Treaties Nobody Counted On

A Treaties on Tropical Therapeutics

Vienna Conference on the Law of Treaties

My Name Is Nobody

S weet wine, unblended, served Odysseus well in the escape with his companions from the Cyclops' cave during his epic return to Ithaca. The wine, a gift from Maron, grandson of Dionysus, was exceptional. " When he drank it he mixed twenty parts of water to one of wine, and yet the fragrance from the mixing bowl was so exquisite that it was impossible to refrain from drinking. " Odysseus carried...

When Nobody Wins*

As young children vividly illustrate with their performance on the wug-test (Berko 1958), the ability to generalize linguistic patterns to novel items is a core property of language. It thus comes as a surprise when we stumble into a dark and dusty corner of language where our boundless linguistic productivity has unexpectedly failed. For example, the English verb forgo ‘to go without’ is unexc...

Climate treaties and approaching catastrophes

If the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty, and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs, treaties can easily coordinate countries’ behavior so as to avoid the threshold. Where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower, treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe, sustaining only modest cuts in emis...