Oxford University Press's Blog, page 664

Hop, the essence of beer

Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) is an essential ingredient for brewing beer, and contributes a characteristic bitterness, aroma, and fullness. However, during the Middle-Ages, various other herbs including Rhodomyrtus tomentosa and Salix subfragilis, had also been used for brewing beer in Europe. Amongst these herbs, the female flower of hop (hop cone, Photo 1) was eventually selected to be the most suitable for making beer due to its noble bitterness, refreshing aroma, antibacterial activity, and fine foam. By 1516, Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria established the beer purity law, which stipulated that only water, barley, and hop could be used as ingredients for beer making.

Photo 1. Hop cone. Courtesy of Hiroo Matsui and Eiichiro Ono.

Hop is a perennial, dioecious, and climbing plant belonging to the Cannabaceae family, which includes the medicinal plant, Cannabis sativa (hemp and marijuana). During springtime, hop plants adventitiously sprout from underground roots, and climb upwardly twining the wire and after just three months they are able to reach the top of the trellis (6-8 m height) (Photo 2). In early summer, they bloom and then develop hop cones, which are generally harvested within 1-2 months. It is the phytochemicals in hop cones that are crucial for beer character; the alpha acids, terpenes, and polyphenols contribute to bitterness, hoppy aroma, and fullness, respectively.

Photo 2. Hop field. Courtesy of Hiroo Matsui and Eiichiro Ono.

Various environmental and endogenous factors – such as temperature fluctuations, climate change, soil properties, and root age – affect crop quality as well as yields. Such quality and yield traits are essentially derived from the genetic information stored in a plant’s cell as genomic DNA.

Most recently, the draft genome of hop was revealed. By comparing genomes and RNAs between a wild hop and a cultivar, genes related to specialized metabolic processes, especially characteristic aroma and alpha acids, were enriched in the hop cultivar during the ancient long-term selection process by humans — probably reflecting our flavour preferences. For example, enhanced expression of a monoterpene synthase gene in the cultivar is clearly consistent with the drastically increased accumulation of monoterpene-class volatiles (responsible for aroma) in the cultivar, compared to the wild hop. This flavour trait is a likely consequence of continuous human selection for hops based on conventional sensory evaluation alone, prior to the development of any analytical instruments that are used in brewing today.

Photo 3. Beer. Courtesy of Hiroo Matsui and Eiichiro Ono.

Today, there are approximately 200 commercial varieties of hop in the world and over 99% of them are used in brewing. In 2014, the world cultivation acreage and yield of hop cones was reported to be about 46,000 ha, and about 83,000 metric tons (alpha acid base was about 8,000 metric tons), respectively. Given that recent beer consumption in BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and developing countries is rapidly increasing, hop production is expected to gradually increase.

Concomitantly, the craft beer market is also expanding in the United States. The characteristic flavors required for craft brewing are distinguishable from established major brands, and their key qualities comprise unique aromas that are mainly derived from hop. Thus, the craft beer market eagerly awaits the development of new varieties with unique hoppy aromas.

Hop is the last of the three essential ingredients (lager brewing yeast, barley and hop) of beer (Photo 3) whose genomes have been sequenced. Knowledge of the genome sequence will certainly be useful for developing novel hop varieties that can be achieved via accelerated breeding to bring us fresh beers that we have not yet experienced.

Featured image: Hops. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Is the history of science still relevant?

It was a simple request: “Try and put the fun back into microbiology”. I was about to write a new practical course for first year students, and apparently there had been complaints that microbiology is just another form of cookbook chemistry. Discussions showed that they liked the idea of doing their own experiments without a pre-determined outcome. Of course, with living microorganisms, safety must be a major concern, and some control was needed to prevent hazardous surprises, but fun and safety are not mutually exclusive. Since Delft has a rich history of microbiology, repeating historically important experiments provided part of the solution. Old experimental descriptions are often vague, leaving the students plenty of scope for their own ideas while minimising the chance of undesirable organisms being found. Necessary fundamental techniques could easily be included.

The experiment took the students back to Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the dawn of microbiology in the 17th century. In letters to the Royal Society and others, van Leeuwenhoek famously provided little information about his methods, and I therefore challenged the students to start with his results and conclusions, and work out how he had achieved them. We selected the 1676 experiment during which he soaked whole peppercorns in water in teacups and then used his single-lensed microscope to examine the water as it grew turbid. The description of the famous ‘pepper water experiment’ was the first time that bacteria had been described. The students were provided with different water from different sources (e.g. rain, canal, tap), pepper (black, white, whole, ground), modern growth media, and culture vessels. They then designed their own experiments to find out what Leeuwenhoek could have done to get his results, and what sorts of organisms were involved.

Baker’s copy of AvL’s pepper water illustration, via Delft School of Microbiology. Image used with permission.

The students were very enthusiastic, and many visited their cultures in their spare time. After more than 10 years, the van Leeuwenhoek experiment has proved to be an excellent example of the currently popular “citizen science” mass experiments that can provide useful results, and we now know why he found certain organisms in some cultures and not others. However, it is not the experimental results that have been most interesting.  The students were expected to do some historical research for their reports, and many of them took this research more seriously than expected. Their indignation at what they found was both amusing and illuminating.

Firstly, it came as a shock to find that scientists, who they know only as very famous names, could argue quite venomously about ideas that are established fact today. Whether it was 19th century botanists trying to deny that photosynthesis produces oxygen or 17th century Royal Society members trying to claim that van Leeuwenhoek could not possibly have seen what he claimed (the poor man was reduced to supplying letters from his Parish Minister, Delft’s Mayor and other notable people to say that he was an honest man and had shown them his little animals), the students found it quite upsetting. I then asked them to compare their historical results to modern situations, and again they surprised me.

van Leeuwenhoek microscope, via Lesley Robertson. Image used with permission.

Although frequently ignored, historical science can be valuable as a teaching aid. Done with due attention to known information, it can also prove as informative about how things were done as current reality TV shows about how people lived in the past. Most of all, it can teach us to think about what we’re reading.

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Believing victims

Hampshire Constabulary are the latest in a long line of police forces obliged to apologise to a victim of crime for failing to investigate an allegation properly. In this case, a young woman accused a man of rape. She was not believed; forensic examination of clothing was delayed; in the meanwhile, the complainant was threatened with arrest for ‘perverting the course of justice’ and she attempted suicide. Eventually, following belated forensic analysis, the man was arrested and has since then been convicted.

This is no isolated example. Inept police investigations that failed to recognise criminality even when staring the criminal in the face. A succession of child abuse cases have revealed failures on the part of officers to become sufficiently suspicious of parents. Dr Harold Shipman murdered an unknown — but undoubtedly huge — number of his elderly patients without stirring police suspicions even after a fellow doctor expressed her concerns.

Things are now changing: victims of domestic violence and sex crimes have been in the vanguard of this change. The Savile Affair and the prosecution of a cast list of celebrities on charges of ‘historical child sexual abuse’, and the Rotherham child sexual abuse inquiry, have kept the issue of child abuse at the top of the news agenda. Alexis Jay’s report into Rotherham revealed an unprecedented criminal conspiracy to abuse vulnerable young girls whilst agencies charged with their protection disregarded evidence that should have prompted action. A recent report from Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary on the policing of domestic violence found that the main cause of victim dissatisfaction was that they felt they were not believed. In response the HMIC recommended that the police should be more willing to accept allegations of domestic violence and abuse.

Should the police accept at face value accusations made by victims? Or should they weigh the credibility of the accuser as well as the nature of the accusation? The ultimate arbiters of such allegations are juries, but when juries have deliberated on such allegations, they have not endorsed them all. There have been celebrities aplenty acquitted as well as those who have not and are now serving terms of imprisonment. Rape is a criminal charge that is notoriously difficult to prosecute.

Dreams by Bjorn Lindell. CC BY-SA 2.0 via arctia Flickr.

This is not just an issue restricted to such crimes, but is faced everyday by police officers who respond to contested allegations of wrongdoing. One party to a dispute alleges that the other has done wrong, but the other denies it and probably counter-claims that wrong has been done by their accuser. It happens most commonly in episodes of domestic conflict, as anyone who has been on the margins of a ‘messy’ divorce will attest. When viewed in this context, accusations tend to lack credibility because the parties have vested interests in making and denying such allegations.

The issue of the credibility of putative victims arose in the course of research that I and others, are hoping to publish with Oxford University Press later this year. We asked focus groups throughout the Black Country region of the West Midlands to evaluate and discuss video clips of encounters between police and members of the public broadcast by the BBC (of the kind with which I’m sure you will be familiar). One of the clips focused on the police response to an alleged knife-point robbery of an elderly man and his young female companion, in the man’s home. Spontaneously, almost every focus group concluded that the elderly man’s companion was complicit in the robbery.

What had ignited their suspicions? Well, wasn’t it odd that such a young woman would spend an occasional evening watching television with an elderly ‘friend of the family’? Wasn’t it suspicious that she became confused, even about whether the robber addressed her by name? How could she insist that the robber was ‘about 20’ years old, if she did not see his face? Why didn’t she scream when the man forced his way into the property? There was almost unanimous agreement that there was ‘more to this than met the eye’. Most focus groups were content with how the officers dealt with the investigation, but if they were critical then it was because the police had not arrested the young woman who was so ‘obviously’ guilty. What they were not to know was that in that programme from which this episode was extracted, it was revealed that the young woman’s boyfriend was convicted of the robbery, but no charges were brought against her. On the other hand, when an officer could see on CCTV three youths breaking into a car, many of our focus groups felt that the officer too hastily assumed that they were attempting to steal it, rather than rescuing one of the lad’s girlfriend who had locked herself out of the car (which turned out to be the truth).

Being ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is a legal principle that receives overwhelming endorsement. If so, the unpalatable corollary must surely be that those who allege guilt must overcome a formidable barrier before conviction can be secured. Crown Prosecutors must be convinced that there is a better than evens chance of overcoming that barrier before prosecuting someone alleged to have done wrong. This undoubtedly works to the disadvantage of those who regard themselves as genuine victims of wrongdoing. It is equally undoubtedly the case that offenders will do all in their power to exploit the ‘presumption of innocence’ to their malign advantage. Yet, it also protects the innocent victims of malign false allegations made for whatever reason. To be wrongfully accused is also an acutely painful experience from which a system of justice should surely also safeguard the innocent. Amid all this uncertainty, what is surely obvious is that prescriptions for the police to believe accusations at face value is no remedy at all.

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The Irish referendum on same-sex marriage

Today the people of Ireland will vote in a Referendum to decide whether to introduce same sex marriage. If ‘Yes‘ wins, the following new wording will be added to the Constitution:

‘Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex’.

This may happen despite Ireland having a Constitution grounded on Catholic values. Indeed, abortion in Ireland is still constitutionally prohibited. Same sex sexual activity was only decriminalized in 1993, and divorce has only been available since 1995. Yet, LGBT rights have progressed very quickly in the last decade: discrimination on the ground of sex is prohibited by legislation, and same-sex couples already have the right to contract a civil partnership (as of 2011). Legislation allowing same-sex couples to adopt will enter into force later on in 2015.

So what is the significance of this referendum? Well, to begin with, Ireland is the first country in the world to organize a Referendum to legalize Same-Sex Marriage: the people decide not the politicians. The social conflict between Catholicism and LGBT campaigners runs very deep. Lobbies on each side are fighting to discredit each other and to muddy the waters with confused arguments. Instead of informed debates, each side engages in campaigns of fear and smear.  The Church, for example, insists that this will irreparably damage the institution of marriage, that same-sex adoption will undermine the rights of children, and it will trample freedom by forcing religious institutions to celebrate same-sex marriage against their will. In what follows, I will try to inform the debate with some ideas and cast some light on those arguments.

“Coercion may produce stability, but it is stability of the wrong kind.”

 

Firstly, we have to clarify what is really at stake. One word is enough: equality. Why would heterosexual couples have a constitutional right that was denied to homosexual couples? More generally, why does religion have such a prominent legal influence on matters of sexual morality, which is used to discipline and order secular affairs, and in particular to subject women to men by imprisoning people in a relation and forcing them to carry out a pregnancy against their will? Religious sexual morality imposes inequalities and discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual couples. On top of all this, representatives of the Catholic Church in Ireland are being exposed as having a long hidden history of criminal behavior in matters of sexual morality. The abuse of children by the clergy makes it hard to resist the idea that the problem lies in the repressive nature of religious sexual morality.

Secondly, is it true that allowing same-sex couples to wed will be the end of marriage? Religious doctrines typically define marriage as the union of a man with a woman. If we accept that definition for a second, what then is the perceived added value of such a union over that between a woman and a woman, or man and a man? Reproduction used to be pointed to as a natural advantage of heterosexual unions. But even that is no longer true: gametes donation, in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have completely changed the landscape of reproduction. Today, we can reproduce without having sex.  Another alleged advantage is the established stability of heterosexual couples over homosexual ones. But there is no evidence to support this. More importantly, Same-Sex Marriage stands for freedom of choice in matters of sexual morality, whereas religious marriage in the Catholic tradition stands for oppression and coercion in matters of abortion, sex and divorce. Coercion may ensure consistency and enforce stability, but it is stability of the wrong kind, perhaps it can even be called stagnation. Free choice is not easy to exercise but it certainly enables people to pursue a happy and lasting stability. Same-Sex Marriage will not compromise marriage; but enhance it.

It is time for religious institutions to be held accountable for the discrimination’s they have legitimized over the centuries.

 

Some still believe that civil partnership is enough of a compromise and fulfills all the needs of same-sex couple. But this misunderstands the symbolic nature of the controversy. It is not just a matter of being allocated the same set of legal benefits. It is also about changing the cultural assumptions that are part of the society. As I pointed out before, religious sexual morality is part of the problem of the Irish society and not part of the solution. It is time for the Catholic Church in Ireland to adapt to the needs of the people rather than asking them to live up to repressive moral standards. Many Catholics all over the world approve of the Church but disapprove of its conservative sexual morality. It is time for religious institutions to be held accountable for the discrimination’s they have legitimized over the centuries.

Does it mean that the Church will be forced to celebrate same-sex marriages? This would be wrong. It would not be acceptable to coerce someone or an institution to do something that it disagrees with. That is why the business of marriage should not be in the hands of religious institutions.  Only secular institutions can guarantee equality between homosexual and heterosexual couples. Once the union is officially recognized by secular institutions, then believers can still ask their religious institutions to provide their blessing. What if religious institutions deny it? As I said, there is no point in coercing them to bless unions that they do not want to bless. However, they will have to be aware that many Irish Catholics, and many other Catholics around the world, are ready for a change, whether or not the Catholic Church approves of it.

 

Image Credit: “Wedding Rings 2″ by firemedic58. Public Domain via Flickr.

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The role of the law, in the matter of Ashya King

Parents of a child diagnosed with a serious illness are immediately required to make decisions about their child’s medical treatment which, in order to save life, may cause pain, unpleasant side-effects and risk damaging their child’s future quality of life. The actions, last summer, of the parents of five year old Ashya King offer just one example of the lengths to which parents will go to secure the best possible treatment for their child; researching alternative treatments, securing second opinions, finding a treatment centre offering innovative or experimental treatment, travelling abroad, selling belongings or otherwise raising funds for treatment. The Internet provides access to a host of information about the side effects and risks of conventional treatment, alternative treatments available across the world – if you can pay for them – and stories of their success.

In his judgment making orders about Ashya’s post-operative treatment, following surgery to remove a malignant brain tumour, Baker J referred to the “fundamental principle of family law” that the “responsibility for making decisions about a child rest with his parents” (In the Matter of Ashya King [2014] EWHC 2964, [31]). His Lordship rightly noted that, in the vast majority of cases, a child’s parents are best placed to make such decisions but then continued, “the State – whether it be the court, or any other public authority – has no business interfering with the exercise of parental responsibility unless the child is suffering or is likely to suffer significant harm as a result of the care given to the child not being what it would be reasonable to expect a parent to give” [31].

The Children Act 1989 does place the primary responsibility for the care of children with their parents including the right to make decisions about their child’s medical treatment in the exercise of parental responsibility (s3(1)). It is focused, by parental instinct, upon the needs of their child thereby fulfilling their legal obligation to consent to the medical treatment they determine to be in their child’s best interests, without which the doctor would commit a criminal or civil battery. But to meet their responsibilities, parents depend upon healthcare professionals to exercise care in diagnosis and provision of treatment, to provide information and advice about treatment options, and to work in partnership with them. Professionals too have a legal obligation to act in the best interests of the child. The different roles, experiences, and perspectives of parents and professionals may, however, lead them to different conclusions on that issue.

In most cases, parents and professionals will work within the law without reference to it. However, the legal framework becomes particularly important in those cases in which parental concerns about a child’s treatment develop into an intractable disagreement; when it is in the best interests of a child for those most directly concerned in the provision of care to work together. Ashya’s parents believed that Proton Beam Therapy, not available in the UK until 2017, presented the best possible chances of eradicating the cancer with the least detrimental effects upon his quality of life. They refused their consent to the conventional radiotherapy and chemotherapy offered at Southampton General and sought to secure the treatment they considered best. Without parental consent, Ashya’s doctors could not treat nor could they provide the innovative treatment his parents preferred. A stalemate occurred. The treatment Ashya urgently required was delayed. In such circumstances, the State does have business interfering in the interests of the child. The issue is how.

Hospital Bed by Global Panorama. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Not, as Ashya’s father Brett indicated, and the reference by Baker J to significant harm alludes, in the form of threats to commence child protection proceedings. Denied by University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, either way, there was a misunderstanding of the role of the law. Child protection proceedings are not appropriate when there is a genuine difference of opinion between the parents of a seriously ill child and caring professionals on the question of the best medical treatment.

The boundaries of parental obligation are set by the criminal law including the specific obligations imposed upon those caring for a child to secure medical treatment, food, shelter, and clothing for the child (Children and Young Persons Act 1933, s1). Prosecutions have been brought where parents have failed to secure medical treatment. Threats to take criminal action are not an appropriate response to the actions of caring parents seeking to secure the best possible treatment for their child.

In the 2004 case of David Glass, the European Court of Human Rights stressed that when disagreement arises between parents and professionals, the onus rests with the Trust to defuse the situation (Glass v United Kingdom [2004] 1 FLR 1019, [79]); in the last resort referring the matter to court in family proceedings. Communication broke down between Ashya’s parents and doctors, for which the Trust subsequently apologized. Ashya’s father has explained that the doctors refused to discuss alternative treatment with them. The law imposes an obligation upon both parents and professionals to act in the best interests of the child. The provision of medical treatment to a child depends upon their co-operation in the shared endeavour of care. But that depends upon understanding of, and response to, the concerns of parents catapulted into their worst nightmare. Using the law as a threat will damage not foster this relationship. Baker J emphasised parental responsibility but did not address the co-existent responsibilities of healthcare professionals and public authorities to work together with parents in securing the best possible care for a seriously ill child, respectful of their distinct perspectives and concerns.

Featured image: Bring on the Taxotere by philandpam. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Parkinson’s disease: the flip side of the coin

The human brain might be perceived as an organ with two main strategic tasks: goal-directed motor behavior, and mental functioning in order to work out that goal. These two main functions have two prototypical diseases: Alzheimer disease, in case of mental function, and Parkinson’s disease, with motor function.

Following its inception as an entity, Parkinson’s disease (PD) was long perceived to be a purely motor disorder with unimpaired mental functions. This was partly influenced by its initial description by James Parkinson, who wrote that the intellect and senses remain intact. Although some of his contemporaries challenged this view and suggested that mental functions do get impaired in patients with advanced PD, this observation did not receive much attention for many decades. It’s ironic that modern medical treatment, which has dramatically changed the lives of PD patients, came as a mixed blessing; trading effective management of motor symptoms and longer patient survival with mental dysfunction (and some other non-motor features of the disease) becoming more apparent.

Front and side views of a man portrayed to be suffering from Parkinson’s disease. These are woodcut reproductions (of two collotypes from Paul de Saint-Leger’s 1879 doctoral thesis, Paralysie agitante etc.) published in Gowers, William Richard (1886). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Research in the last few decades has established that cognitive impairment and dementia are an integral part of the disease process. Several prospective as well as cross-sectional studies revealed that milder forms of cognitive impairment can even be detected at the early stages of the disease, if appropriately looked for. In fact, it has become apparent that some non-motor symptoms may precede classical motor symptoms by many years, such as anosmia, depression, constipation and dream-enacting behavior. When properly assessed, a variety of non-motor symptoms can be identified throughout the disease. Dementia develops particularly in patients with advanced age and severe disease; twenty years after the diagnosis, mental dysfunction of varying degrees is present in practically all patients.

In earlier years the assumption was that dementia in PD may simply represent co-incident Alzheimer disease (AD). Research on the profile of dementia associated with PD (PD-D), however, demonstrated that, in a typical patient, its features are different than that of AD, and it constitutes a dementia syndrome of its own. Biochemical deficits and pathological features associated with PD-D were also worked out, which lead to the first rationally designed treatment trials. These studies bore fruit and the first specific drug for PD-D became available. In parallel, clinical diagnostic criteria were described for PD-D as well as criteria for mild cognitive impairment associated with PD (PD-MCI). Efforts are now ongoing to better understand the neurobiological basis of cognitive impairment and to find biomarkers which can identify patients at risk in earlier stages. Once the chrono-biology of mechanisms are better understood, scientists may be able to design treatment interventions to halt the progression of mental dysfunction, as well as the progression of the disease itself.

We have entered a new phase in Parkinson’s disease research: its molecular pathology is being disentangled; the first vaccination trial is on the way along with efforts to in vivo image the accumulation of alpha synuclein molecules, the hallmark pathological feature of PD. We are looking forward to exciting times, which we hope to come sooner rather than later.

Featured image: PET image by Jens Maus. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Climate consciousness in daily legal practice

Thinking about climate change generates helplessness in us. Our persistent role creating this global catastrophe seems so inevitable as to be predetermined; our will to contain it, or even reach agreement to contain it, feeble. Global negotiations seem far removed from our everyday lives and, as lawyers and scholars, remote from the daily practice of our discipline. But understanding climate change as a multiscalar problem requiring a response on all levels reminds us that climate change is as much a small-scale, local, and immediate issue, as it is a global problem of the past and future. This encourages a ‘climate conscious’ approach, which accentuates the importance that our conduct, decisions, and practice have in relation to the demands of climate change.

Legal thinking and action(s) in response to climate change have generated both a wealth of scholarship and a varied body of climate change jurisprudence. In most legal climate change actions the fact of climate change is not disputed; rather, the nature of an appropriate response, is. Studies of the scope and content of climate change case law have identified a heterogenous body driven by varied objectives. Yet any litigation about climate change will have broader impact, by implicitly or explicitly condoning or condemning defendant behaviour, and by determining where the costs of tackling climate change fall. This accentuates the value of focusing on the instrumental when organising climate cases. In doing so, a number of criteria help us navigate the expanse of potential climate change litigation.

Primarily, it is unhelpful to continue to conceptualise climate change as a global problem that is removed from us; climate change is multiscalar. While this notion is complex and contested, in essence it describes a fluid and dynamic phenomenon, requiring a concerted and consistent response across our static levels of governance. The potential for interaction between scales helps us to understand that, for instance, local conduct (and litigation) has potential to impact on national, regional, or global climate policy. In practical terms, it helps us to understand that the climate context has as much relevance in small or mundane disputes, as in mass liability claims.

We must also rethink our conception of climate change litigation. At this stage we should move beyond the idea of climate change liability as liability for climate change, and start thinking about litigation in the context of climate change. This means paying attention to the multiple ways in which climate change issues are present but invisible in, particularly private, litigation. For myriad reasons it might not serve either party to introduce climate change as an issue, when this interfaces with smaller, more mundane disputes, so the broader context would remain unacknowledged. I characterise this as ‘climate blind’ litigation – the outcome will have some impact on climate change policy, but the action will be litigated without any attention on these impacts. In contrast, a ‘climate conscious’ approach demands awareness of the interfaces between the subject matter of the litigation and climate change issues. For example, it could acknowledge where climate damage is invisible to self-interested parties, and where liability outcomes have potential to determine climate change policy.

We should examine the purpose and impact (both intended and unintended) of prospective and concluded litigation. In doing so, clear distinctions must be drawn between litigation about mitigation or adaptation strategies. Of course, climate mitigation and adaptation strategies could overlap or interact in dispute areas; for example, climate blind litigators would accept carbon intensive mechanical cooling as a solution to poorly adapted, overheating buildings.

The best-known decisions concerning climate mitigation are large and unsuccessful actions seeking compensation for climate change loss and damage. The refusal to adjudicate these matters raises questions about the instrumental effect of an adverse (or no substantive) decision in climate cases. Arguably, this constitutes an implicit refusal to deter high-emitting defendants, and determines that the most impecunious claimants should bear the harms of climate change without recompense.

Turning to adaptation: floods, rising sea levels, and unmanaged coastal erosion are all areas where climate risks are predicted and emerging, yet surprisingly the literature reflects little legal action. There are a host of reasons why (particularly small-scale, private) litigation in relation to climate change adaptation would be ‘climate blind’, not overtly engaging with climate change issues. For example, parties to private litigation about flood damage would avoid introducing climate change into determinations of foreseeability and causation. Nevertheless, the instrumental impacts of any finding would persist; decisions on liability for flood damage implicitly encourage attention (or otherwise) of government agencies to the increasing risks of flooding. As before, any outcome has potential to support or undermine national climate adaptation policy, and define where the risks of, and responsibility for, changing climate conditions lie. If this is to be done, it is better to do it explicitly.

Of course, many private disputes engage with areas of social or environmental importance, which often are taken into account in determining disputes. However, its particular characteristics – the combination of immediate invisibility, potentially disastrous consequences, and significant policy challenges – call for particular awareness about climate change. It might also be said, for instance, that in smaller disputes the volume of emissions in issue is so negligible compared to the overall scale of the problem that it might be disregarded. This approach ignores the reality that climate change is a cumulative problem, and that the combined effect of many ‘insignificant’ pockets of excessive emissions is significant.

In summary, recognising that climate change demands a response on a small scale, can relieve us of our sense of helplessness. This, and a reminder that any legal action which interfaces with climate issues, will impact on climate policy, imposes a responsibility on us: to maintain an awareness of climate issues in our daily lives and practice. As lawyers and scholars, it is precisely in relation to the smaller or more mundane areas of practice, where we remain preoccupied with our basic interests, that carefully ‘climate conscious’ approaches are required.

Headline image credit: Trees in haze By Sebastian Kostrubala. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Do America’s political parties matter in presidential elections?

April 2015 will go down in history as the month that the 2016 race for the White House began in earnest. Hillary Clinton’s online declaration of her presidential candidacy was the critical moment. With it America’s two major political parties have locked horns with each other.

The Democrats intend to continue their control of the presidency for another four years; Republicans, for their part, hope to finally make good on a conservative bumper sticker that began appearing on automobiles as early as the summer of 2009 and that read: “Had Enough Yet? Next Time Vote Republican.” To be sure, the electorate decided in 2012 that it wanted more of Barack Obama and Democratic leadership. But Republicans are clearly banking that “time for a change” sentiment will rise to flood level by November, 2016.

“Wait a minute,” you might be saying to yourself at this very moment. “Political parties? How can one claim with a straight face that the political parties – the organizations themselves, their officials, and the hundreds of office-holders on Capitol Hill, in governors’ and mayoral mansions, and in statehouses – have just now gotten down to a contest for control of the White House?”

There is a lot to be said for this retort – call it the “weak parties” view of American presidential politics. But a new view of political parties – propounded by several scholars who all did their graduate work together at UCLA about 15 years ago and who have become the Young Turks of the political science of American parties – shows that in fact the two political parties are doing the selection of their nominee. Parties just happen to be doing the selection in a way that is far more protracted than before. The heart of this alternative view is to recognize that what we are now seeing is the “invisible primary” – a phase during which candidates persuade party leaders around the country and another key party elite (the party’s major donors) that their candidacy is viable. That period in the struggle is well underway and will continue until early next year, when the next moment (the preference primaries) brings the active voter bases of the two parties into the bargaining process.

The Presidential Candidate As Ulysses

The quest for the presidency first and foremost appears to be a personal odyssey – one that begins with a video or a press conference, quickly followed by trips to Iowa and New Hampshire (which are the two states that have tenaciously held on to their positions as the venues for the earliest popular preference primaries.)  The trek seems, indeed, to be Exhibit A for the old saw that American political parties are extraordinarily weak. Political science textbooks tell us that a central function of political parties is to recruit the men and women who can successfully compete for electoral favor. The presidential selection process, by contrast, seems to start when and how someone with a big ego and perhaps delusions of grandeur wants to start it – and what happens after that is like a board game with cards, dice, and a winding path to the spot at the center of the board labelled “Oval Office.”

An historical perspective, moreover, adds weight to the “weak parties” thesis. At one time, party regulars met at the nominating conventions – and they collectively bargained over who their standard bearers would be. They pooled their knowledge of a candidate’s acceptability to the party’s various factions, and they settled on a running mate who could be counted on to heighten party unity and stoke voter enthusiasm.

Image: Bumper sticker car parked in Santa Cruz, California. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

But that all ended with tear gas and the fury of protest in 1968 at the disastrous nominating convention that the Democrats held in Chicago. Party bosses, chief among them Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, anointed Vice President Hubert Humphrey – even as the city police clubbed anti-war protesters in the streets. Determined never to repeat this searing experience, the Democrats reformed their delegate selection process. By 1976, when a little-known dark horse from Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter, won the nomination more or less by himself, the new, candidate-centered era had begun. Republicans soon mimicked the Democrats, which is why the Goldwater wing of the party eventually triumphed over the Northeastern Republican establishment. Their internal revolution in fact paved the way for the Reagan Era. Now the nominating convention in both parties seems to be little more than a formal coronation of whoever succeeds in winning the required number of delegates for nomination – besides, of course, being an opportunity for the nominee both to catch the mass public’s attention and to start focusing loyalists and independents on the choice that they will soon face at the ballot box.

The Presidential Candidate As The Party’s Choice

Yet, this is where revisionist scholarship comes in to help us fundamentally re-think the “weak parties” conventional wisdom concerning presidential selection. Instead of parties doing their collective bargaining over their nominee in a compressed period of a few days at a nominating convention, they now do it in several stages lasting a little over a year, sharply reducing the risk that the nominee is potentially unpopular, alienated from a key faction or set of activists, or inept. The first stage – the invisible primary – is the segment that we have now begun. On the Democratic side, Mrs. Clinton has already won this primary;  no one is contesting her primacy. Her main goal is to lock in funding commitments that will make her campaign astonishingly well funded – around $2.5 billion. The Republicans have 19 candidates in all, however; their invisible primary will therefore winnow the field to those few – Jeb Bush?  Scott Walker? Ted Cruz? – who can compete in the primaries to the bitter end. In both cases, the nominee will be the consensus winner of an extended bargaining process. It involves party leaders, each party’s major donors (most of whom are as intensely ideological as the activists and volunteers who work during for candidates during the primary elections and the general election), and finally the most loyal voters of either party, who show up at the primaries to register their preferences. The end result for both parties is actually superior to the old system of a nomination convention. The consensus that now infuses the nominating convention and that turns it into a media event reflects, in fact, just how much the nominee is not just the party’s choice, but the party’s considered and enthusiastic choice.

Weak Parties?  No, Stronger Parties

In short, the evolution of the presidential selection system suggests not that American political parties abandoned a key function of party politics sometime in the 1970s, that is, the task of picking the presidential nominee. Instead, the crises and factionalism that the two parties experienced paved the way for an improvement in how the parties select their leading politician. Instead of a nominating convention, we have today a complex, very expensive, and highly participatory substitute for it. The attentive public, journalists, and politics junkies are just now tuning into the first phases of it. They will have a feast of events, so called “game-changers,” gaffes, and any number of tactical twists and turns to entertain them. But behind the spectacle, the parties are choosing – and between Labor Day weekend 2016 and the general election the great majority of voters will focus and decide whether their psychic identification with one party or the other is the proper guide for their choice. By Election Day there will only be a small number of “persuadable” voters – but even those voters tend to identify with one party or the other. Even at the end, then, the parties decide – that is, the distribution of party strength in the electorate will be the most important determinant of the election.

Featured image credit: Replica of the Oval Office, from the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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How well do you know Shakespeare actors?

‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.’ Over the past 400 years, Shakespeare’s plays have been performed across the globe, in productions big and small. Many actors have tried their hand at bringing characters such as Hamlet, Othello, Puck, and Juliet to life. How well do you know some of the great Shakespeare actors and the plays they performed in? Test your knowledge with our quiz below.

Image Credit: “Innenraum des Globe Theatre in London” by Tohma. GFDL via Wikimedia Commons.

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Salamone Rossi and the preservation of Jewish identity

Grove Music Online presents the final installment in our multi-part series by Don Harrán, Artur Rubinstein Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the life of Jewish musician Salamone Rossi on the anniversary of his birth in 1570. Harrán considers three major questions: Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Jews; Rossi as a Jew among Christians; and the conclusions to be drawn from both.

Like other Jewish musicians in later times, among them Ernest Bloch, Darius Milhaud, and Leonard Bernstein, Rossi confronted the problems of preserving his Jewish identity in a non-Jewish environment and of communicating with Jews and Christians in such a way as to be understood and appreciated by both. His solutions illustrate the paradoxe juif.

Rossi, the man and musician, had his Jewish and Hebrew sides, as evident from his connections with his family and with Jews and their institutions in Mantua and Venice, to which one should add his commitment to the Hebrew tradition in his Hebrew works. He participated in productions of the Jewish theatrical troupe that performed before the dukes in Mantua and was probably called upon to prepare music for celebrations within the Jewish community. He might have been affiliated with one or more synagogues in and beyond Mantua.

At the same time, Rossi had his Mantuan and Italian sides. He was heavily involved in music-making for the Gonzagas and was occasionally invited to entertain guests at other courts. He came into contact with the greater and lesser non-Jewish musicians—Monteverdi, Giaches de Wert, etc.—who worked in or passed through Mantua. He joined them or even collaborated with them in composing, rehearsing, and often performing vocal and instrumental music for courtly or private entertainments. He met with dukes, princes, and other worthies, sometimes receiving commissions, though more often asking them to commission works from him.

The outward dichotomy between Jewish and non-Jewish influences and motivations cuts through his production. Rossi supplied Hebrew compositions for services in the synagogue and possibly events in the community; he related to these compositions, so he intimated in the dedication to his “Songs by Solomon,” as different from his Italian ones (“the Lord,” he said, “has been a support for me and He put new songs in my mouth”). He knew of an ancient Hebrew musical practice in the Temple, which declined after its destruction; he was perceived by others as playing a major role in its revival. Leon Modena believed that by writing Hebrew music Rossi both linked with the past and perpetuated it into the future. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that from the day this collection is published, those who learn it [the science of music] will multiply in Israel in order to sing to the magnificence of our God by using the ‘Songs’ and others like them.”

Rossi – Il Primo Libro de Madrigali

But before, during, and after pursuing his Hebrew inclinations, Rossi operated, with no less enthusiasm, within the bounds of an ongoing Italian musical tradition. His canzonette and madrigals are firmly rooted in Italian practice, as are his instrumental canzoni, dances, sinfonie, and sonatas. Here and there Rossi innovated within this practice, especially in his sinfonie and sonatas. Yet, in the main, he shaped the ideas of his non-Jewish works according to an inherently Italian, non-Jewish tradition of vocal and instrumental music.

Rossi was known as a virtuoso violinist and in his instrumental music he emphasized his soloist inclinations. The result was something quite different from his vocal music. Released from words, Rossi was free to impose his own ideas, as determined by his performing capacities. While he drew from words for his vocal works, he drew from himself for many of his instrumental ones: Rossi is the measure of their form and content. In this he is a man of his times, for the seventeenth century saw the gradual rise of the soloist in vocal and instrumental music.

In daily life Rossi moved between two cultures, combining, if not fusing them in his activities. Though there was increasing segregation of Jews from Christians in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mantua, Rossi illustrates the possibility of breaking down civic and religious barriers. After all, the Lord God who ruled his people was the same God who ruled mankind. In writing to Duke Vincenzo on his brother’s behalf in 1606, Rossi finishes with the words “I pray our Lord for your every happiness and content”; and in the dedication of his four-voice madrigals to Alfonso d’Este he addresses him as “Your Highness to whom I pay my humblest respects by entreating the Lord God that, in His benignity, He rain all favors upon you and Your Most Serene Household.” One wonders whether Rossi was not saying, as an innuendo, that, after all, it was the Jewish God who formed the world and the nations and that it was for the Jewish God, who had chosen the Jews for His people, to dispense His benevolence to Gentiles. Whatever the case, the result is unification, through continuities within the Judeo-Christian tradition or through notions of Hebrew culture as the fons et origo (source and origin) of later developments.

These and other interpretations depend on the way one reads Rossi’s biography and his works. They form the chapters of a still “open book,” whose contents can be variously organized according to the particular point of view selected for their narration. Vivat S. R. (Long live Salamone Rossi), to quote the acrostic in the table of contents to his first collection: in “living on,” Rossi’s story can be told and retold as a narrative for the shifting associations of Jews and their music within European culture.

Headline image credit: Opening of Salomone de Rossi’s Madrigaletti, Venice, 1628. Photo of Exhibit at the Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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