"This Woman's Work" in a "Man's World": A Feminist Analysis of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002
This paper will discuss the background of the 2002 Farm Bill and its origins in the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (hereinafter the 1996 Farm Bill). Secondly, a basic discussion of feminist international relations and more generally, feminist legal theory will be invoked to provide a theoretical beacon for the rest of the journey. Thirdly, specific arguments about ecofeminsim and postcolonial feminism are teased out in order to critically investigate the direct and indirect consequences of United States farm policy. Fourthly, the 2002 Farm Bill's disparate impact on international womyn will be discussed and theories about the need for critical investigation of international law from a feminist perspective will be developed. Next, the impending expiration of the 2002 Farm Bill and the possibilities and problems associated with the pending 2007 Farm Bill will be analyzed to provide a starting point for those interested in affecting agricultural policy and international trade, with emphasis paid to feminist theory. Lastly, the paper will conclude with recommendations for future inquiry and ways in which agricultural policy can be advanced while preserving the value of womyn's work.
Reputational Fallacies in International Law: A Comparative Review of United States and Canadian Trade Actions
Reputation is an important and complex issue for individuals, communities and nations. The notion behind reputation is that individuals receive information about the behavior of others from third parties; this information is then used to decide whether or not to behave in a similar manner, and how to interact with the other person. Positive reputational information results in increased willingness to act cooperatively with the other person, while the opposite reaction occurs when individuals are provided negative reputational information. Similar to the reputations of individuals, state reputations can be highly inaccurate. State reputations may be flawed or bear little resemblance to the actions of the states themselves, creating reputational fallacies. Reputational fallacies raise important issues for international law. In particular, the utility of reputation as a compliance mechanism, when reputation does not accurately reflect state behavior, may impact the effectiveness of international law. This Article will examine the problem of reputational fallacies through a comparative examination of two states with very different reputations in the international trade arena: the United States and Canada. The ensuing examination of U.S. and Canadian trade actions explores whether each state's reputation is logically connected to its actual behavior in the international trade arena. This Article ultimately concludes that there is little substantive support for each state's reputational difference. While this Article's examination is confined to the trade actions of the United States and Canada, it nonetheless suggests that reputation - as a means of enforcing state compliance with international obligations - is, at best, an inaccurate tool of international law. In fact, this Article suggests that reputation, at its worst, is harmful to international law compliance because it introduces fallacies and inefficiencies, as well as a whole host of other problems associated with its inherent inaccuracy.
On the Graph Edit Distance Cost: Properties and Applications
We model the edit distance as a function in a labeling space. A labeling space is an Euclidean space where coordinates are the edit costs. Through this model, we define a class of cost. A class of cost is a region in the labeling space that all the edit costs have the same optimal labeling. Moreover, we characterize the distance value through the labeling space. This new point of view of the edit distance gives us the opportunity of defining some interesting properties that are useful for a better understanding of the edit distance. Finally, we show the usefulness of these properties through some applications.