Person:

Song, Jiewuh

A common criticism of global institutions is that their rules disproportionately favor the political and economic interests of powerful states over those of weaker states. This dissertation consists of three essays that each deal with a specific application of the criticism. In the first essay, I examine the question of whether international human rights law should include a human right to democracy. Joshua Cohen and Charles Beitz offer two kinds of argument for thinking that it should not. First, protecting a human right to democracy would permit outsiders to intervene in domestic political arrangements in objectionable ways. Second, democracy presupposes a conception of persons as equals that cannot be shared internationally. I argue that both these arguments would prove too much: they would rule out from the human rights corpus rights that clearly seem to be human rights. Building on this conclusion, I offer a positive argument for recognizing a human right to democracy. In the second essay, I explore the objection that global economic institutions sustain unacceptable degrees of inequality. On one skeptical response, the rules of global economic institutions are justifiable insofar as states have consented to them. I argue that specific features of global economic institutions make this view implausible. I then articulate several reasons for thinking that inequalities sanctioned by global economic institutions are objectionable. It turns out that the prominent philosophical debate on whether Rawlsian egalitarianism should be globalized addresses one but not the other of these reasons. In the third essay, I examine the practice of universal jurisdiction, which allows states to exercise jurisdiction over a narrow range of international law violations regardless of where, by whom, or against whom the violations occur. On the standard justification for this exceptional category of jurisdiction, what makes the exception justifiable is the moral heinousness of the relevant violations. This justification, I argue, can explain neither the narrow subject matter nor the expansive scope of universal jurisdiction. I offer an alternative justification on which universal jurisdiction is justifiable as a way of filling enforcement gaps to which some but not other international legal norms are prone.

Clearance of cellular debris is a critical feature of the developing nervous system, as evidenced by the severe neurological consequences of lysosomal storage diseases in children. An important developmental process, which generates considerable cellular debris, is synapse elimination, in which many axonal branches are pruned. The fate of these pruned branches is not known. Here, we investigate the role of lysosomal activity in neurons and glia in the removal of axon branches during early postnatal life. Using a probe for lysosomal activity, we observed robust staining associated with retreating motor axons. Lysosomal function was involved in axon removal because retreating axons were cleared more slowly in a mouse model of a lysosomal storage disease. In addition, we found lysosomal activity in the cerebellum at the time of, and at sites where, climbing fibers are eliminated. We propose that lysosomal activity is a central feature of synapse elimination. Moreover, staining for lysosomal activity may serve as a marker for regions of the developing nervous system undergoing axon pruning.