UCLA School of Law

This paper critiques Brook Gotberg’s recent proposal to reform preference law by creating a new safe harbor for preferences in chapter 11 while repealing certain existing preference defenses in chapter 7. The proper path of reform in this area would preserve preference recovery as a feature of chapter 11 reorganization law while raising the monetary limits on minimum recoveries, restricting financial contract safe harbors and bolstering ordinary trade creditor defenses across both chapter 11 and chapter 7.

We tend to take nature’s ecological systems – or ecosystems – for granted, but they provide critically valuable services to society and to urban areas. They create a sense of place and recreational opportunities, contributing to quality of life by enhancing human physical and psychological health. This is particularly true for cities, where economic productivity, fiscal soundness, community life, and governance are tied to natural surroundings in distinct, unique and generally under-appreciated ways. Because the urbanized world depends on ecosystem services – both inside and outside of city boundaries – investing in the provision of ecosystem services will often be more cost-effective than response actions, such as treatment, restoration, and disaster response. Given the importance of urban ecosystem benefits to surrounding populations, we might expect that ecosystem services would play a prominent role in the formulation of urban policies, plans, and laws. However, with rare exception, they do not. Many cities are experiencing declines of the ecosystems that sustain them. Metropolitan areas are losing open space, farmland, and environmentally sensitive lands.

As America, and indeed the rest of the world, becomes increasingly urbanized, these issues are of the first importance in seeking to improve quality of life. The scholarship in the area, though, has been fragmented by discipline. Much remains to be done. First and foremost, we must identify the pressing research needs. This article brings together the collective insights of scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines – lawyers and urban planners to ecologists and economists. Taking a comprehensive and wide-ranging view of the field, we identify the most important research questions that should shape the future of scholarship on urban ecosystem services. In doing so, we seek to help shape the trajectory of research across multiple disciplines in this growing and critical area.

Abstract: The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a legal institution embedded in international politics. Politics shaped the Rome Statute of the ICC, which is rooted in norms and rules of European lineage and security interests of party states. Politics constrains and influences the operation of the Court, which has adapted in response to oversight and governance of the Assembly of States Parties, and to political actions extrinsic to institutional rules. The ICC also has political effects in situation states. A brief history shows that application of Rome Statute triggers across state parties with different social conditions skewed geographic distribution of its investigations and prosecutions towards Africa, a structural bias that catalysed a legitimation crisis for the ICC. Subsequent exercises of expansive jurisdiction aimed at nationals of non-African, non-party states – including Israel and some of the world's great powers – have dampened African complaints and advanced the ICC agenda, but intensified non-legitimacy claims by powerful non-party states. To survive, Court organs must follow legal mandates, yet be responsive to pressing international political demands, continuously risking the legitimacy of the ICC as a legal institution and adverse political reactions by antagonised governments. Careful management of the tension between law and politics at the ICC may modestly reduce antagonism towards the Court, but that tension cannot be resolved, and confrontations over the ICC's legitimacy are certain to recur.

In admitting DNA sample taken at the crime scene in 2010 to compare it with a DNA sample taken from the defendant in 2020 courts assume that the defendant’s DNA has not changed in the prior ten years. This article questions that assumption using scientific findings published in the journals Scientific American and Science News.