Oxford University Press's Blog, page 250

Smashing black holes at the centre of the Milky Way

The centre of the Milky Way is a very crowded region, hosting a dense and compact cluster of stars—the so-called nuclear star cluster—and a supermassive black hole (SMBH) weighing more than 4 million solar masses.

A star cluster is an ensemble of stars kept together by their own force of gravity. These large systems are found in the outskirts of every type of galaxy, being comprised of up to several million stars. Nuclear clusters constitute a special variety, since they are found at the very centre of galaxies, including the Milky Way, and they are much heavier and denser than ordinary clusters.

Nuclear clusters are thought to form, at least in part, from repeated collisions of several star clusters, which spiralled slowly toward the centre of the host galaxy due to a process called dynamical friction. During the past 12 billion years, the Galactic Centre may also have been the site of multiple collisions among massive star clusters.

Massive star clusters are also ideal nurseries of stellar black holes (BHs), with masses of 10-100 solar masses, and represent the most likely birthplaces for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), truly enigmatic objects with putative masses in the range 100-100000 solar masses. Intermediate-mass black holes leave little signs of their presence and their detection remains one of the outstanding challenges of modern astrophysics.

If the Galactic nuclear star cluster was formed by a series of collisions of massive clusters, the Galactic Centre might have been contaminated with their “dark” content. Some fallen clusters might have delivered tens to hundreds of stellar black holes and a few intermediate-mass black holes to the centre of the Milky Way.

Image credit: A cluster of stellar BH’s around a SMBH by Manuel Arca Sedda. Used with permission. 

A recent study published by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has modelled the evolution of a massive star cluster spiralling toward the centre of the Milky Way, assuming that it hosts either an intermediate-mass black hole or population of stellar black holes. These models have one of the highest resolution levels ever achieved, thanks to the use of accurate numerical simulations and exploiting the advantages offered by the Graphic Processing Units computing power. The whole set of 12 simulations required nearly two years to be completed, but it would have required much more time with a normal computer—up to 100 years.

As the black holes are deposited close to the super massive black hole they interact strongly, emitting gravitational waves—ripples of spacetime predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and recently observed by the international LIGO/VIRGO detector.

A stellar black hole passing sufficiently close to the super massive black hole can remain trapped in a tight binary system. Due to the large difference in mass between the stellar black hole (~10 Msun) and the supermassive black hole (10^5 – 10^6 Msun), these exotic systems are called Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs). As time passes, the EMRI’s orbit slowly shrinks due to gravitational waves emission, eventually leading to the black hole-super massive black hole pair merging. EMRIs are the most promising sources of gravitational waves to be seen with the next generation of space-born observatories, like LISA or the TianQin experiments.

Image credit: IMBH and SMBH by Manuel Arca Sedda. Used with permission. 

Moreover, if some stellar black holes were paired in a binary system, the presence of a nearby super massive black hole can affect their evolution significantly, driving their merging efficiently. The echoes of the resulting emission of gravitational waves can potentially be “heard” by the LIGO and VIRGO experiments.

Dr. Gualandris, lecturer in physics, added “If the black holes delivered in the Galactic Centre form tight binaries, they can coalesce in a very short time due to the presence of the super massive black hole. This is the first time in which the disruption of a star cluster is directly connected with the coalescence of black hole binaries.”

When the spiralling cluster contains an intermediate-mass black hole, things are slightly different. The strong gravitational forces suffered by the cluster leads to its disruption as it approaches the super massive black hole and, like an oyster revealing its pearl, the cluster leaves its intermediate-mass black hole wandering around the SMBH. The two massive black holes pair together, forming a tightly bound system that may merge in 1-10 billion years.

Image credit: Progetto logo by Michael Arca Sedda. Used with permission.

Dr. Arca-Sedda, postdoctoral fellow, said: “We find that the Milky Way may have witnessed the coalescence between the super massive black hole and an intermediate-mass black hole a few billion years ago, resulting in a burst of gravitational waves. The SMBH may also have captured thousands of stellar mass black holes, forming tight binaries which will be detected by future observatories like LISA.”

The simulations performed by Arca-Sedda and Gualandris show that these processes can be part of the Milky Way past, and can potentially be observed in galaxies similar to the Milky Way.

Feature image credit: Hubble-Spitzer composite of the galactic centre (full-field) by NASA, ESA, Q.D. Wang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and S. Stolovy (Caltech). Creative Commons Attribute 4.0 via Spacetelescope.org.

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What you need to know about plastic pollution

“There’s a great future in plastics,” Mr. McGuire said to recent-grad Benjamin Braddock at his graduation party in one of the most iconic films of the twentieth century, the Graduate. This scene captures more than just the mere parting words of some career advice the older generation tends to give young people at their graduation parties, it signals something more cultural—indeed, more industrial—that had been so prevailing at the time, and so worrisome now.

Over the last century and a half, humans have learned how to make plastics. With the arrival of World War II, there was a great expansion of the plastics industry in the United States. The plastics industry’s production has increased near exponentially since the 1950s. In 2013, 299 x 106 tons of plastic were produced throughout the world. There’s no wonder why: it’s inexpensive, lightweight, and versatile.

As scientists would come to learn in the 1960s and 70s, plastic have a tremendous impact on our environment. As we celebrate World Environment Day, let’s take a look at how plastic pollution has affected the environment:

Thinglink background image: Conscience by Andrei Ciobanu. Public domain via Unsplash.

Featured image credit: Assorted plastic bottles by mali maeder. Public Domain via Pexels .

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Stroboscopic medicine

The stroboscope is an ingenious device of rapidly flashing lights that allows engineers and scientists to freeze motion and capture brief slices of time. The resulting image is akin to examining a single frame of a motion picture that provides a sharp image, albeit one without context and with neither past nor future. This is now, sadly, an apt metaphor for contemporary clinical encounters. Surveys of primary care practices in the UK indicate patient visits of seven to eight minutes and their American counterparts report seeing more than 40 patients in a working day. Hardly enough time to say hello, let alone deal with the travails of the complex and complicated world of illness.

The many reorganizations of health care systems in the interest of efficiency and through-put have added their own pressures such that patients assigned to their own family physician often meet a different doctor on each visit. Residents and students now spend less time with patients and are required to dedicate more hours looking after the insatiable demands of computers and electronic health records—all those time-saving devices intended to reduce administrative demands and herald a robotic utopia. While the many important imaging and ultrasound technologies have certainly improved the precision of diagnosis, an unintended consequence has been a decreasing reliance on the history and physical examination with their inevitable benefits of actually communing with the patient.

Thus, on a discursive backdrop of rhetorical flourishes of patient-centered medicine and continuity of care, we have entered the post-millennial world of stroboscopic medicine. A patient may wait weeks to schedule a visit and spend hours in the waiting room for a few minutes with a physician whose attention is hardly undivided, directed in part to the ubiquitous computer and the demand to complete the electronic paperwork. The fleeting encounters lead to disgruntled patients, burnt-out physicians, and increasingly cynical trainees. The latter are now also welcoming their own stroboscopic learning arenas of competency based education with its emphasis on bite-size nuggets of fragmented skills and entrustable professional activities as dissociated frames of clinical care.

Image credit: Wittner metronome by Paco from Badajoz, España. CC 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The deleterious effects of these flashes of learning and drive-through care will be deepened by an unintended consequence of new drop-in clinics in supermarkets and shopping malls. While these can provide needed and rapid attention to an isolated clinical problem, they may also come to serve as competitors and substitutes for primary care providers whose mandate is to look after an integrated person in the context of her family and community. Without such care-givers, patients will be forced to become the integrators of their own care and asked to piece together into a coherent picture the electronic reports of specialist consultants and disjointed imaging and laboratory results. The resulting picture may be an uninterpretable collage of added uncertainty and anxiety.

It is hardly a surprise, yet not a happy realization, that clinical work is controlled by a speeding metronome. Obstetrics is beset by skyrocketing rates of Caesarian sections for healthy mothers, emergency rooms display posters of the racing driver, Mario Andretti, with his quip that, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough,” and psychiatrists resort to the quick-fix of a prescription in lieu of therapeutic engagement. Small wonder that, while patients still trust their own physicians (if they can find them), they display little regard for the medical profession and the health care system.

The good news is that a set of circumstances that benefit neither patients nor physicians is susceptible to change. At the same time, the sobering reality is that change is always difficult, in this instance, because of the myriad of entwined causes and contingent factors. Nonetheless, since the behaviors and attitudes of clinicians are formed during training in medical schools and hospitals, medical educators can play a significant role in changing today’s realities by rethinking and reframing the clinical learning environment.

Featured image credit: Stroboscopic photography by Nadeem. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Legal leadership and its place in America’s history and future

This past year, I wrote a book about lawyers’ service in the American Civil War, I argued that the lawyers’ part in the US and Confederate cabinets and in their respective Congresses made a civil war a little more civil, and allowed that out of horrific battle came a new respect for rule of law, as well as a new kind of positive, rights-based constitutionalism.

Lawyer/politicians like Abraham Lincoln and William Seward understood the need for military operations to save the Union, but they also realized that the strength of the Union lay in good laws, justly administered. Lawyer/politicians like Charles Sumner and Salmon Chase saw in the carnage of the war the promise of a new kind of Constitution, based on citizenship for all Americans. Their commitment to law gave all four of these men, and their comrades in Lincoln’s cabinet and the US Congress, a will to victory that reports of losses from the field and defections from their party could not dull. On the Confederate side, a legal regime based explicitly on the protection of slavery gave temporary comfort to some lawyer/politicians like Alexander Stephens. But even he yearned for a return of law and order, and when peace came, he readily returned to his legal practice. Equally important, he and his fellow Confederate lawyer/politicians accepted the terms of lawful surrender, and signed the docket books of the federal courts to prove their renewed loyalty to the United States. Some writing in bold strokes, some in hands shaking with age, they recommenced their legal careers.

Mark Twain wrote that comparisons were odious, but they need not be malicious, and sometimes they are useful. Can the lawyer/ politicians’ performance in the Civil War tell us anything about the role of the lawyer/politi­cian in the United States’ system in the present constitutional crisis?

Today, and for the past two decades, the US has been perpetually at war. Hot wars in the Middle East, cold wars of words in East Asia, and endless rounds of war with terrorists abroad and at home. Started by politician leaders whose background is business, they have at times profited in certain business enterprises, but in no case have they led to a resolution of hostilities. Absent from them is a vision of a world ruled by law, according to law. This is not an accident.

 Today legal historians among these scholars have much of worth to say, and have been offering it freely, if only the political leaders would pay heed.

Law promotes resolution of conflict. Law teaches its practitioners how to find an end to disputes. Sometimes that path is adversarial. Other times it rests on mediation or arbitration. Whatever path it takes, legal reasoning, litigation, and judging all lead to an end to conflict. When the United States as a nation choose leaders who lack background, training, learning, and trust in law, the ideals of a law-abiding nation are lost. The US became an aggressor, a sovereign version of a mugger, whose only goal is immediate gratification of violent impulses. Law constrains animosity and provides the basis for resolution of conflict. An abandonment of law to the desire to enrich ourselves, or satisfy the desire for revenge, leads to excess that has no ending point.

In the present days of tweets and retweets and social media accusations without consequences in libel law, threats and territorial impositions without regard to international law, and actions at the very top of government that seem intentionally indifferent to Constitutional law, the United States is in desperate need of legal leadership. A high court that seems perpetually divided, and worse, divided along partisan political lines, cannot provide that leadership unless it sets itself to the task. A president beset on all sides by lawsuits, working in the shadow of an indictment of obstruction of justice and an impeachment movement, is unlikely to provide that leadership. A revolving door of White House and personal legal counsel hardly sets one’s mind at ease about the prospect of legal leadership. A Congress, replete with lawyers, but bent on disregarding legal precedent and unable to agree on legislation, with members accused of various misconduct departing in droves, is not a source of legal leadership. Where, then, can one find it?

The obvious place is where one should start, with the legal profession itself. Although taught to defend clients zealously, and occasionally given to overstatement on their behalf, lawyers are the best and perhaps the last resort when legal crisis looms. Lawyers for the public interest, lawyers for the “usual suspects”, and lawyers for the justly aggrieved enable democracy to work. Even though as a profession the law ranks low in public esteem, lawyers like Robert Mueller are the direct descendants of the Lincolns and even farther back, John Adams, John Dickinson, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson—all lawyers.

Looking at this lineage of lawyer/politicians who founded and saved the United States’ republican system leads us to reexamine our history, and, from that perspective, to see another group of women and men entrusted with our best tradition. Historians are sources and repositories of national wisdom. Today legal historians among these scholars have much of worth to say, and have been offering it freely, if only the political leaders would pay heed. One thinks of Annette Gordon-Reed, Noah Feldman, Lawrence Friedman, Cass Sunstein, and Mark Tushnet in the law school ranks, Jeffrey Rosen, Jeffrey Toobin, and Linda Greenhouse among the journalists, and Eric Foner, Sean Wilentz, and Julian Zelizer among the many historians whose contributions to the national dialogue on US law in its historical context are precious.

Featured image credit: Courtroom One Gavel by Joe Gratz. Public domain via Flickr.

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Defining a network

The scientific study of networks is an interdisciplinary field that combines ideas from mathematics, physics, biology, computer science, statistics, the social sciences, and many other areas. It is a relatively understudied area of science, but its multidisciplinary nature means that an increasing amount of scientists are engaging with it.

A network is, in its simplest form, a collection of points joined together in pairs by lines. A point is referred to as a node or vertex and a line is referred to as an edge. Many systems of interest in the physical, biological, and social sciences can be thought of as networks, and there are four principle types of network:

1. Technological networks are the physical infrastructure networks that form the backbone of modern technological societies. Perhaps the most celebrated such network—and a relatively recent entry in the field—is the Internet, the global network of data connections that links computers and other information systems together.
2. Networks of information are networks consisting of items of data linked together in some way. Information networks are all, so far as we know, man-made, with perhaps the best known example being the World Wide Web, though many others exist and are worthy of study, particularly citation networks of various kinds.
3. In the scientific study of networks, the phrase “social networks” has a much broader meaning: a social network is any network in which the nodes represent people and the edges represent some form of connection between them, such as friendship.
4. Networks appear in many branches of biology as a convenient way of representing patterns of interaction between biological elements. Biological networks include metabolic networks, neural networks, and food webs.

These networks are simplified representations that reduce systems to an abstract structure or topology, capturing only the basics of connection patterns and little else. This makes the abstract study of its content and structure much clearer. The study of network structures is crucial, as understanding something about the structure of networks is essential to understanding fully how the corresponding systems work. Networks capture the pattern of interactions between the parts of a system, and these can have a large effect on the behaviour of a system.

See below for examples of each of the four types of network: from natural gas pipelines to 15th century Italian marriage ties.

Structure of the Internet: Technological Network

The Internet is the worldwide network of physical data connections between computers, phones, tablets, and other devices. The nodes and edges of the Internet fall into a number of different classes: the backbone of high-bandwidth long-distance connections; the ISPs, who connect to the backbone; and the end users home users, companies, and so forth – who connect to the ISPs.

Image credit: A schematic depiction of the structure of the Internet by Mark Newman. Used with permission.

Telephone network: Technological Network

The telephone network—meaning the network of landlines and wireless links that transmits telephone calls—is one of the oldest electronic communication networks still in use, but it has been studied relatively little by network scientists, primarily because of a lack of good data about its structure.

Image credit: A sketch of the three-tiered structure of a traditional telephone network by Mark Newman. Used with permission.

Natural gas pipelines in Europe: Technological Network

Above is an example of a distribution network. Distribution networks include things like oil and gas pipelines, water and sewerage lines, and the routes used by the post office and package delivery companies. The thickness of lines indicates the sizes of the pipes.

Image credit: Network of natural gas pipelines in Europe by R. Carvalho, L. Buzna, F. Bono, E. Gutierrez, W. Just, and D. Arrowsmith. Reprinted with permission. “Robustness of trans-European gas networks”, Phys. Rev. E 80, 016106 (2009). Copyright 2009 by the American Physical Society.

Pages on a corporate website: Information Network

The nodes in the above network represent pages on a website and the directed edges between them represent hyperlinks.

Image credit: A network of pages on a corporate website by Mark Newman. Used with permission.

A web crawler: Information Network

Web crawlers can be used to investigate the structure of the internet by automatically surfing the Web looking for pages. The network structure of the Web does not allow for all pages to be discovered, however.

Image credit: The operation of a web crawler by Mark Newman. Used with permission.

An ego-centered network: Social Network

This is the network surrounding one particular individual, meaning that individual plus his or her immediate contacts. The individual in question is referred to as the ego and the contacts as alters.

Image credit: An ego-centered network by Mark Newman. Used with permission.

Intermarriage network: Social Network

In this network, the nodes represent families and the edges represent ties of marriage between them.

Image credit: Intermarriage network of the ruling families of Florence in the fifteenth century by J.F. Padgett and C.K. Ansell. Reprinted with permission. “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434”, The American Journal of Sociology 98.6 (1993).

Protein folding: Biological Network

Proteins, which are long-chain polymers of amino acids, do not naturally remain in an open state, but collapse upon themselves to form a more compact folded state. Proteins that detect whether new genetic proteins need to be created form a genetic regulatory network. The nodes in this network are proteins or the genes that code for them, and a directed edge from gene A to gene B indicates that A regulates the expression of B.

Image credit: Protein folding. Copyright OUP 2018.

The structure of a neuron: Biological Network

At the simplest level, a neuron can be thought of as a unit that accepts a number of inputs, combines them, and generates an output that is sent to one or more further neurons. In network terms, a neural network can thus be represented as a set of nodes—the neurons—connected by two types of directed edges, one for excitatory inputs and one for inhibiting inputs.

Image credit: The structure of a neuron. Copyright OUP 2018.

A food web of species in Antarctica: Biological Network

Nodes in a food web represent species or sometimes, as with some of the nodes in this diagram, groups of related species, such as fish or birds. Directed edges represent predator–prey interactions and run in the direction of energy flow, i.e., from prey to predator.

Image credit: A food web of species in Antarctica by Mark Newman. Used with permission.

Featured image credit: Connection by TheDigitalArtist. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Taxing donor-advised funds

Congress should extend two taxes to donor-advised funds which currently apply to private foundations. First, Congress should apply to donor-advised funds the federal tax on private foundations’ net investment incomes. Second, Congress should extend to donor-advised funds the federal penalty tax imposed upon a private foundation if it fails to pay out annually an amount of at least equal to five percent of its assets.

By some measures, donor-advised funds are the fastest growing form of charity in the US. Recent reports about the travails of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation have highlighted the increasing use of donor-advised funds by charitable donors in general, and by very affluent donors in particular.

In the Tax Reform Act of 1969, Congress divided charitable organizations into private foundations and public charities. In the former category are entities established by one donor or a relative handful of donors. The latter category includes more broadly-supported institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and community foundations.

Congress perceived private foundations as potentially subject to abuse. Congress was concerned that such foundations, while nominally committed to philanthropic purposes, could be used by their donors to accumulate and control tax-favored wealth with no substantial philanthropic benefit. Consequently, Congress in 1969 imposed upon private foundations (but not public charities) a series of regulatory taxes to prevent, inter alia, insiders from abusing the assets of such foundations. Among these regulatory taxes, Congress required grant-making private foundations to pay out annually for charitable purposes an amount equal to at least five percent of the foundations’ assets.

 Donor-advised funds thus straddle the line between heavily-regulated private foundations and less regulated public charities.

Congress further decreed that private foundations must pay the federal Treasury a tax of 1% or 2% of their net investment incomes. This tax recognizes the public services which protect the assets of such foundations.

Donor-advised funds often operate like donor-controlled private foundations without being subject to the same strictures. A donor-advised fund is located in a public charity such as a community foundation or a public charity established by a commercial vendor such as Fidelity or Vanguard. Since the donor-advised fund is part of a public charity, it is not subject to the full network of taxes applicable to private foundations. However, in practice, a donor-advised fund usually operates like a private foundation as the “advice” advanced by those who establish the fund is generally followed by the public charity at which the fund is located.

Donor-advised funds thus straddle the line between heavily-regulated private foundations and less regulated public charities. In recent years, Congress has recognized the often close resemblance between a donor-advised fund and a donor-controlled private foundation, but has not gone all the way. Congress has extended to donor-advised funds rules designed to prevent insiders from misusing such funds’ assets. But Congress has not applied to donor-advised funds the same minimum payout requirements that apply to private foundations. Congress has also not subjected donor-advised funds to the tax on their net investment incomes which private foundations must pay to offset the public services from which such foundations benefit.

In light of the close resemblance between the two, Congress should now extend these two taxes to donor-advised funds. Donor-advised funds, like the private foundations they emulate, can be used to accumulate funds income tax-free without bona fide philanthropy receiving much (or any) of that income. Donor-advised funds, again like private foundations, use public services.

It is now time for Congress to follow its initial steps recognizing that private foundations and donor-advised funds are in practice typically indistinguishable. Similar entities should be taxed and regulated in the same way. Donor-advised funds should be subject to the same minimum distribution requirements as are private foundations, as well as the tax on net investment incomes.

Featured image credit: Tax pen writing by rawpixel. Public domain via Unsplash.

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Levels of editing of a scientific paper

There are four key steps to crafting a paper and getting it ready for submission just as there are four levels for editing or reviewing a paper. These steps will help you develop and perfect your idea before it is read. It is just as important to edit your research as it is to copy edit for grammar before turning in your submission.

Scientific editing
Developmental (or structural) editing
Line editing
Proof editing

At the highest level comes the determination of the value of the scientific content. From whether the work is targeted at the best journal for the content to whether it works as a ‘publishable’ unit or should be extended or split, this needs input from scientists familiar with the literature of the field. A key feature of a well-written paper is an appropriate reference list, which requires fully understanding the international landscape of the topic.

Scientific editing is also about making sure the data provides enough evidence for the interpretations made and are presented in the clearest way possible. Scientific editing is about closing any holes in logic about the work done and making clear why things were done as they were, what might be done next, and how these findings advance the field. It is also about making sure the methods are described in enough detail that the work can be repeated.

Image credit: “Creative Writing Editing Library Paper Write Pen” by WokinghamLibraries. CC0 via Pixabay.

Co-authors will be contributing content, data, results, interpretation, discussion, and conclusion in the initial draft. Once circulated to others, they will comment on the scientific content of the paper as it is currently presented as if from the coauthor and peer-reviewer (journal editor) perspective.

Developmental editing is about structuring the scientific content, so it logically flows. Co-authors will help make sure you “tell the story”. This type of editing looks at the overall structure of the paper, what’s extra and what’s missing, and the order of material. A developmental edit examines the narrative of the story and the way the data, interpretation, and context is presented and offers advice on potential structural changes that could improve the overall paper.

The developmental edit is about getting the ‘Big Picture’ right so it best reflects the main message of the paper. Before it is done, there is little use in spending too much time on polishing the details. It is far easier to get the overall structure right while working at the ‘minimal draft’ stage than once a full draft is created. Create this draft when you have 1) a finished data set, 2) finalized figures or tables to support your primary and secondary results, and 3) a target journal. A minimal draft can be shared in the body of email — the point is to be brief. You are defining the absolute core of the paper. Agreeing upon the data and the story it tells, saves endless hours of revision.

Now your draft is down to the level of just needing to iron out specific sentences and their order. This is the copy, or line editing phase. Just before you submit, and you don’t intend to change any content, you can proof-edit to look for any remaining typos. Proof-editing makes the most minimal changes to the text as possible.

Ideally, you will have more experienced co-authors to help you manage the levels of editing needed to get your paper ready for submission. If you choose to craft a ‘minimal draft’ first, this process will hopefully be greatly simplified and streamlined.

You might though, be writing as sole author, want input from other experts, or be in a research group of non-native English speakers. In any of these cases you might want editing by external parties. Especially, if you are seeking help casting your science into publication-quality English, you might be seeking the services of a professional editor.

With your revision in tact your reader will able to clearly understand the “Big Picture” of the paper. Making sure your paper flows through the levels of editing smoothly will streamline your submission process. Enlisting the help of other professionals will also help you remain on track and level the playing field if you are writing outside of your most fluent language. From fact checking to line editing, each level of editing is important to the overall success of your paper.

Featured Image Credit: “Pencil Sharpener Notebook Paper Education Office” by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay. 

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The history and importance of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) signifies different things to different people. It is both a court and an advisory body. It rules on disputes ranging from the personal, such as the inheritance of a hereditary title amid accusations of historic infidelity, to those of great public importance, such as the validity of elections, or significant commercially, such as the ownership or control of Turkey’s largest mobile phone company. It renders advice to a Queen and a Sultan and sits as the final court for 30 overseas jurisdictions, including three republics. It is at the same time an anachronism and a functioning part of many modern systems of justice. For some it is a hanging court, and for others an upholder of human rights.

In short, it is a conundrum.

For a start, today the JCPC can be distinguished from the Privy Council, which maintains a largely symbolic role as a mechanism for giving effect to certain governmental decisions in the fields of domestic and foreign affairs. The Privy Council featured in the news when Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn allegedly declined to attend the traditional ceremony where new members kneel before the Queen and kiss her hand when accepting the oath of allegiance.

Though now separate, the JCPC and Privy Council were originally the same body. From at least the 11th century, the Privy Council performed a vital role in the government of England, not just as an advisor to the Crown but also as a legislator and a court. The Council was formed from the King’s most trusted and powerful advisors, though as anyone who has read Shakespeare’s histories will appreciate, the two were not always the same thing.

Today the JCPC can be distinguished from the Privy Council, which maintains a largely symbolic role as a mechanism for giving effect to certain governmental decisions in the fields of domestic and foreign affairs.

Ironically, the Privy Council first began to hear judicial appeals from overseas territories not, as one might expect, as a result of England conquering another nation, but rather by England being conquered. The Duke of Normandy also ruled the Channel Islands, and their citizens were able to appeal to his mercy. When William of Normandy ascended the throne in 1066 becoming William I of England, this right of appeal became vested in English Kings and Queens.

This overseas jurisdiction grew with Britain’s empire, and by its peak was described as having “a wider jurisdiction than any court known to history… unique in the variety of its suitors, which include not only subjects of every part of the empire, but also Indian gods, African chieftains, and vassal princes.”

In the 1830s, the JCPC had become unmanageable. Henry Brougham, a Scottish advocate, anti-slavery campaigner and fiery Parliamentarian, took it upon himself to push for change. The Privy Council Acts of 1833 and 1844 carved out the JCPC from the Privy Council. They transformed the JCPC from an ad hoc committee sitting as little as twice a year, whose members could include non-lawyers ranging from politicians to bishops, to a professional court staffed only by senior judges.

Today the JCPC hears appeals from 30 overseas countries and territories, from the inhospitable and sparsely populated British Antarctic Territory to the vibrant and diverse: Jamaica, Jersey, Guernsey and the British Virgin Islands.

Its long history and varied jurisdictions have allowed it to hear a fascinating combination of cases. These included an appeal in the 19th century from Hindu leaders in India against the ban on the practice where widows were compelled to jump on to the funeral pyres of their husbands. Notable appeals in the 20th century included a challenge to the lawfulness of British controls on immigration to Palestine by European Jews.

Today, as a constitutional court, the JCPC contributes, with other supra-national or international tribunals, to the development of fundamental principles associated with the rule of law and individual liberties. The death sentence in some of its jurisdictions still regularly raises issues for determination.

As a commercial court, the JCPC aims to secure certainty and consistency among its jurisdictions, which include several offshore financial centres. This has been illustrated most recently in a series of cases involving innocent victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi operation. The JCPC’s lesser-known domestic jurisdictions include disciplinary appeals for vets, disputes over parish boundaries, and even the distribution of bounty in the event that a foreign ship is captured (though this hasn’t been invoked since the Second World War).

Before 2017, the last practitioner guide to the JCPC was published in 1937 and written by Norman Bentwich, a former Attorney General of Palestine who once survived an assassination attempt. Perhaps the lack of updates in the past 80 years is because of an impression that the JCPC is soon to be abolished. But rumours of its death may have been premature.

The JCPC is ancient, but it isn’t stagnant. In 2016 it was decided for the first time that a JCPC judgment could formally bind English Courts on questions of English law, despite being outside the English legal system. 2016 was the first occasion JCPC and Supreme Court also sat together as a single body to hear two appeals concerning joint enterprise liability in both England and Jamaica. It has embraced modern technology including broadcasting judgments on YouTube.

Dean Acheson, the former US Secretary of State, commented in 1962 that “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.” With Britain’s impending exit from the EU, the same could be said today, as Britain once again considers its place in the world. However, after all the turmoil of the past thousand years, the JCPC has continued to exist as an arbiter of justice, applying and developing the law across and within its jurisdictions in accordance with local circumstances, as well as international norms. Its jurisprudence both influences and is influenced by that of the UK.

For so long as the JCPC remains the constitutionally-prescribed final court of appeal for any country or territory, it has indicated both willingness and determination to serve that jurisdiction and its people as best it can.

Featured image credit: UK Supreme Court by Shark Attacks. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Philosopher of the month: Mullā Sadrā [infographic]

This June, the OUP Philosophy team honours Mullā Sadrā (1571 – 1640) as their Philosopher of the Month. An Iranian Islamic philosopher, Sadrā is recognised as the major process philosopher of the school of Isfahan. Mullā Sadrā is primarily associated with “metaphilosophy,” but also maintains sovereign status as a spiritual leader for the Islamic East.

After having spent some time in Isfahan once he finished his formal education, Sadrā retreated to work in solitary in a small village near Qom. Upon his return to his birthplace Shiraz, Sadrā trained students, gained followers, and completed over forty works. His most well-known of those is al-Hikma al-muta’āliya fī al-asfār al-ʿaqliyah al-arba’ā (or The Transcendent Wisdom Concerning the Four Intellectual Journeys), commonly referred to as Asfār or The Four Journeys. This idea of “transcendent wisdom” (al-hikmat al-muta’aliya) is the grand philosophical system of Mullā Sadrā. This system brings together elements from much of what Sadrā studied including the School Illumination, within which he is recognised as a key figure.

We’ve created the infographic below to highlight more from the life and work of Mullā Sadrā. For more, follow @OUPPhilosophy and the hashtag #philosopherotm on Twitter.

Featured image credit: Bridge in Shiraz, Iran by yisus10. Public domain via Pixabay .

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Putting modifiers in their place

Sometimes I misplace things—my sunglasses, a book I’m reading, keys, my phone. Sometimes I misplace words in sentences too, leaving a clause or a phrase where it doesn’t belong. The result is what grammarians call misplaced or dangling modifiers. It’s a sentence fault that textbooks sometimes illustrate with over-the-top, made-up examples like these:

Damaged by the storm, the city closed the road for repair.

A foil-wrapped behemoth, you need two hands to eat this burrito.

When we have a participle like “damaged,” we naturally understand it as modifying the closest noun, which here yields a mismatch. Was the city damaged or the road?

The same goes for appositive nouns like “a foil-wrapped behemoth” which, at first glance, seems to refer to “you.”

Misplaced modifiers at times find their way into professional publications, like this sentence from a British Medical Journal article on brain freeze:

The most common cause of head pain is ice cream, occurring in one third of a randomly selected population.

I laughed when I read that one. Other misplaced modifiers provoke a raised eyebrow, like this from the Washington Post in 2017, where the clause beginning with “after” reads the wrong way:

Earlier this year, after serving more than 35 years in prison, President Barack Obama commuted [Oscar] Lopez Rivera’s sentence.

A good editor will catch such sentences, and writing instructors will often query misplaced modifiers on student essays, papers, and stories. If I come across the sentence:

Coming out the barn, Sara saw her father.

My comment in the margin is “Wait. Who’s coming out the barn? Sara or her father???”  But I don’t worry about every potential misplaced modifier. Consider this example, sent to me by a colleague:

From Washington, you’re listening to NPR.

No one is likely to be confused about where they are when they are listening to National Public Radio.

Potentially misplaced modifiers are all around us. Here are four that jumped out in just one evening’s reading:

As a director and a citizen of the world, the search for these answers is what drives my artistic work.

As innovators go, Malamud’s life was interior and modest.

When reading Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manhatta, my gut did a backflip.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, history doesn’t repeat itself.

I would change some of these and leave others alone. It’s very much a stylistic judgement call. In the first sentence, the phrase “As a director and a citizen of the world” has the potential for misreading, but the later reference to “my artistic work” makes the point clear. It looks okay to me.

In the second sentence, the phrase “As innovators go” seems to modify “Malamud’s life,” so that sentence might be revised, but it’s hard to rephrase in a way that is as concise. The best I could do was “As the lives of innovators go, Malamud’s was interior and modest,” which lacks the pace and punch of the original.

I would probably change the third example: “When reading Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manhatta, my gut did a backflip.” Here it’s possible to momentarily conjure up the image of a gut reading a play. For me, “When I read Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manhatta, my gut did a backflip” works better.

And in the last example, there is nothing to change. “Contrary to conventional wisdom” is a sentence modifier, and no one is likely to misread it as ascribing contrariness to history.

When we look at such sentences, some writerly risk factors stand out: possessives (like “Malamud’s life,” or “my gut”), subjectless participles (like “When reading”), and scene-setting nouns (like “As an innovator”) can all be tricky. The more of these grammatical constructions that co-occur in a sentence, the more likely it is for something to go wrong. On the other hand, phrases that modify a whole sentence (like “From Washington” or “Contrary to conventional wisdom”) are unlikely to cause problems.

If you keep an eye on these factors, most of your modifiers will fall into place.

Featured image credit: books by  Stiller Beobachter. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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