can ever be justified to make these demands in respect of particular categories of witness.
Tax, Marriage and the 1988 Budget
Authors: Kerridge Roger
Published: January 2009

There appeared in the March issue of the Cambridge Law Journal an article criticising the rules under which married, separated and divorced people were taxed in the United Kingdom. The article dealt with the position as it was in the tax year 1987/88, before the 1988 Busdget. The 1988 Budget made radical proposals for change and, at the time of writing, these proposals have just been enacted as part of the Finance Act 1988. On the whole the changes are to be welcomed. They will introduce rules which will be both simpler and fairer than those they replace. Having said this, the new system will include or retain some rules which are, in effect, left-overs from the old and which will make both for unnecessary complications and continued unfairness.
The Relative Nature of a Shareholder's Right to Enforce the Company Contract
Authors: Drury R. R.
Published: January 2009

It has been suggested in this article that every shareholder does have a right to have all the provisions of the company contract enforced, but that this right is not an absolute one, and cannot be considered in isolation. For a more complete appreciation of the picture this right must be viewed in a context where the company contract constitutes the framework of a long-term relationship between the contracting parties. Thus we need to take into account the equally valid rights of the other shareholders to enforce conflicting provisions of this contract, to change those provisions, and to condone or regularise breaches of those provisions relating, inter alia, to the rules of internal procedure. We need also to consider the machinery provided by company law for the resolution of disputes concerning these conflicting rights, machinery which includes reference of the dispute to the decision of the majority, where it is appropriate to do so. Finally, it must be borne in mind that one of the aims of providing such machinery is the preservation of the long-term relationship between the participants in the company. It is only be considering such factors as these that the relative, rather than absolute, nature of any one shareholder's right to enforce the company contract can be truly understood.
Liberty and the Common Law
Authors: Wright Lord
Published: January 2009

In preparing the few and elementary observations which I am about to make to you tonight I have wondered if the title I chose was apt or suitable. The Common Law is generally described as the law of liberty, of freedom and of free peoples. It was a home-made product. In the eighteenth century, foreign lawyers called it an insular and barbarous system; they compared it to their own system of law, developed on the basis of Roman and Civil Law. Many centuries before, and long after Bracton's day, when other civilised European nations ‘received’ the Roman Law, England held back and stood aloof from the Reception. It must have been a near thing. It seems there could have been a Reception here if the Judges had been ecclesiastics, steeped in the Civil Law. But as it turned out they were laymen, and were content as they travelled the country, and in London as well, to adopt what we now know as the Case System, instead of the rules and categories of the Civil Law. Hence the method of threshing out problems by debate in Court, and later on the basis of written pleadings which we find in the Year Books. For present purposes, all I need observe is that the Civil Lawyer had a different idea of the relation of the state or the monarch to the individual from that of the Common Lawyer. To the Civil or Roman Lawyer, the dominant maxim was ‘quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem’; law was the will of the princeps. With this may be compared the rule expressed in Magna Carta in 1215: No freeman, it was there said, was to be taken or imprisoned or exiled or in any way destroyed save by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Whatever the exact application of that phrase in 1215, it became a text for fixing the relations between the subject and the State. Holdsworth quotes from the Year Book of 1441; the law is the highest English inheritance the King hath, for by the law he and all his subjects are ruled. That was the old medieval doctrine that all things are governed by law, either human or divine. That is the old doctrine of the supremacy of the law, which runs through the whole of English history, and which in the seventeenth century won the day against the un-English doctrine of the divine right of Kings and of their autocratic power over the persons and property of their subjects. The more detailed definition of what all that involved took time to work out. I need scarcely refer to the great cases in the eighteenth century in which the Judges asserted the right of subjects to freedom from arbitrary arrest as against the ministers of state and against the validity of a warrant to seize the papers of a person accused of publishing a seditious libel; in particular Leach v. Money (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1001; Entick v. Carrington (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1029; Wilkes v. Halifax (1769) 19 St. Tr. 1406. In this connexion may be noted Fox's Libel Act, 1792, which dealt with procedure, but fixed a substantive right to a trial by jury of the main issue in the cases it referred to.
Lord Atkin of Aberdovey
Authors: Gutteridge H. C.
Published: January 2009

The death of Lord Atkin has deprived our English law schools of one of their staunchest friends, and will be deeply deplored by all who have the cause of legal education at heart. The teaching and the study of the law meant much more to him than a mere preparation for professional life, for the law was ‘all the time the object of his fervent and almost passionate devotion,’ and he was unswerving in his insistence that it should have the place due to it in the studium generale which connotes the unity of knowledge. The full extent of the services which he rendered to legal education will probably never be known, because he was not given to seek publicity for his opinions or his achievements, but it is largely due to his zeal and enthusiasm that our law schools now occupy a very different position from that held by them a quarter of a century ago. His influence made itself felt in two directions. The improvement in the status of law teachers is in no small measure the result of his efforts on their behalf, and he also played a leading part in securing the establishment of closer contact between the academic and practising sides of the law.
Promises to Perform an Existing Duty
Authors: Davis A. G.
Published: January 2009

In December, 1934, the ex-Lord Chancellor asked the Law Revision Committee ‘to consider and report whether and, if so, in what respects the doctrine of consideration requires modification, and in particular to consider among other aspects of and observations upon that doctrine … (b) The rule that a promise to perform an existing duty is no consideration’.
The Inner Relationship Between English and Roman Law
Authors: Pringsheim Fritz
Published: January 2009

If a German professor announces his intention of speaking on the inner relationship between English and Roman law, he must first state why he intends to do so. When I reviewed Roman law, and later on English law, from the German point of view, it struck me again and again that the two systems touch each other at many points. It is obvious that this relationship must be clearer to a person acquainted with German law (and therefore speaking as an outsider) than it is to an English student who understands his law by working within the system and appreciates it accordingly. This, then, is one justification. Since I have not been brought up in English law, I shall always remain a layman, despite all my efforts to penetrate its nature.
Formedon En Remainder at Common Law
Authors: Humphreys W.H.
Published: January 2009

It is a far cry to go back now to a controversy which took place almost fifty years ago between two of the foremost exponents respectively of the historical and practical schools of English law, Maitland and Challis. The technical subject of Remainders after Conditional Fees before the passing of De Donis was in question. According to Maitland's view, Remainders limited after Conditional Fees, were common enough, and he vouched Bracton, and a considerable number of Fines all prior to 1285, in support of his argument, at the same time admitting that no Writ protecting such Remainders had been found in any Registrum Brevium.
Attempts to Commit Crimes
Authors: Turner J. W. Cecil
Published: January 2009

Now people in the street,’ said a learned judge in a modern case, ‘before they begin to think about it, is a very easy thing to say what amounts to an “attempt,” but when you come to analyse it, it becomes a little difficult.’

The text-books tell us a that at Common Law every attempt to commit any indictable crime, whether that ulterior crime be a felony or a misdemeanour, is itself a misdemeanour. Professor Sayre, of Harvard, in an article in the Harvard Law Review, has traced the growth of this rule which, he thinks, did not take its modern comprehensive form until a judgment of Lord Mansfield in 1784 in R. v. Scofield. Until that date there seems to have been no recognition of the doctrine that an attempt to commit any crime at all was itself a crime.
Nocere and Noxa
Authors: Daube David
Published: January 2009

In the year 1908 Professor W. W. Buckland published his book on The Roman Law of Slavery. There existed in England, before that time, no Roman legal studies in the modern sense; and it is no exaggeration to say that it is he qui fundavit ius civile. To-day every scholar in Roman Law or History, whether English or foreign, is acquainted with Buckland's Equity in Roman Law (1911), Elementary Principles of Roman Law (1912), Text-Book of Roman Law (1921, 2nd ed. 1932), Manual of Roman Law (1925, reprinted 1928, new edition to appear 1939), and Main Institutions of Roman Law (1931), and with Buckland and McNair's Roman Law and Common Law (1936).
Abuse of Rights
Authors: Gutterridge H. C.
Published: January 2009

The theory of the abuse of rights is one which has been rejected by our law, with the result that the ancient brocard ‘dura lex sed lex’ finds its most vivid illustration in the present-day decisions of the Anglo-American Courts. The absolutist view of rights which is a feature of the Common Law was summed up by Lord Macnaghten in trenchant language when he said in Mayor of Bradford v. Pickles that although Mr. Pickles's conduct in wilfully depriving his fellow townsmen of part of their water supply might be ‘shocking to a moral philosopher’ there was nothing in the law of England which could stop him from being as ‘churlish, selfish and grasping’ as it was possible for a man to be. In other words our law has not hesitated to place the seal of its approval upon a theory of the extent of individual rights which can only be described as the consecration of the spirit of unrestricted egoism.
The Law of Defamation in Scotland
Authors: Normand Lord
Published: January 2009

There are differences between the law of Scotland and the law of England on Defamation which cannot readily be accounted for by any differences in the sources of the two systems. In some chapters of jurisprudence Scots law has derived from the Civil law or the Canon law characteristics which distinguish it from English law. But Scotland has not made substantially larger draughts on these special sources than has England in forming the principles of its law of defamation. Nor can it be said that Stair, who contributed so much to the formation of Scots law, made any marked contribution here. In the one brief passage (Inst. I, ix, 4) in which he treats of defamation he leaves it to be supposed that the law of Scotland, so far as claims for damages for defamation are concerned, and apart from minor differences of procedure, is identical with the law of England. ‘Such actions’, he says, ‘upon injurious words, as they relate to damage in means, are frequent and curious among the English, but with us there is little of it accustomed to be pursued, though we own the same, grounds, and would proceed to the same effects with them, if questioned.’ It sometimes happens that differences between Scots law and English law are to be explained by differences in the history of the Courts and of jurisdiction in the two countries. But this explanation is at first sight of little avail in the chapter of defamation, and some at least of the distinctive differences which will be described must be referred to other causes.
Societas as Consensual Contract
Authors: Daube David
Published: January 2009

Everybody knows how Rabelais dumbfounded, ere they had yet found time to speak out, those unruly spirits who would not trust his account of the miraculous nativity of the horrific Gargantua. Pourquoy ne le croiriez vous? he exclaimed. Pour ce, dictes vous, qu'il n'y a nulle apparence. Je vous dicz que pour ceste seule cause vous le debvez croire en foy parfaicte. Car les Sorbonistes disent que foy est argument des choses de nulle apparence. Fortunately enough, modern interpolationists have not yet made use of this argument. And it is still possible, there-fore, to put in a word for some good classical texts and concepts which we are asked to regard as the miraculous offspring of the horrific Tribonian.
The Burden of Proof of Negligence in Running-down Cases
Authors: White E. Wyndham
Published: January 2009

In what are generally known as ‘running-down’ cases, that is to say, actions of negligence by pedestrians against motorists who have caused them injuries, the pedestrian, like every other plaintiff, has to discharge the burden of showing that the accident was due to the negligence of the motorist. This burden is made heavier by the fact that in most cases the pedestrian will have been disabled at the time of the accident from observing accurately the exact circumstances of the case and from enlisting the support of eye-witnesses. This latter disadvantage is a very real one if one takes into consideration the extraordinary reluctance of the average citizen to come forward and testify voluntarily in legal proceedings. The appalling wastage of human life and the suffering caused by road accidents in recent years is reflected in the anxiety of legislators to devise regulations for the protection and safeguarding of all road-users, and pedestrians in particular. The time is apt, therefore, to consider once again the desirability of altering in this class of cases the common law burden of proof of negligence.
The Official Manuals of Roman Law of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries
Authors: Freshfield Edwin H.
Published: January 2009

The two manuals here referred to are known respectively as the Ecloga and the Procheiros Nomos. They are distinguished from all others subsequently edited by private jurists or the Colleges of Notaries by the fact that they were issued throught the Imperial Chancery in the name and by the authority of the Sovrans. They begin like an English Act of Parliament, by a short title and a preamble in which the Emperors address their subjects in the first person plural, indicating the occasion and announcing the purpose of their new exposition of law. They use the kind of official Romaic Greek affected by the antigrapheis or official draftsmen of the period. The language is simple and direct and the student will have no difficulty in interpreting it when he has mastered the vocabulary.
The Mental Element in Crimes at Common Law
Authors: Turner J. W. C.
Published: January 2009

Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea is one of the best-known maxims of our Common Law. It is regarded at the present day as a statement in general terms which indicates the essentials of liability to criminal punishment. The maxim sharply contrasts the conduct of the wrongdoer, i.e. his physical acts or omissions, with the state of his mind at the time, i.e. what he was thinking when he so acted.
The Dominions and the United Kingdom
Authors: Phillips G. Godfrey
Published: January 2009

The relationship between the Dominions and the Crown and the Imperial Parliament presents questions of great difficulty. At the present time the Dominions are, just as the Colonies, subject to the legal—though not to the political—supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Though this supremacy has for many years not been exercised positively, i.e. by the passing of Acts affecting a Dominion, except at the request of such Dominion, e.g. at the request of Canada to amend the British North America Act, 1867, yet it still exists, inasmuch as there are in force Acts of the Imperial Parliament (especially the Acts creating the Dominion Constitutions) which apply to the Dominions, and the courts would be compelled to hold any Dominion legislation conflicting with such Acts to be inoperative.
New Light on the Roman Legal System: the Appointment of Judges
Authors: Birks Peter
Published: January 2009

In Spain in 1981, near Seville, there was a spectacular discovery. It allows us to see back to the reign of Domitian, third and last of the Flavian emperors (AD 81–96), and to recreate a vivid picture of the little local senate of Irni meeting in the very shadow of the municipality's newly acquired constitution. Ten bronze tablets, each nearly a metre wide and rather more than half a metre high, were fixed along the wall of its council-chamber, presumably at a level at which letters about half a centimetre high could be clearly read from ground level. Each rectangular tablet carried three columns of writing, each column about fifty lines, each line an average of about ten words. At five hundred words a column and thirty columns, the Statute of Irni— thelex Irnitana—was thus a massive document. The discovery in 1981, by people using metal detectors to search for coins, was of no less than six of the ten tablets. Later excavation discovered a few more fragments. The last tablet bears at its end the date 11th October, AD 91.
A changing international law of the sea
Authors: Jennings R. Y.
Published: January 2009

The legal régime of the sea has been a persistently important theme of the law of nations from the beginning; but it has probably never been more dominant than it is at the present time, touching as it does so many of the most vital interests of nations, such as the supply of food and of energy; politically sensitive questions like defence and immigration; and some of the most pressing aspects of pollution and conservation problems. With this renewed importance of the law of the sea have come also new doubts about its content and meaning, and even about the underlying legal principles. Half a century ago, the law of the sea was relatively simple, certain and stable, at any rate in time of peace. The classical dispute between the closed sea and open sea doctrines seemed at last to have been finally resolved on the basis of a kind of dualism by which the coastal state was to have sovereignty over a belt of territorial waters, subject to the general right of innocent passage, and the high seas outside that maritime belt were to be res communis, not subject to acquisition by title of sovereignty, but subject to an international régime which was spelt out in terms of the so-called “freedoms” to be enjoyed by the flags of all nations, the most important being the freedom of navigation and the freedom of fishing.
Conflict of law 1921–1971 the way ahead
Authors: Lipstein K.
Published: January 2009

(1) Legal Basis

When the first issue of the Cambridge Law Journal appeared in 1921, the English rules of the conflict of laws were those stated and reformulated by Dicey and by the editors of Westlake and Foote. Their progress between 1858 and 1912 had been charted by Dicey himself in a survey published in 1912. The legal basis for the application of foreign law in England was and remained Lord Mansfield's pronouncement in Holman v. Johnson: “Every action here must be tried by the law of England, but the law of England says that in a variety of circumstances … the law of the country where the cause of action arose shall govern.” Dicey never waivered in his adherence to this rule of English law, but he supplemented it with an argument drawn from the doctrine of acquired rights which bedevilled English lawyers for a long time, until in 1949 the editors of the sixth edition of Dicey took what they believed to be a bold, but substantially honest, step by restricting the concept to its proper boundaries and thus by depriving it of its capacity to serve as a general principle of the Conflict of Laws.
“As a matter of fact …”
Authors: Odgers F. J.
Published: January 2009

“Now what I want is Facts. … Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. … Stick to facts, Sir!” Dickens's Mr. Gradgrind was, perhaps, a county court judge manqué. There is a clear echo of his voice in a story told—and told superbly—by Mr. Justice Mars-Jones of a judge in a rural county court who found himself bemused by a claim to an easement based on the doctrine of lost modern grant. “What's that? What's that?” he declaimed. “A lost grant? That's a very serious matter! Who lost it, and when? Was it your instructing solicitors? Let me see the affidavit of documents. …” And, on being assured that “lost grant” was a matter of legal fiction, demurred with vigour. “Fiction, is it? Fiction!? It's not fictions we want in this court, it's facts!” Whether he had Thomas Gradgrind in mind or not, His Honour was among the prophets, for over the last fifty years facts have largely replaced fictions and, in the law of tort in particular, dogmatic rules of lawyers' law, most of them prohibitory, have been rooted out. It is true that some old plantings survive, and that some strange and undesired off-shoots have appeared, but in general the process has been successful. It has certainly been welcomed by all save a few ageing academics who year by year have lamented the disappearance of much long-cherished and well-cultivated material. It is the removal of the law's negatives, leaving liability in an increasing number of cases to be determined as an issue of fact, that is perhaps the outstanding development in the law of tort since 1921.
Civil law concepts in the criminal law
Authors: Smith J. C.
Published: January 2009

At this juncture it is convenient in connection with the older authorities concerned with obtaining money or chattels by false pretences to mention a point of some importance in relation to the Theft Act 1968. That is an Act designed to simplify the law—it uses words in their natural meaning and is to be construed thus to produce sensible results; when that Act is under examination, this Court deprecates attempts to bring into too close consideration the finer distinctions in the civil law as to the precise moment when contractual communications take effect or when property passes.
“Risk” in the law of sale
Authors: Sealy L. S.
Published: January 2009

The jubilee of the Journal happens to coincide with the centenary of Head v. Tattersall, the well-known but troublesome case in which the buyer of a horse was allowed to exercise a contractual right to return it (for failure to answer a warranty that it “had been hunted with the Bicester hounds”), despite the fact that it had been accidentally injured in the meantime and could be restored to the seller only in a damaged state. Most contract textbooks cite this as the classic instance of the condition subsequent, by virtue of which a contract or obligation, although initially effective, ceases to operate on the occurence of a specified event. It is apparent, however, on closer analysis that it was not the contract or any aspect of it which was terminated because the horse failed to meet the warranty, but the buyer's title: in other words, the property in the horse passed to the buyer immediately, but defeasibly, so that when he rejected the horse he divested himself of the title and revested it in the seller. Even this explanation leaves on one side the question of the damage sustained by the horse. In the language of the law of sale, it would be most natural to regard this issue as one of risk, and to say that the court held in effect, and indeed perhaps expressly, that the horse was at the seller's risk during the period allowed for its return.
The waning of parental rights
Authors: Hall J. C.
Published: January 2009

Fifty years ago the rights of a parent were held in high regard by English law. Since then there has taken place a fairly steady erosion of those rights, so that the picture presented today differs quite markedly from that of the early 1920s.
The Constitution of the United Kingdom
Authors: Williams D. G. T.
Published: January 2009

Whynot, we are asked, establish a permanent reconciliation between England and Ireland by the conversion of the United Kingdom into a federalised kingdom whereof England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and, for aught I know, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, Shall form separate states? This new constitutional idea of the inherent excellence of federalism is a new faith or delusion which deserves examination.
Identifying isotropic events using a regional moment tensor inversion
Authors: Ford Sean R. , Dreger Douglas S. , Walter William R.
Published: January 2009

We calculate the deviatoric and isotropic source components for 17 explosions at the Nevada Test Site, as well as 12 earthquakes and 3 collapses in the surrounding region of the western United States, using a regional time domain full waveform inversion for the complete moment tensor. The events separate into specific populations according to their deviation from a pure double‐couple and ratio of isotropic to deviatoric energy. The separation allows for anomalous event identification and discrimination between explosions, earthquakes, and collapses. Confidence regions of the model parameters are estimated from the data misfit by assuming normally distributed parameter values. We investigate the sensitivity of the resolved parameters of an explosion to imperfect Earth models, inaccurate event depths, and data with low signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) assuming a reasonable azimuthal distribution of stations. In the band of interest (0.02–0.10 Hz) the source‐type calculated from complete moment tensor inversion is insensitive to velocity model perturbations that cause less than a half‐cycle shift (<5 s) in arrival time error if shifting of the waveforms is allowed. The explosion source‐type is insensitive to an incorrect depth assumption (for a true depth of 1 km), and the goodness of fit of the inversion result cannot be used to resolve the true depth of the explosion. Noise degrades the explosive character of the result, and a good fit and accurate result are obtained when the signal‐to‐noise ratio is greater than 5. We assess the depth and frequency dependence upon the resolved explosive moment. As the depth decreases from 1 km to 200 m, the isotropic moment is no longer accurately resolved and is in error between 50 and 200%. However, even at the most shallow depth the resultant moment tensor is dominated by the explosive component when the data have a good SNR.
Atmospheric forcing of the Beaufort Sea ice gyre: Surface‐stratosphere coupling
Authors: Lukovich J. V. , Asplin M. G. , Barber D. G.
Published: January 2009

In a companion article we examined the nature of correspondence between synoptic weather patterns and reversals in the Beaufort Sea ice gyre. In this paper we extend this analysis to examine the role of stratospheric forcing on surface phenomena. Investigated in particular is the correspondence between reversals in stratospheric winds at 10 mbar during winter as defined by stratospheric sudden warmings (SSW) and mean sea level pressure synoptic types in the Beaufort Sea region. Connections between stratospheric and surface events are characterized using relative vorticity and the square of strain computed at different pressure levels from the stratosphere to the surface in the Beaufort Sea region. We quantify the correspondence between stratospheric flow and surface phenomena through investigation of the frequency in synoptic types derived in a companion article during stratospheric sudden warming events. Investigation of stratospheric wind gradients averaged over the Beaufort Sea region demonstrates a prevalence in anticyclonic activity during SSWs that persists for approximately 20 days. Examination of the evolution in synoptic types in the Beaufort Sea region also shows an increase in the number of synoptic types associated with anticyclonic activity during SSWs.
The origin, evolution and structure of the protein world
Authors: Caetano-Anollés Gustavo , Wang Minglei , Caetano-Anollés Derek , Mittenthal Jay E.
Published: January 2009

Contemporary protein architectures can be regarded as molecular fossils, historical imprints that mark important milestones in the history of life. Whereas sequences change at a considerable pace, higher-order structures are constrained by the energetic landscape of protein folding, the exploration of sequence and structure space, and complex interactions mediated by the proteostasis and proteolytic machineries of the cell. The survey of architectures in the living world that was fuelled by recent structural genomic initiatives has been summarized in protein classification schemes, and the overall structure of fold space explored with novel bioinformatic approaches. However, metrics of general structural comparison have not yet unified architectural complexity using the ‘shared and derived’ tenet of evolutionary analysis. In contrast, a shift of focus from molecules to proteomes and a census of protein structure in fully sequenced genomes were able to uncover global evolutionary patterns in the structure of proteins. Timelines of discovery of architectures and functions unfolded episodes of specialization, reductive evolutionary tendencies of architectural repertoires in proteomes and the rise of modularity in the protein world. They revealed a biologically complex ancestral proteome and the early origin of the archaeal lineage. Studies also identified an origin of the protein world in enzymes of nucleotide metabolism harbouring the P-loop-containing triphosphate hydrolase fold and the explosive discovery of metabolic functions that recapitulated well-defined prebiotic shells and involved the recruitment of structures and functions. These observations have important implications for origins of modern biochemistry and diversification of life.
Phimsy
Authors: Ellis R. Hobart , Cox Everett F.
Published: January 2009

More fun with decimal places; For everyone his own way; Detective work with infrared; You incredible witnesses; Lots of Peltier devices; The function is the particle; Weston Batavia Fermi machine.
Crystallographers offer meetings within meetings
Authors: Hamilton Walter C.
Published: January 2009

THE US PLAYS HOST again this month to the General Assembly and Congress of the International Union of Crystallography after an interval of 21 years. The program and structure of this, the eighth meeting, reflect the broad interdisciplinary character of crystallography. Biological crystallographers have their turn first at Buffalo (see box on page 25 for meeting schedule) for a topical meeting on biologically important substances. This specialized meeting is followed by ten days at Stony Brook, during which many small meetings-within-meetings will be held on “Frontier Topics of Crystallography” (see PHYSICS TODAY, July, page 117 for list). More specialized symposia follow at Stony Brook and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the meeting is topped off by a tour of scientific laboratories in the Washington, D.C. area.
Electricity and rain
Authors: Sartor J. Doyne
Published: January 2009

THE GENERATION OF ELECTRICITY and the formation of rain in thunderstorms are closely related through the physical and electrical interactions among colliding cloud particles, raindrops and hail. Our understanding of these processes started with the observations of Benjamin Franklin and Lord Rayleigh, in the 18th and 19th centuries, that electric fields exist in thunderclouds and that charged raindrops can coalesce. Modern theories indicate that different fall velocities of large and small drops are responsible for the separation of charge in the interior of the cloud.
Three decades of fast-neutron experiments
Authors: Barschall Henry H.
Published: January 2009

EXPERIMENTS WITH NEUTRONS in the MeV region are important both for learning about properties of nuclei and for applications in nuclear technology; yet relatively few nuclear physicists work in this area. The reason may be that experiments with neutrons are more difficult than those with charged particles, because neutrons can neither be accelerated nor detected directly. Consequently the accuracy of fast-neutron experiments is typically an order of magnitude poorer than that of charged-particle experiments. This comparison partially reflects the enormous advances of recent years in charged-particle experiments, particularly with solid-state detectors.
Matter Meets Antimatter in Akademgorodok
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: January 2009

It is worth traveling halfway round the world to visit the antiworld of Andrei Budker. There, at his Nuclear Physics Institute in Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk, he makes beams of antimatter collide with beams of matter, doing high-energy physics experiments on a low-energy physicist's budget. We spent a week in Akademgorodok, the Siberian science town, and had several pleasant visits with Budker and his wife Ludmilla at their home. At the institute we saw his latest venture, a 25-GeV proton-antiproton device, being built, toured his factory for mass producing accelerators, and looked at beams of positrons and electrons circling in one of his smaller storage rings.
Phimsy
Authors: Ellis R. Hobart , Lasky Dorothy M.
Published: January 2009

More physics philately.
Elementary particles
Authors: Veneziano Gabriele
Published: January 2009

THE THEORY OF STRONG INTERACTIONS has been for many years particularly hard and fruitless. Today, under the momentum of a number of new ideas, theorists in this field appear to have regained confidence and enthusiasm. Both in its mathematical tools and physical ideas, the new trend in strong interactions points to a decisive change from the old one. Is elementary-particle theory undergoing a revolutionary change too?
What is the point of so-called “axiomatic field theory”?
Authors: Wightman Arthur S.
Published: January 2009

QUANTUM FIELD THEORY is well described by an adjective that Robert Oppenheimer once applied to the Fermi theory of beta decay; it is robust. It has had its ups and downs, but it somehow seems to survive all vicissitudes and continues to provide the best available language for the description of elementary-particle phenomena. Here I shall try to describe the origins and some of the achievements and objectives of the particular brand of field theory customarily referred to as “axiomatic.” I will thereby try to answer the question posed by the title.
Spectra Suggest Anomalous Water is a Stable Polymer of H2O
Authors: Rothenberg Marian S.
Published: January 2009

Anomalous water, first discovered by Boris V. Deryagin and coworkers at the Karpov Institute of Physical Chemistry in Moscow, is a polymer, according to a group from the National Bureau of Standards and the University of Maryland. The experimenters, Ellis Lippincott, Robert Stromberg, Warren Grant and Gerald Cessac, believe that the substance they have produced in capillaries from distilled water is not H2O but rather a polymer whose formula is (H2O)n.
A Correction
Authors: Ballato Arthur D. , Mcknight Robert V.
Published: January 2009

The hydrogen maser measurements attributed in our August article to Norman Ramsey were indeed discussed by him in his talk. They were ade, however, at the National Bureau of Standards, Boulder, Colo., by a joint effort of NBS and Varian personnel using Varian hydrogen masers.
The two Ernests—II
Authors: Oliphant Mark L.
Published: January 2009

BOTH ERNEST RUTHERFORD and Ernest Lawrence led great laboratories and inspired the physicists who worked in them. Rutherford was personally involved in almost all of the work at the Cavendish Laboratory, dominating the laboratory by his sheer greatness as a physicist and providing for his colleagues only the barest minimum of equipment. Lawrence, on the other hand, created at the Radiation Laboratory, the first of the very large laboratories in which massive and expensive equipment was designed, built and used for investigations into basic problems in physics in which he played little part, personally. After the discovery and successful development of the cyclotron at his laboratory, Lawrence enthusiastically offered his assistance in the construction of cyclotrons at laboratories elsewhere.
Nuclear-structure Emperor operating at Yale
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: January 2009

The A. W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale University, which houses the first Emperor Van de Graaff accelerator, is being dedicated this month. Its two-stage tandem machine produces the most energetic protons yet obtained with an electrostatic accelerator—23.50 MeV; this energy could eventually go as high as 30 MeV, according to D. Allan Bromley, director of the laboratory. Beam currents are also high. During acceptance tests in July the Emperor put out 25 microamperes at 15 Mev and 10 μA at 20 MeV.
NBS moves to Gaithersburg
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: January 2009

THIS MONTH the world's largest physical science laboratory, the National Bureau of Standards, is dedicating its new facility at Gaithersburg, Maryland. We recently visited the 565-acre site, to which most of the activities formerly housed on Van Ness Street in northwest Washington have been moved. In addition three major new facilities for which the old site was unsuited have been completed in Gaithersburg. These are a high-intensity 100-MeV electron linear accelerator (linac), a 10-megawatt heavy-water-moderated reactor for materials research and a collection of highly accurate deadweight machines to calibrate force-measuring devices.
Novosibirsk colliding beams
Authors: Lubkin Gloria B.
Published: January 2009

A new kind of colliding-beam device that stores 25-GeV protons and antiprotons is being built at Academic City, Novosibirsk, USSR. The device is the third storage ring to be built there; a pair of 160-MeV electron-electron-storage rings and a 700-MeV electron-positron storage ring are both operating. Academician G. I. Budker, director of the Nuclear Physics Institute in Academic City, described the devices in talks given at seven US laboratories last September.
PPA beam extracted
Authors: Thomsen Dietrick E.
Published: January 2009

After a year of effort physicists at the Princeton-Pennsylvania accelerator have succeeded in extracting the synchrotron's beam. The method of extraction, which is the same as the one used on the electron accelerator at Frascati, employs betatron oscillation to blow up and spill the beam. Specifically the radial betatron resonance, vr = 2/3, is excited so that the radial oscillations of the beam build up and move the protons so far from the equilibrium orbit that they find their way into the field of an extraction magnet that bends them out of the accelerator.
CERN starts storage rings and plans the 300 GeV
Authors: Ellis R. Hobart
Published: January 2009

The European Center for Nuclear Research retains its air of purpose and international harmony. So we found when we lunched there recently with the director-general, Bernard Gregory, and members of ECFA, the European Committee for Future Accelerators, which was meeting that day at CERN, just outside Geneva. ECFA appears to be approaching the European 300-GeV accelerator with the same smoothness that has been characteristic of CERN since its 1952 founding. Touring the site and talking with physicists, we found that, aside from the 300-GeV plans, the most stimulating conversation pieces are two storage rings and a neutrino facility that is abuilding.
Who are physicists? What do they do?
Authors: Barisch Sylvia
Published: January 2009

•The 1964 median salary for physicists and astronomers taken as a group was $1000 higher than that of all scientists. • The physics-astronomy group is younger than scientists in general. • Forty-two percent of them are employed by industry.
Megagauss fields
Authors: Linhart Jiři G.
Published: January 2009

MEGAGAUSS MAGNETIC FIELDS are intimately connected with such entities as megaämperes, megajoules and megabars. Density of stored magnetic energy corresponding to megagauss fields is higher than that of high explosives, and it follows, therefore, that coils producing such fields will disintegrate under the enormous pressures and energy dissipations required. These and other relations between megagauss fields and explosives have caused the subject to fall for many years under the shadow of military classification.
Unified theories of elementary particles
Authors: Bludman Sidney A.
Published: January 2009

THEORISTS AT A RECENT SEMINAR on unified theories of elementary particles were brought together by continued interest in more or less realistic application of quantum field theory to elementaryparticle physics. Thus they do not share the fears of Freeman J. Dyson (expressed in last June's PHYSICS TODAY)—about the relevance of field theory to strong-interaction physics nor his fear that field theorists are to become an isolated band of specialists like specialists in general relativity.
Color vision
Authors: Luria Saul M.
Published: January 2009

PHYSICISTS, PSYCHOLOGISTS, PHYSIOLOGISTS and artists—not to mention paint manufacturers—have all played substantial roles in the study of color and color vision. Many disparate points of view have resulted in great cross fertilization but, not surprisingly, some confusion as well. One confusion is the dichotomy of physical stimulus and sensation, that is, color perception. Several different theories have attempted to explain the relation between the two, the two major ones being those called “trichromatic” and “opponent-process.” Meanwhile observable facts have been determined by many types of measurement: color mixing, wavelength discrimination, spectral sensitivity and studies of color blindness. We do not know all the answers yet, but apparently all the major theories have their own validities at different levels of perception.
What do other specialists do?
Authors: Teaney Dale T.
Published: January 2009

AMONG MATTERS OF PRIVATE and professional concern to physicists today are problems that arise from our increasing specialization. One of the most important of these certainly is the way we specialists tend to get so absorbed in our own work that we lose touch with discoveries and developments of colleagues in fields not immediately related to our own. The stimulation to be found in our shortrange intellectual interactions is something we would not want to give up or weaken with dilettantism; still, most of us feel that a constant effort to broaden our general understanding is a professional responsibility, as well as a good in itself.
Why Technical Books Cost What They Do
Authors: Dembofsky Thomas J.
Published: January 2009

Costs rise. Markets decrease as specialization increases and more people use copying devices. The government competes. Sometimes the publishers feel they are caught in a supply–demand dilemma.
Outlook for US physics
Authors: Committee National Academy of Sciences Physics Survey
Published: January 2009

PHYSICS: SURVEY AND OUTLOOK, a report that assesses physics research and teaching in the United States and spells out requirements for future growth of the science, has been released by the National Academy of Sciences. The report is based on studies made during 1964 and 1965 by the Physics Survey Committee, an 18-member group working under the auspices of NAS's Committee on Science and Public Policy. The Physics Survey Committee was headed by George E. Pake, provost of Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee.
Some remarks on the theory of superconductivity
Authors: Bloch Felix
Published: January 2009

SUPERCONDUCTIVITY THEORY has been approached in several ways. The most direct but also the most difficult is the attempt to derive all facts from a detailed microscopic theory, and the most significant steps in this direction have been made since 1957 through the theory of John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper and J. Robert Schreiffer. Another approach, less fundamental but often very instructive, is based on suitably chosen simple models, of which the degenerate ideal Bose gas, suggested by M. R. Schafroth in 1955, has proven to be particularly useful.