Is there a 'best practice' model for the legal recognition of customary tenure? If not, is it possible to identify the circumstances in which a particular model would be most appropriate? This article considers these questions in the light of economic theories of property rights, particularly as illustrated by the World Bank's 2003 land policy report. While these theories have their flaws, the underlying concept of tenure security allows a typological framework for developing legal responses to customary tenure. In particular, this article suggests that the nature and degree of State legal intervention in a customary land system should be determined by reference to the nature and causes of any tenure insecurity. This hypothesis is discussed by reference to a wide variety of legal examples from Africa, Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific. The objective is not to suggest that law determines resource governance outcomes in pluralist normative environments, but to improve the quality of legal interventions in order to assist customary groups to negotiate better forms of tenure security and access to resources.

According to conventional law-and-economics theory, private property rights tend to evolve as resource values rise. This optimistic assessment fails to explain the development of open access in many Third World property systems. Indeed, while the evolution of property has been studied extensively, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the evolution of open access itself. This Essay presents a theoretical analysis of open access that focuses on contested institutional interactions between laws, norms, and agreements. It argues that rising resource values are more likely to lead to open access than private property when the institutional environment is characterized by competing legal and norm-based systems. The Essay concludes that to understand property failures in contemporary Third World circumstances, we must move beyond conventional evolutionary analysis to taxonomic formulations based on the nature and interaction of property enforcement arrangements.

The somatostatin (SRIF) receptors (SSTRs) 1 and 2 bind SRIF and SRIF 28 with high affinity, although a number of synthetic hexapeptide and octapeptide analogs of SRIF bind selectively to SSTR2. Extracellular loop three and its adjoining trans-membrane-spanning regions contain elements essential for the binding of such analogs to murine SSTR2. In particular, a stretch of amino acids from residues 294 -297 (FDFV) in murine SSTR2 in trans-membrane domain seven can determine affinity for the SSTR2-selective analogs. Within this region, Phe 294 has previously been predicted to be essential for the binding of octapeptides (Kaupmann, K., Bruns, C., Raulf, F., Weber, H., Mattes, H., and Lubbert, H. (1995) EMBO J. 14, 727-735) based on the observation that SSTR1 can bind the octapeptide SMS-201-995 with reasonable affinity after a Ser-to-Phe conversion in the analogous region of this receptor (SSTR1 S305F ). We find that SSTR1 S305F has low affinity for a number of SSTR2-selective hexapeptides, suggesting that these analogs have different binding requirements than SMS-201-995. A correlation is seen between the ability of SSTR1 S305F to bind hexapeptide analogs and the presence of a phenylalanine, but not tyrosine, at position two in these small cyclic molecules. Thus, a single hydroxyl group in hexapeptides can play a critical role in determining receptor binding to these receptor mutants. We also find that the second extracellular loop of SSTR1 is important for the selectivity of certain SRIF agonists for binding to SSTR1. Taken together, our data indicate that there are multiple elements in the somatostatin receptors that can determine the binding affinity and selectivity of peptide analogs. Somatostatin (SRIF)1 is a physiological inhibitor of growth hormone secretion from the anterior pituitary, insulin, and glucagon secretion from the pancreas and gastric acid secretion from the stomach (Bloom et al., 1975;Brazeau et al., 1972;Brown et al., 1977;Gomez-Pan et al., 1975;Hellman and Lernmark, 1969;Mandarino et al., 1981;Reichlin, 1983). The peptide is also a neurotransmitter and neuromodulator involved in locomotor activity and cognitive functions in the brain Reisine and Bell, 1995).SRIF induces its biological actions by interacting with membrane-associated receptors. Recently, five SRIF receptor subtypes have been cloned

We study tiling and spectral sets in vector spaces over prime fields. The classical Fuglede conjecture in locally compact abelian groups says that a set is spectral if and only if it tiles by translation. This conjecture was disproved by T. Tao in Euclidean spaces of dimensions 5 and higher, using constructions over prime fields (in vector spaces over finite fields of prime order) and lifting them to the Euclidean setting. Over prime fields, when the dimension of the vector space is less than or equal to 2 it has recently been proven that the Fuglede conjecture holds (see [6]). In this paper we study this question in higher dimensions over prime fields and provide some results and counterexamples. In particular we prove the existence of spectral sets which do not tile in Z 5 p for all odd primes p and Z 4 p for all odd primes p such that p ≡ 3 mod 4. Although counterexamples in low dimensional groups over cyclic rings Z n were previously known they were usually for non prime n or a small, sporadic set of primes p rather than general constructions. This paper is a result of a Research Experience for Undergraduates program ran at the University of Rochester during the summer of 2015 by A. Iosevich, J. Pakianathan and G. Petridis.

Much of the recent literature on customary property relations in sub-Saharan Africa has highlighted underlying characteristics of negotiability and indeterminacy. Custom is prone to reinvention as resource claimants manipulate customary references across multiple forums for property legitimation and authority. This article focuses on the resilience of customary property relations in East Timor. Based on a study of customary authority in the village of Babulo, we conclude that traditional Timorese narratives of first possession, where land authority is claimed by groups that trace descent to a mythic first settler, have acted as adaptive and resilient focal points for the reproduction of customary property relations in historical circumstances of war, colonization, and occupation. While a finding of customary resilience is not new to postcolonial contexts, the relative novelty of our study lies in its structured explanation for resilience in circumstances of war and displacement, based on the social ordering capacity of first possession principles themselves. This explanation, which derives from focal point theories for cooperative property relations, also takes into account a number of limits on the ordering capacity of first possession principles, which support a conclusion of relative or constrained resilience, particularly in terms of contested interpretations of possessory authority in contemporary East Timor.Fr om 1974 to 1999, at least 102,800, and as many as 183,000, East Timorese died from conflict-related causes. These deaths represented between 15 and 25 percent of East Timor's then population, a mortality rate equivalent to the killing fields of Cambodia (CAVR 2005:44). Most deaths took place during the period of Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1999. Many resulted from forced relocations by the Indonesian military, an ill-fated attempt to separate civilians from the armed resistance. Others were due to killings by the Indonesian military and its proxies, pro-Indonesian

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Recent law and economics scholarship has revived a debate on bright-line rules in property theory. Economic analysis asserts a baseline preference for bright-line property rules because of the information costs if "all the world" had to understand a range of permitted uses, or deal with multiple interest holders in a resource. A baseline preference for bright-line rules of property arises from the cost of communicating information: all else being equal, complex rules suit smaller audiences (e.g., contracting parties) and simple rules suit large audiences (e.g., property transactors, violators, and enforcers). This article explores the circumstances in which a simple rule, purportedly for a large audience, takes on interpretive complexity as it traverses specialized audience segments. The argument draws on two heuristic strands of recent sociolegal scholarship: systems theory notions of autopoiesis, and concepts of negotiability in plural property relations. The potential for complex interpretations of simple legal rules is illustrated through a case study of the Fataluku language group in the district of Lautem, East Timor.Recent law and economics scholarship has revived a debate on bright-line rules of exclusion in property theory. Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith (2011) argue that exclusion better defines the core element of property than the metaphor of a "bundle of rights." 1 Their argument is based on a conception of property as an act of communication: unlike rights in contract, property rights are good "against the world," and require rules that reduce the costs of information for a broad class of potential violators orThe authors wish to thank Henry Smith, Susana Barnes, Rebecca Monson, and two anonymous reviewers for their insights and comments. The authors owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the people of Lautem and to members of East Timor's Land and Property Unit.

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