The sources and interpretation of Olympic Law

In this article, Mark James and Guy Osborn discuss how the relationships between the various members of the Olympic Movement are governed by the Olympic Charter and the legal framework within which an edition of the Olympic Games is organised. The legal status of the Charter and its interpretation by the Court of Arbitration for Sport are examined to identify who is subject to its terms and how challenges to its requirements can be made. Finally, by using the UK legislation that has been enacted to regulate advertising and trading at London 2012, the far-reaching and sometimes unexpected reach of Olympic Law is explored

The Origin of the Sphaleron Dipole Moment

By providing a suitable definition of the electromagnetic field off the Higgs vacuum, we show that within the sphaleron there is a monopole-antimonopole pair with quantized charges, and a loop of electromagnetic current. On integration of the relevant charges and currents over the interior in the limit of small $\Theta_W$, we recover the standard formula for the sphaleron dipole moment.Comment: 13pp Plain TeX, 2 ps figures in 2 files, self-unpacking uuencoded. (Tidied up, discussion of 't Hooft definition of electromagnetic charge, and 2 nice new figures showing charge and current distributions inside the sphaleron.

Private Schools and Queue‐jumping: A reply to White

John White (2016) defends the UK private school system from the accusation that it allows an unfair form of ‘queue jumping’ in university admissions. He offers two responses to this accusation, one based on considerations of harm, and one based on meritocratic distribution of university places. We will argue that neither response succeeds: the queue-jumping argument remains a powerful case against the private school system in the UK. We begin by briefly outlining the queue-jumping argument (§1), before evaluating White’s no-harm (§2) and meritocracy (§3) arguments

Risk Assessment for National Natural Resource Conservation Programs

This paper reviews the risk assessments prepared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in support of regulations implementing the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). These two natural resource conservation programs were authorized as part of the 1996 Farm Bill. The risk assessments were required under the Federal Crop Insurance Reform and Department of Agriculture Reorganization Act of 1994. The framework used for the assessments was appropriate, but the assessments could be improved in the areas of assessments endpoint selection, definition, and estimation. Many of the assessment endpoints were too diffuse or ill-defined to provide an adequate characterization of the program benefits. Two reasons for this lack of clarity were apparent: 1) the large, unprioritized set of natural resource conservation objectives for the two programs and 2) there is little agreement about what changes in environmental attributes caused by agriculture should be considered adverse and which may be considered negligible. There is also some "double counting" of program benefits. Although the CRP and EQIP are, in part, intended to assist agricultural producers with regulatory compliance, the resultant environmental benefits would occur absent the programs. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for continuing efforts to conduct regulatory analyses of these major conservation programs. The central recommendation is that future risk assessments go beyond efforts to identify the natural resources at greatest risk due to agricultural production activities and instead provide scientific input for analyses of the cost-effectiveness of the conservation programs.