Stanford University

Transforming Politics via Delegation to International Courts

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Karen Alter's current research investigates how the proliferation of international legal mechanisms is changing international relations.  Her book in progress, The New Terrain of International Law: International Courts in International Politics provides a new framework for comparing and understanding the influence of the twenty-four existing international courts, and for thinking about how different domains of domestic and international politics are transformed through the creation of international courts.     

Alter is author of The European Court's Political Power (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe. (Oxford University Press, 2001) and more than forty articles and book  chapters on the politics of international law and courts.  Recent publications investigate the politics of international regime complexity,  how delegation of authority to international courts reshapes domestic and international relations, and politics in the Andean Community's legal system.

Professor Alter teaches courses on international law, international organizations, ethics in international affairs, and the international politics of human rights at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Alter has been a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Howard Foundation research fellow and an Emile Noel scholar at Harvard Law School. Her research has also been supported by the DAAD and France's Chateaubriand fellowship. She has been a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation where she is an associate scholar of the Center on Law and Globalization, Northwestern University's School of Law, Harvard University's Center for European Studies, Institute d'Etudes Politiques, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartiges Politik, Universität Bremen, and Seikei University. Fluent in Italian, French and German, Alter serves on the editorial board of European Union Politics and Law and Social Inquiry and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Karen Alter Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University; Northwestern Law School (courtesy appointment) Speaker
Workshops

War Games: Childhood, Militarization, and the Future of a Pacifist Japan

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Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

In March 2000, the release of Sony's new PlayStation2 hit a snag. The Japanese government classified the game console as a "general purpose product related to conventional weapons" on the grounds that it was powerful enough to be used as an actual missile guidance system. Accordingly, the government applied export controls on PlayStation2 requiring that distributors obtain a special license. Illustrating the coinage of such terms as "military-industrial-entertainment complex," the incident marked one of numerous collusions between military and commercial uses of video games in Japan and elsewhere.

It is against this backdrop that Frühstück traces the rules and conventions of war games from the fields of rural Japan in the nineteenth century to cyberspace in the twenty-first century. Her examination of the varying configurations of militarism and infantilism, the production of "child soldiers," and the competing roles of state agencies and entertainment industries suggest that war has been leaving its mark on the social body, and on children in particular, not only in the form of injury or death. Rather, through military institutions, pedagogy, technology, popular culture, and other intermediaries, war continues to have general effects on Japanese society and the global order as a whole.

Sabine Frühstück is a professor of modern Japanese cultural studies and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Employing historical and sociocultural methodologies, Frühstück's research focuses on militarization and war, gender and sexuality, and Japan in a global context from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Her book Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007) was translated into Japanese as Fuan na heishitachi: Nippon Jieitai Kenkyû (2008). She is also the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003) and Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft, 1908-1941 (1997), and co-editor of the volumes The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (1998), Neue Geschichten der Sexualität in Zentraleuropa und Ostasien (1999), and Recreating Japanese Men (in press, 2011). Committed to engaging the humanities and the social sciences, she has written essays in English, Japanese and German that have been published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, American Ethnologist, Jinbun Gakuho, and Zeitschrift für angewandte Sozialforschung, among other scholarly journals.

Since joining the faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Frühstück has been serving as the executive board director of the UC-wide Pacific Rim Research Program and as a member of the editorial boards of the University of California Press and the Journal of Japanese Studies. She also has been a member of the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies of the Japan Foundation, the executive board of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan, and the Board of Trustees of the Society for Japanese Studies. At UCSB, she has dry appointments with the departments of history, anthropology, and feminist studies, and the Cold War Center.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Sabine Fruhstuck Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies Speaker University of California, Santa Barbara
Seminars
Shorenstein APARC Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

Can ICT Improve Clean Water Delivery Systems in Slums? Lessons from Kibera

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Water is scarce, costly, and contaminated in Kibera, Nairobi -- one of Africa's largest urban slums. On good days, the women and children spend just under an hour finding clean water in their community. On bad days, the price of water increases tenfold and the search takes all day. Often, people ask jokingly whether it is water or cholera they are buying.

Many slums like Kibera lack access to clean drinking water, but they don't lack access to mobile phones. This is the insight behind M-Maji, a start-up non-profit project that uses mobile phones to empower communities with better information about water availability, price, and quality. This seminar will introduce the M-Maji system, and describe some of the challenges to designing for such a complex social environment.Background: M-Maji emerged from the Designing Liberation Technologies course in the Stanford d.school, which focused on using mobile phone technology for health improvement in Kibera. M-Maji has since received funding to run a pilot from the Program on Liberation Technologies and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford

Sunny Jeon is the principal investigator to M-Maji research, and is currently making frequent trips to Kenya to prepare for a randomized impact evaluation of their water program. He is also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science, where he is working on a dissertation project that studies the economic and political returns to ethnic diversity.

Katherine Hoffman is a co-terminal student completing a B.A. in International Relations and Economics and an M.A. in International Policy Studies with a focus on Global Health. She has been involved with M-Maji since it began in Spring quarter, and has just returned from a trip to Kenya in December to begin laying the groundwork for the project implementation. 
Her primary interests include economic development and health improvement in low-resource settings. Past experience includes internships at the Bonn International Center for Conversion in Bonn, Germany and at the Institute for Financial Management in Chennai, India; she has also volunteered at the Center for the Working Girl in Quito, Ecuador and studied abroad for a quarter in Moscow.

Wallenberg Theater

Katherine Hoffman M.A. Candidate, International Policy Studies, Global Health Speaker Stanford University
Sunny Jeon Ph.D. Candidate,Political Science Speaker Stanford University
Seminars
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Food price volatility and the world's poor

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Rosamond L. Naylor
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An October 13 New York Times headline article warned that an increasing volatile market for grains could lead to a repeat of the 2008 food price run-up. That price spike left over 1 billion people in a state of food insecurity-a threshold symbolic in its extreme order of magnitude and in the challenges it presents for combating global hunger in the future. In a paper released December 20 in Population and Development Review FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor and deputy director Walter P. Falcon provide insight into the causes and consequences of these volatile events.

"Price variability, particularly spikes, has enormous impacts on the rural poor who spend a majority of their income on food and have minimal savings," said Naylor. "Impacts at the local level have not been well measured, yet are key to improving food security globally." 

Expectations--often faulty--have played a key role in price volatility over the past decade. Uncertain exchange rates and macro policies added to price misperceptions, as did flurries of speculative activity in organized futures markets, particularly as a result of the growing biofuels market.

"These events highlight new linkages between agriculture-energy and agriculture-finance markets that affect the world food economy today," explained Falcon. "More importantly, volatile markets compound problems of low crop productivity, increase reliance on food imports, and aggravate other internal causes of instability--conflict, weak institutions, and inadequate infrastructure--that typically plague the world's poorest countries."

To see how the rural poor were impacted on a local scale, Naylor and Falcon looked at Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Guatemala, and India. Price changes at the local level during the 2008 price spike were frequently half that of international prices, primarily as a consequence of domestic food and trade policies.

"The price bubble was undeniably grim for poor consumers, particularly for households living under $1/day or $2/day, but not as debilitating as many commentators suggested," said Falcon. "Unfortunately, most price stabilization efforts aimed at the poor, however well intended, ended up helping larger net producers much more than those at the margin."

Additionally, domestic self-sufficiency polices tended to have long-term negative impacts on the international market when governments lacked the resources to defend a targeted price or were ‘large actors' with significant shares of global production or consumption.

For example, in the spring of 2008, the Indian government placed a ban on rice exports--a major staple in the country--when it feared significant increases in grain prices and a spread of Ug99 (wheat rust). This ban affected food prices from Asia to Africa, created mini-panics within food importing countries, and added to global grain price variability. It underscored the growing food-security and crop interdependencies among nations arising from pathogens, prices, and policies.

The extreme heat wave that hit Russia and Eastern Europe in the summer of 2010, coupled with floods in Pakistan, declining estimates of maize stocks in the U.S., and uncertainties about global GDP growth have captured the attention of many analysts and policymakers. What will happen to prices in terms of spikes, trends, and variations during 2011-2013 and beyond is uncertain.

What is known, said Naylor, is that the causes and consequences of food-price variability deserve much more attention if we are going to alleviate global food insecurity in the future.

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Environmental Impact of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Rod Ewing Visiting Professor at CISAC; Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan Speaker
Seminars

U.S. Preventative War in the Nuclear Age: A Reassessment

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Francis Gavin Director, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security & Law Speaker University of Texas at Austin
Mira Rapp-Hooper PhD Student Speaker Columbia University
Seminars

Survival Migration: Old Institutions, New Challenges

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Alexander Betts

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Postdoctoral Fellow
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Dr. Alexander Betts is the Hedley Bull research fellow in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he is also director of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Global Migration Governance project. He received his MPhil (with distinction) and DPhil from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the international politics of refugee protection and migration. His main academic focus is on understanding the conditions under which international cooperation takes place in the refugee regime and other areas of migration. In particular, the theoretical focus of his work is on the dynamics of international institutions: on a ‘horizontal' level (across issue-areas and policy fields) and on a ‘vertical' level (between the global and the national level). He has worked on a range of policy issues including forced migration and development, protracted refugee situations, and the protection of vulnerable irregular migrants.  His research has a geographical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and he has carried out extensive fieldwork across the region, including in South Africa, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the DRC. He has taught a range of graduate courses including ‘International Relations Theory', ‘International Relations of the Developing World' and ‘Forced Migration and International Relations'. He is on the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). He has previously worked for UNHCR, and been a consultant to UNHCR, IOM, and the Council of Europe.

 

(Profile last updated in September 2011.)

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Alexander Betts Post-doctoral Fellow Speaker CISAC
Brenna Powell Predoctoral Fellow, CISAC; PhD Candidate, Harvard University Commentator
Seminars

Comparative Analysis of Online Distribution of Software in the United States and Europe: Piracy or Freedom of First Use?

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This paper provides an understanding of the current copyright laws regarding software licensing in the United States and Europe. The concept of copyright under both the U.S. and EU legal regimes is to convey on the copyright owners the exclusive right to distribute their copyrighted software. In case of sales transactions, that right is expressly limited to statutory copyright law.

Sections 109 and 117 of the U.S. Copyright Act are the respective core provisions to apply to software transactions. It is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a work obtained at an authorized sale to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy. In addition, the owner of a copy of a computer program may, inter alia, create another copy of that program provided that the copy is made either as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or for archival or back-up purposes. Under U.S. case law the crucial question is whether a licensee of software can be deemed as an "owner" of a copy of the software and as such trigger the first sale immunities. The paper shows the different approaches taken by different courts on the so-called "sale versus license debate".

Article 4(c) of the Council Directive on the Legal Protection of Computer Programs ("EC Software Directive") contains the European version of the first sale doctrine, the Community exhaustion doctrine. The first sale of a copy of a computer program by the copyright owners or with their consent shall exhaust the distribution right of that copy within the European Communities (EC) or European Economic Area (EEA). Contrary to the sale versus license debate in U.S. case law, European courts—with no greater argument—deemed software licensees subject to exhaustion. The courts have been more concerned to apply the doctrine of exhaustion in a way as to further the implementation of the fundamental freedom of free movement of goods and services in the EC.

On the basis of a transatlantic copyright analysis the paper will discuss, in a second step, the existence of a digital first sale doctrine (as called in the United States) or digital Community exhaustion doctrine (as known under EC law). The paper debates whether the first sale/exhaustion privilege is to apply also in the event of online-transmissions of software, i.e., when no tangible data carrier embodying the target software changes hands. In today’s world, copies of copyrighted works, including software, are bought with increasing frequency by electronically downloading them through networks, mostly the Internet, with no tangible copy of the target software provided. However, digital transmissions of copyrighted works over the Internet fit neither comfortably within the narrow concepts of first sale nor exhaustion. In discussing whether online distribution of software shall render sections 109 and 117 of the U.S. Copyright Act or Article 4(c) of the EC Software Directive applicable, the paper concludes that in the absence of persuasive case law in either jurisdiction on this matter, U.S. governmental authorities tend to protect software copyright owners, whereas the existence of a digital Community exhaustion doctrine may be based on the ground of free movement of information.

This research was published as TTLF Working Paper No. 6 at
http://www.law.stanford.edu/program/centers/ttlf/#ttlf_working_papers.

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Transatlantic Technology Law Forum
Authors
Petra Heindl
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Biotechnological Inventions – A Comparison between the Patent Systems of Europe and the United States

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Reaching everything from medicine to the food industry, biotechnology’s impact on society has become a major economic factor and is ever-increasing. In addition to its impressive potential benefits, biotechnology carries serious risks, especially regarding security and ethics. The European Patent Convention includes statutory restrictions regarding morality and public policy, while today’s U.S. laws in contrast, try to avoid morality restrictions in patenting biotechnology and U.S. agencies generally grant patents without regard to moral concerns. Not long ago, the U.S. Patent Act included a morality doctrine which had a restrictive effect on biotechnology.

The new U.S. approach applies to micro-organisms, plants, and animals where moral concerns were not considered at all before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It is not clear, if the moral questions re-emerged referring to the Newman/Rifkin patent application, claiming an animal-human chimera, since the application was finally rejected on the grounds that human beings do not constitute statutory subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. This line of argumentation was a break from the developed case law concerning living matter. The attempt to keep ethical concerns out of the U.S. patent laws stands on very shaky grounds.

Another problem arises from the fact that both patent systems, in Europe and the U.S., are relying on the term “human” as a borderline for patentability but none of them define the term “human” which leads to ambiguities. An interesting approach came up, defining a human being not by its biological criteria but rather by its intellectual capabilities. However, this approach is still in its infancy.

The project is co-sponsored by the Stanford-Vienna Transatlantic Technology Law Forum (TTLF, a joint initiative of Stanford Law School and the University of Vienna School of Law) and by Stanford University’s Forum on Contemporary Europe at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

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Transatlantic Technology Law Forum
Authors
Christine Reiter
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