Aaron Xavier Fellmeth

The challenge to patent law of pure chemical protein synthesis

The emergence of pure chemical protein synthesis as a commercially viable method of drug design and production will create serious problems in the patent system.

The Proportionality Principle in Operation: Methodological Limitations of Empirical Research and the Need for Transparency

The principle of proportionality, notoriously obscure in application and subjective in interpretation, has been enforced so rarely as to call into question its potency as a meaningful international legal standard. Nonetheless, international criminal tribunals, academics, and the ICRC’s monumental study on customary international humanitarian law all confidently proclaim the principle as embedded in the customary international law applicable to both international and non-international armed conflicts. To assess whether these claims are accurate, and to flesh out how states interpret the principle in practice, the author and a colleague have undertaken a long-term, multinational empirical study of state practice in interpreting and enforcing the proportionality principle. This article discusses the methodological options available and explains the one chosen for the proportionality study. The limitations of the study, in spite of its carefully designed methodology, suggest that the debilities of the proportionality principle may not be conceptual so much as a byproduct of military secrecy. This article concludes that greater transparency in state compliance with the rule of discrimination and the principle of proportionality could create systemic effects that would significantly decrease the dangers to civilians in armed conflicts. The article suggests some ways that a transparency regime could be developed and proposes some alterations to the ius in bello to remove certain pathological disincentives to transparency.

Comparing U.S. and European police subcultures: A field study

This article is a satire of sociology and field anthropology research on comparative police behavior; it uses humorous anecdotes to make a serious point. The author argues that until police supervision is undertaken by civilian review boards, police behavior will never conform to community morality despite attempts at police reform. To support this argument, the author compares U.S., German, Italian, Russian, and French police subcultures in an attempt to calculate (a) the correlation between police behavior and its conformity to community morality, and (b) whether a high correlation results from a high degree of civilian oversight. The author concludes that, because no country has appreciable civilian oversight, and because the police of no country conform to community morality, there is therefore a perfect correlation between lack of civilian oversight and lack of police conformity to community morality.