The Association of Transnational Law Schools [ATLAS] is a consortium of seven law schools from four continents that launched an annual academic summer program, called the Agora, for doctoral students this past July 2008. As the name of the consortium would suggest, the program focused on transnational law. The Agora is one of several multi-school initiatives aimed at furthering the study of the globalizing legal environment. The Agora both reflects and furthers a trend in legal scholarship, and as a consequence legal education, toward a focus on a set of interrelated concerns, which include globalization, international governance, transnational law, comparative legal studies, legal transplantation and the apparent conceptual challenges that these pose. In important respects these new conceptual challenges have a long pedigree in questions about the scope of legal pedagogy and theory. The pedagogical controversy is rooted in questions about the purpose of legal education, namely, whether it is trade training and should focus on practical legal skills, or whether it should be conceived of as broader than this. Intimately connected to this pedagogical controversy is a legal-theoretical controversy about the scope of legal theory (and thus the nature of law and its investigation). Does the word “law” designate the organizational instruments of state power, or should we think of “law” as referring to a more diverse set of social-organizational systems that may have greater or less affinity and connection with state law?

The deep subsurface of other planetary bodies is of special interest for robotic and human exploration. The subsurface provides access to planetary interior processes, thus yielding insights into planetary formation and evolution. On Mars, the subsurface might harbour the most habitable conditions. In the context of human exploration, the subsurface can provide refugia for habitation from extreme surface conditions. We describe the fifth Mine Analogue Research (MINAR 5) programme at 1 km depth in the Boulby Mine, UK in collaboration with Spaceward Bound NASA and the Kalam Centre, India, to test instruments and methods for the robotic and human exploration of deep environments on the Moon and Mars. The geological context in Permian evaporites provides an analogue to evaporitic materials on other planetary bodies such as Mars. A wide range of sample acquisition instruments (NASA drills, Small Planetary Impulse Tool (SPLIT) robotic hammer, universal sampling bags), analytical instruments (Raman spectroscopy, Close-Up Imager, Minion DNA sequencing technology, methane stable isotope analysis, biomolecule and metabolic life detection instruments) and environmental monitoring equipment (passive air particle sampler, particle detectors and environmental monitoring equipment) was deployed in an integrated campaign. Investigations included studying the geochemical signatures of chloride and sulphate evaporitic minerals, testing methods for life detection and planetary protection around human-tended operations, and investigations on the radiation environment of the deep subsurface. The MINAR analogue activity occurs in an active mine, showing how the development of space exploration technology can be used to contribute to addressing immediate Earth-based challenges. During the campaign, in collaboration with European Space Agency (ESA), MINAR was used for astronaut familiarization with future exploration tools and techniques. The campaign was used to develop primary and secondary school and primary to secondary transition curriculum materials on-site during the campaign which was focused on a classroom extra vehicular activity simulation.

We numerically model the dynamics of the Enceladus plume ice grains and define our nominal plume model as having a particle size distribution n(R) ~ R−q with q = 4 and a total particulate mass rate of 16 kg s−1. This mass rate is based on average plume brightness observed by Cassini across a range of orbital positions. The model predicts sample volumes of ~1600 µg for a 1 m2 collector on a spacecraft making flybys at 20–60 km altitudes above the Enceladus surface. We develop two scenarios to predict the concentration of amino acids in the plume based on these assumed sample volumes. We specifically consider Glycine, Serine, α-Alanine, α-Aminoisobutyric acid and Isovaline. The first ‘abiotic’ model assumes that Enceladus has the composition of a comet and finds abundances between 2 × 10−6 to 0.003 µg for dissolved free amino acids and 2 × 10−5 to 0.3 µg for particulate amino acids. The second ‘biotic’ model assumes that the water of Enceladus's ocean has the same amino acid composition as the deep ocean water on Earth. We compute the expected captured mass of amino acids such as Glycine, Serine, and α-Alanine in the ‘biotic’ model to be between 1 × 10−5 to 2 × 10−5 µg for dissolved free amino acids and dissolved combined amino acids and about 0.0002 µg for particulate amino acids. Both models consider enhancements due to bubble bursting. Expected captured mass of amino acids is calculated for a 1 m2 collector on a spacecraft making flybys with a closest approach of 20 km during mean plume activity for the given nominal particle size distribution.

We describe the Schwarzian equations for the 328 completely replicable functions with integral $q$ -coefficients [Ford et al., ‘More on replicable functions’, Comm. Algebra 22 (1994) no. 13, 5175–5193].