Years For Decision

This book tells the story of some people who went west in 1846. 1846 saw the outbreak of the war with Mexico, Fremont and the Bear Flag Revolt, a great Oregon and California emigration, the conquest of New Mexico, Doniphan's expedition, and the tragedy of the Donner party of emigrants--half adults, half childrens. These narratives are told as stories in themselves, as related parts of the great national spectacle, and as the culmination of the whole movement of American westward migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The world is full of uncertainty. In unpredictable circumstances, can emotions facilitate advantageous decision-making? A neuroscience team, led by Antonio Damasio, explored this question using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). To the present day, the findings of numerous IGT-related investigations strongly influence clinical and interdisciplinary research, for example, in neuroeconomics and neuromarketing. This special issue examines IGT-based research progress over the past 20 years through literature reviews, clinical examinations, model construction, theoretical integration, and brain imaging technology. Both supportive and opposing viewpoints are provided to frame correlations between rationality, emotion, decision-making, and IGT. Potential future directions for IGT studies are discussed

This book marks the 75th anniversary of the 1948 Hostage Case in which a US military tribunal in Nuremberg acquitted General Lothar Rendulic of devastating Northern Norway on account of his honest factual error. The volume critically reappraises the law and facts underlying his trial, the no second-guessing rule in customary international humanitarian law (IHL) that is named after the general himself, and the assessment of modern battlefield decisions. Using recently discovered documents, this volume casts major doubts on Rendulic’s claim that he considered the region’s total devastation and the forcible evacuation of all of its inhabitants imperatively demanded by military necessity at the time. This book’s analysis of court records reveals how the tribunal failed to examine relevant facts or explain the Rendulic Rule’s legal origin. This anthology shows that, despite the Hostage Case’s ambiguity and occasional suggestions to the contrary, objective reasonableness forms part of the reasonable commander test under IHL and the mistake of fact defence under international criminal law (ICL) to which the rule has given rise. This collection also identifies modern warfare’s characteristics—human judgment, de-empathetic battlespace, and institutional bias—that may make it problematic to deem some errors both honest and reasonable. The Rendulic Rule embodies an otherwise firmly established admonition against judging contentious battlefield decisions with hindsight. Nevertheless, it was born of a factually ill-suited case and continues to raise significant legal as well as ethical challenges today. The most comprehensive study of the Rendulic Rule ever to appear in English, this multi-disciplinary anthology will appeal to researchers and practitioners of IHL and ICL, as well as military historians and military ethicists and offers ground-breaking new research. Nobuo Hayashi is affiliated to the Centre for International and Operational Law at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm, Sweden. Carola Lingaas is affiliated to the Faculty of Social Studies at VID Specialized University in Oslo, Norway.