Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: How much of a buffer is needed between a catch limit and target to ensure no overfishing? This question is key to setting Annual Catch Limits (ACLs) under the recently updated Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006 (MSRA). The MSRA’s new provisions dictate that Regional Fishery Management Councils establish ACLs and accountability measures at levels that prevent overfishing in each fishery management plan. However, the relationship between ACLs, optimum yield, and overfishing limits has yet to be clearly delineated. Due to uncertainty in many aspects of stock assessments, including natural and fishing mortality rates, it is necessary to develop buffers that account for uncertainty and risk to prevent overfishing. For instance, in data poor fisheries the amount of buffer between the limit and target catch level should be increased to reduce the risk of overfishing. To simulate the potential application of an ACL policy, age structured bioeconomic models were constructed for the Gulf of Mexico Red Grouper and Red Snapper. The probability that management measures would not exceed critical levels was determined after accounting for uncertainty with a Monte Carlo simulation. Based on the potential use of ACLs in these specific fisheries, guidance applicable to all fishery regions regarding risk assessment and ACL setting is given.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In Gregg v. Georgia, Supreme Court justices Powell, Blackmun, and Stevens all agreed that the procedures adopted by Georgia in response to Furman v. Georgia satisfied the requirements of the Eighth Amendment. Over the years that followed, each of these justices, all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, repudiated their prior views, reaching the same conclusion that the procedures adopted (in Georgia and other states) were unsatisfactory, created arbitrary outcomes, and were ultimately unconstitutional.

In 1991, Justice Powell stated that he had “come to think that capital punishment should be abolished.” In 1994, Justice Blackmun pronounced that he would “no longer tinker with the machinery of death.” And in 2008, Justice Stevens concluded that the “the imposition of the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.’”

Tracing the decisions of each of three justices in a series of landmark cases, this article will attempt to pinpoint the factors, whether similar or not, that lead each to the same conclusion -- that there is no fair, non-arbitrary way to administer the death penalty. Considering these factors, the article will then explore the degree to which the procedural problems that result in such a conclusion mandate abolition of the death penalty, or in the alternative, suggest how the capital punishment system should be reformed.

Publication Type: Abstract Proposal
Abstract: Papyrus Stevens (Toledo Museum of Art 27.71) is an unpublished Egyptian funerary papyrus made for a woman named Tamesia, daughter of Tashenanoup. Although acquired in Cairo for the Toledo Museum of Art in 1927 (with the help of Wilhelm Spiegelberg and Caroline Ransom Williams), the papyrus almost certainly originally came from Thebes. The drawing style, composition, palaeography and onomastic information suggest a date in the second century CE, when Egypt was under Roman rule but when Egyptian religious practice and afterlife beliefs still survived. The papyrus is nearly twelve feet long and almost ten inches high; it preserves the remains of a protective outer strip, six columns of hieratic text with vignettes and then a long vignette of a judgment scene that takes up nearly two thirds of the papyrus. The contents of this papyrus are not precisely paralleled elsewhere, but contain a unique amalgam of passages of the Book of the Dead and other, later funerary texts. This paper will present the papyrus and discuss its date and contents.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There can be little doubt that there has been a global rise in concern about security – both in terms of criminal threats to individuals and in terms of terrorist threats to national security. There can also be little doubt that responses to this rising fear now represent a major threat to the protection of, and popular commitment to the protection of, human rights and liberty. This global trend represents a significant challenge for the human rights community – made up of international, governmental or non-governmental human rights organisations, political activists, political theorists, human rights lawyers, and even judges. What this paper will consider is only a small contribution to this general debate, but potentially an important one. The paper will comparatively examine the responses of a number of constitutional courts to the legal questions placed before it regarding of the balance between security and human rights. This examination will be place the constitutional responses of these courts in the broader legal and political cultures of each jurisdiction. It will seek to distil commonalities as well as differences, and in so doing, attempt to develop a new human rights discourse which is imaginative, as well as specific, about how rights and security are to be balanced in this new world order.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Justice John Paul Stevens has been one of the Supreme Court's foremost advocates of prisoners' rights since his very first term of service on the Court. This paper documents the unique role that Stevens has played in prisoners' rights cases. In addition, the paper examines the question of why an affluent Republican, who was known as an antitrust law expert in his pre-judicial career, became so concerned about prisoners' rights. The answer, in part, stems from his involvement in specific pro bono legal work during his career as a lawyer.