Excellent New Article on the Polonium Issue

This is an outstanding new article by Jonathan Tirone, posted at Bloomberg. And very courageous – the IAEA under Amano does not take criticism well. But this is an important piece, setting the record straight about how bringing up the polonium issue now is both technically ridiculous, and threatening of the small signs of trust and cooperation that have started to emerge between Iran and the West. It includes some very good quotes by Bob Kelley and Tariq Rauf. It also cites to fascinating evidence of US and French officials intentionally trying to revive the polonium issue, after it had been resolved by the IAEA – which could be seen as an attempt to artificially gin up controversy where technically there was none, and thereby unnecessarily prolong the dispute between the West and Iran. As described in the article:

The IAEA’s March 2008 decision to suspend the investigation into Iran’s polonium experiments, made during Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei’s tenure, prompted French and U.S. diplomats to seek new ways to reintroduce the issue. At the time, some diplomats didn’t want ElBaradei’s initiative to resolve allegations against Iran to derail sanctions.

France “suggested intensifying our involvement in verification of formerly outstanding issues, such as polonium, by feeding the secretariat additional information,” former U.S. IAEA envoy Greg Schulte wrote in March 2008 after the polonium file had been cleared.

Congratulations to Jonathan for this very valuable article, and for his and Bloomberg’s courage in publishing it.

*Breaking News Update on the Polonium Issue*

We’ve all been tricked.

Basically, the piece by Fredrik Dahl that I referred to in my last post, made a mountain out of a molehill. Amano didn’t in fact bring the polonium issue up at all. He only responded to it very briefly, when a reporter, Joseph Joffe, raised it as a question which he posed to Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif.  Frankly, it was a dumb question to ask, but Zarif humored the reporter and answered the question. Only then did Amano make his very brief remarks on the matter, which I think really amounted only to a boilerplate answer that this was among the various issues about which that the IAEA would like more information from Iran. This was not, as the sensationalism of the Dahl article would lead us to believe, something that Amano raised himself out of the ether, during a speech or other pre-planned presentation. This was just Amano responding briefly, and probably fairly disinterestedly with regard to the specific matter in question, to a query from a reporter.

You can see the exchange yourself in this video from the Munich conference. The exchange happens at the 1hr 2 min mark of the video. Here is a rough transcript of the exchange (I don’t guarantee its 100% accurate, but it’s close):

Joseph Joffe: Mr. Minister. I wish we had a few more like you in our Western diplomatic services who can handle words and arguments so nicely as you do. this whole argument has revolved around trust, verification and facts. I think there’s a nice little case study, which you mentioned yourself, which is the Tehran Research Reactor which went online, I don’t know, 1967. What you forgot to say is that it was fueled with highly enriched uranium under the Shah’s reign. So by 1991, the United States, which delivered this stuff, thought maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to give weapons grade uranium to the Iranians. And then the Iranians went around and begged a little bit and scaled down the reactor to the use of 20 percent so that it can be ostensibly for the use of medical purposes. That’s under safeguards and that’s good. However, there’s a little thing that’s called polonium, which this reactor produces. It’s a tiny, tiny quantity which is extremely important for creating neutron, neutron eruptions, which trigger nuclear explosions. And that our friends from the IAEA say that they cannot control. So why not start with that old clunker, which is worthless to begin with, and really open it up and say `you know, you think we’re making plutonium here, why don’t we go and check it out.’ That builds trust! Not [your] appeals to trust. I think if we can start with these things, as we have, I think we’ll be doing fine.

Javad Zarif: I don’t know whether I should take that as a compliment, but I will. We didn’t build that reactor. It was a part of Atoms for Peace. The United States built it. We didn’t ask for highly-enriched uranium to fuel that reactor. It was the United States that did it at that time. Then it decided to convert it to medium-enriched uranium, or low-enriched uranium because 20 percent is just the border line between medium and low. Sorry Dr. Solana, I’m not a physicist, you know this more than I do. And we did, we brought it down. We did, we had to. But then the United States had to give us the fuel. Why didn’t it? Because they don’t have to. That’s the problem. Now that reactor is under full IAEA safeguards. The IAEA controls it. The polonium issue — it’s not plutonium, it’s polonium. We didn’t design that to come out of that reactor. And the reactor is under IAEA safeguards. As I said very clearly to you: nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and nuclear technology for weapons are twin sisters, or twin brothers. It’s the role of the IAEA to make sure that the more benign parts of nuclear technology are implemented and the other side is not and we are open to that. The IAEA has full access to Tehran nuclear reactor and it’s under inspection, has always been, and we’ll continue to work with the IAEA to answer any questions they may have about it.

Yukiya Amano: Just a brief intervention. As Minister Zarif mentioned, the Tehran Research Reactor is under IAEA safeguards and we can tell that stays in peaceful purpose. You have raised issues of polonium. Polonium can be used for civil purpose like a nuclear battery but it can also be used for a neutron source for nuclear weapons. We would like to clarify this issue, too.

Not cool, Fredrik Dahl.  Not cool.

Polonium?

Sort of a weird development that has many observers scratching their heads – yesterday Reuters published this report in which IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano’s remarks are reported as follows:

The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, Yukiya Amano, said possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme needed to be clarified and he said his agency also wanted to clarify the issue of small amounts of polonium-210 that had been produced by the Tehran research reactor.

“Polonium can be used for civil purposes like nuclear batteries but can also be used for a neutron source for nuclear weapons,” Amano told the Munich Security Conference.

Fredrik Dahl then wrote up this report about the incident today.

What’s weird about this is that the issue of polonium-210 related experiments in Iran was dealt with in 2008, and this Director General’s report issued in February 2008 contained the following passage concerning the agency’s findings:

 A.3. Polonium-210

20. Polonium-210 is of interest to the Agency because it can be used not only for civilian applications (such as radioisotope batteries), but also — in conjunction with beryllium — for military purposes, such as neutron initiators in some designs of nuclear weapons. On 20–21 January 2008, a meeting took place in Tehran between the Agency and Iranian officials during which Iran provided answers to the questions raised by the Agency in its letter dated 15 September 2007 regarding polonium-210 research (GOV/2007/58, para. 26). The Agency’s questions included a request to see the original project documentation.

21. According to Iran, in the 1980s, scientists from the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre (TNRC) were asked to propose new research activities. A project called “Production of 210Po by the irradiation of 209Bi in the TNRC reactor” was proposed and eventually approved by the Scientific Advisory Committee of TNRC in 1988. The project consisted of fundamental research aimed at enhancing knowledge about this process. According to Iran, it was not aimed at a specific immediate application. However, a potential use in radioisotope batteries, if the chemical extraction of polonium- 210 proved successful, was mentioned in the initial proposal.

22. Iran reiterated that the project was not part of any larger R&D project, but had been a personal initiative of the project leader. According to Iran, the chemist working on the project left the country before full chemical processing had been performed, the project was aborted and the decayed samples were discarded as waste (GOV/2004/11, para. 30).

23. To support its statements, Iran presented additional copies of papers and literature searches that had formed the basis for the request for approval of the project. Iran also provided copies of the project proposal, the meeting minutes and the approval document from the Scientific Advisory Committee of TNRC, as well as a complete copy of the reactor logbook for the entire period that the samples were present in the reactor.

24. Based on an examination of all information provided by Iran, the Agency concluded that the explanations concerning the content and magnitude of the polonium-210 experiments were consistent with the Agency’s findings and with other information available to it. The Agency considers this question no longer outstanding at this stage. However, the Agency continues, in accordance with its procedures and practices, to seek corroboration of its findings and to verify this issue as part of its verification of the completeness of Iran’s declarations. (emphasis added)

So the question people are asking is, if the issue was resolved in 2008, why bring it up again now six years later? It is possible that some new information has been brought to light on the issue. That’s what Mark Hibbs suggests in the Dahl piece. But it still seems strange to bring up an issue involving past experiments with a material that my technical friends tell me is really not at all useful in modern nuclear weapons programs.

What should one read into this decision by Amano to bring this issue up now, in light of the very sensitive stage at which we are currently in diplomacy between Iran and the P5+1, and in parallel between Iran and the IAEA? One possible interpretation is that Amano is bringing up this issue now in order to keep pressure on Iran, to force concessions in the respective negotiating fora. The more cynical interpretation would be that this is a strategy aimed at making a diplomatic settlement in both fora more difficult. It’s difficult for me to see whose interests that would serve, other than of course Israel’s. It’s hard for me to see this as an instance of one of the P5 pulling Amano’s strings. Is he going rogue and interjecting this rather lame and tangential PMD issue into the mix for some reason only he knows/understands? Hard to say. This is a weird one.   

Julian Borger on Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal

This new piece by Julian Borger, detailing the history of clandestine and illicit means by which Israel developed its nuclear weapons stockpile is an absolute must read.  Borger subtitled the piece:

Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won’t come clean?

Good question. There’s some very damning stuff in here – a lot of information I’d never read before. Here are just a few excerpts, but you really need to read the whole thing:

Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.

The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today’s staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.

………..

As more and more evidence of Israel’s weapons programme emerged, the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them.

The timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.

The Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do anything to make their existence public.

In fact, US involvement went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel’s bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America’s nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.

Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who’s-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry “chemist”, but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.

“It was a shock. Everyody was open-mouthed,” recalls Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed by Duckett. “It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on.”

The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.

A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country’s nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.

It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.

“I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn’t want anyone to know about,” says Weiss.

Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.

Wow.  How many times have you heard Israeli officials blast Iran’s nuclear program for being clandestine and illicit? How do you translate “the pot calling the kettle black” into Hebrew?

Peter Jenkins on Gareth Porter’s New Book

Peter Jenkins, former UK Ambassador to the IAEA and friend of ACL, has written a fascinating review of Gareth Porter’s newly released book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare over at LobeLog.  Basically, this book is Porter’s narrative of the history of Iran’s nuclear program and the dispute over it between Iran and the West.  Porter, who by all accounts is a well respected, independent journalist of long and productive career, has been working on the subject of this book since 2006.  I have not yet read the book myself, but will be ordering my copy straightaway.  Peter’s review and description make me eager to read what promises to be a very useful independent analysis of the causes of the crisis.

Along with a truly excellent research assistant, I am currently working myself on a narrative history of Iran’s nuclear program and the dispute surrounding it, that will eventually comprise the first chapter of my forthcoming book Iran’s Nuclear Program and International Law.

New DOD Panel Report Thinks it’s Calling for Negotiation of a New NPT

I debated whether or not to even mention this, but it has gotten some attention so I thought I’d address it, at least briefly.

Recently the Defense Science Board, an advisory committee to the US Department of Defense, released a report entitled “Assessment of Nuclear Monitoring and Verification Technologies.”  What has people talking is one of the recommendations by the DSB in this report, as a part of its “4-phase approach for expanded cooperation.” The recommendation is for the:

Negotiation of a future Non‐Proliferation Treaty (NPT “X”) to bring in all nuclear weapon and material programs into a cooperative, multi‐lateral regime.

Some people see this recommendation as momentous, in that it is a rare, if not unprecedented, occasion of a highly regarded advisory committee to the US government, recognizing a need for re-negotiation of the NPT.

Having heard some of those thoughts from people, I was eager to read what the report had to say about this new NPT – oh, sorry, “NPT X” (they’re right, that is much cooler). I’ve now read it. And as we say in the South, I can’t make head nor tails of it.

It turns out the only text in the report that specifically relates to this recommendation is the following few paragraphs:

Phase 4. The Evolution from Bi‐lateral to Multilateral Implementation and a Prospective Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT‐x)

Several studies have concluded that it is premature to pursue negotiation of a follow‐on Non-Proliferation Treaty that would impose transparency on States possessing nuclear weapons and NNWS equally and add nuclear weapons disarmament transparency to the treaty. Completion of the three phases presented above, however, could set the stage for overcoming the current difficulties and be the basis for the trust and understanding needed to carry out both the periodic/continual monitoring of nuclear weapons worldwide, and the periodic/continual monitoring of SNM quantities of potential nuclear weapons materials worldwide.

The signatories of nuclear arms control or arms reductions agreements, joined by all of the nuclear weapons ‐ possessing nations, would collectively and mutually negotiate the procedures, frequencies, prohibitions, etc. for carrying out materials and weapons transparency measures/inspections protecting against the spread of nuclear weapons expertise to NNWS. The ideal outcome would be agreement that the results of these inspections would be delivered to the IAEA as part of its routine monitoring and shared with all nations worldwide.

The Task Force believes that progress through Phase 4 will have a positive effect on worldwide arms stability as well as strengthen non‐proliferation efforts. With everyone having a stake in the transparency processes coming into existence and successfully working, it might then be possible to require mandatory compliance for any holdout nations. The culmination of all of these efforts would be the achievement of a Cooperative Universal Transparency regime that would operate to ensure monitoring and verification of all nuclear weapons as well as inventories of SNM—over the whole world.

You know that old song about seeing the world through rose-colored glasses? Well, this DSB report would appear to see the world through transparency colored glasses – which I know is a bit oxymoronic – but then so is the idea of negotiating a replacement NPT just to achieve nuclear weapons stockpile transparency benefits. It’s like the authors don’t really know what’s in the current NPT, and have no appreciation of the incredible complexity of the notion of negotiating a replacement treaty balancing the peaceful and military uses of nuclear energy. To them it’s all about increasing nuclear weapons stockpile transparency – which isn’t even in the current NPT!

To paraphrase Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.”

That’s why I said in the title of this post that the DSB thinks that they are proposing in this report the negotiation of a new NPT. But in reality, what they are proposing has nothing to do with the NPT, either current or future.

This recommendation in the report, and the accompanying text, are truly bizarre. I honestly can’t understand why they linked what they are talking about – nuclear weapons stockpile transparency – to the NPT. If anyone can explain better than the committee did what they are trying to say, and how it is relevant to the NPT, by all means please chime in in the comments.

Reforming UN Security Council Nuclear Sanctions Practice

I’m pleased to be able to host another excellent guest post by friend of ACL Dr. Yousaf Butt. Yousaf makes excellent points in this piece, as usual, and I recommend it highly.

———————————————————–

Reforming UN Security Council Nuclear Sanctions Practice

By: Dr. Yousaf Butt*

Technically, Iran was not sanctioned by the UN Security Council because of past violations of its IAEA nuclear safeguards agreement, but because the UNSC chose to  interpret these violations as a “threat to the peace”. However, Pakistan, India and Israel have far exceeded Iran’s nuclear threshold capability, and built actual nuclear weapons. They are — by any objective standard — far greater nuclear threats than Iran.

The UNSC would never have bothered with Iran if  the “trigger” of the nuclear safeguards violations hadn’t raised the issue to the level of the UNSC. However, the only reason such triggers have not gone off for India, Pakistan and Israel is that, since they are outside the framework of the NPT, their IAEA safeguards agreements are watered-down and similarly strict triggers simply don’t exist. (The UNSC sanctions are applied under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, Article 39, in which the Security Council can determine a “threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and may recommend, or decide what measures to take…to maintain or restore international peace and security.”)

But just because there is no similarly stringent safeguards’ trigger to refer the cases of India, Pakistan and Israel to the UNSC does not mean the UNSC should be willfully blind about the threats they pose. The UNSC can sanction these nations on its own initiative. This minor bureaucratic detail — that an IAEA referral currently seems to be needed before a nuclear threat is even considered by the UNSC — results in a major flaw: NPT member states are punished more severely than non-NPT states, even if the latter nations make nuclear weapons and proliferate willy-nilly.

Moreover, the actions of some of the P5+1 nations negotiating with Iran, namely China and the US, go against the spirit and intentions of the NPT and could also be construed as a threat to peace. (Of course, there is no prospect of any P5 country ever being sanctioned for a threat to peace due to their veto powers.) But both the US and China are helping nuclear-armed NPT non-signatory states India and Pakistan, respectively, with their civilian nuclear programs. (And before it signed the NPT in 1992, France helped Israel with its nuclear program.) But the ‘firewall’ between civilian and military nuclear sectors in Pakistan, India and Israel is somewhere between porous to non-existent. So, essentially, the US and China are also helping the military nuclear sectors in these non-NPT states.

And, at the least, civilian nuclear assistance frees up nuclear resources – scientists and materiel, much of which are dual-use – which can be applied to the military nuclear programs in these non-NPT nations. Nuclear technology and assistance is largely dual-use and fungible. Thus the nuclear assistance given by China and the US to Pakistan and India can legitimately be seen as a violation of the NPT.

As Prof. Daniel Joyner points out in his book, “Interpreting the NPT”: “Many NPT Non-Nuclear Weapon States see this granting of nuclear technology concessions to India by an NPT Nuclear Weapon State as a positive reward for India’s decision to remain outside the NPT framework, and develop and maintain a nuclear weapons arsenal, which is the precise opposite to the incentive structure which the NPT sought to codify into international law.”

Under no circumstances should nations who have signed the NPT – whether or not they are currently seen to be in good standing – be sanctioned and treated more severely than those that haven’t signed on to the NPT and actually have developed nuclear weapons. Such heavy-handedness with signatory nations will undercut the desire of many nations to sign on to new arms control initiatives, like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

If the NPT is invoked to try to limit nuclear capabilities in signatory states like Iran via sanctions then even more toughness with the nuclear-armed NPT non-signatories is first needed. Conversely, so long as nuclear-armed Pakistan, India and Israel remain unsanctioned so should NPT signatories like Iran which only have an advanced — but thus far non-military — nuclear infrastructure.

This major flaw can be fixed if the UNSC instead shows initiative, behaves apolitically, and does not wait around for a bureaucratic referral from the IAEA  in order to rouse itself and open its eyes to blatantly obvious nuclear threats.

=======================

*Dr. Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist, is director of the Emerging Technologies Program at the Cultural Intelligence Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting fact-based cultural awareness among individuals, institutions, and governments. The views expressed here are his own.

Leaving the PMD Issue Behind

When I first wrote about the new Joint Plan of Action between Iran and the P5+1 here, I noted how remarkable it was that in the text of that agreement, as well as in the text of Iran’s recent agreement with the IAEA, the issue of past possible military dimenstions (PMD) to Iran’s nuclear program was not mentioned.  As I said in an earlier piece on the agreement with the IAEA, I was pleased to see that in both documents, neither the PMD issue generally, nor the Parchin facility specifically, were mentioned.  It would appear from these two recently negotiated statements that Western powers and the IAEA have made the prudent decision not to focus on these issues during negotiations aimed at resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, thereby avoiding the dynamic which seems to have been present so much in recent years of the tail of PMD issues, wagging the dog of a broader agreement on Iran’s nuclear program going forward.  I’ve written about the PMD issues and Parchin previously including here.  I continue to hope that in further negotiations these red herring issues will be similarly marginalized.

I was pleased, therefore, to see today a new Reuters piece by Fredrik Dahl, including quotes from a number of people that strengthen my optimism that this might actually be what is happening. Quoting from the piece:

However, some experts suggest that the powers may be more concerned with obtaining an agreement to limit future Iranian nuclear enrichment than with helping the IAEA get to the bottom of research and tests Iran may have carried out in the past.

Mark Hibbs, of the Carnegie Endowment think-tank, said it was possible that they, in the interest of quickly concluding a final deal, “might strongly urge the IAEA to accept what it would consider less than satisfactory demonstration by Iran” in response to suspicions about its past activity.

Jofi Joseph, until October a director for non-proliferation on the White House National Security Council staff, said the powers may be tempted to set past PMD issues aside and focus on limits to Iran’s future nuclear bomb breakout capability.

“There may be an implicit preference by the P5+1 to sweep the weaponisation issue under the rug,” he wrote in a commentary last week for Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“It is always difficult to prove a negative and, even if Iran significantly expanded access to IAEA inspectors … doubts likely would persist that Iran was still hiding something.”

In Iraq after the 1991 war, the IAEA acted under the authority of a U.N. Security Council resolution giving inspectors carte blanche “anytime, anywhere” authority, former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said.

“From an inspector’s perspective, this sounded idyllic,” he wrote in his 2011 book the Age of Deception. “But it worked only because Iraq was a freshly defeated country … No other country would have accepted such conditions.”

The Iran Implementing Agreement a Secret Treaty?

I wanted to draw attention to Orde Kittrie’s suggestion over at Opinio Juris that the newly announced implementing agreement for the November Joint Plan of Action is a “secret treaty.”

I responded in the comments to the piece as follows:

I certainly dont have any inside information about the new implementation agreement, but my impression has been that the negotiations since the November agreement have been to hash out quite technical details concerning the original agreement. It doesnt make much sense to me that the original agreement would have been informal, but the technical implementing agreement would not be some secret formal agreement. If I were a betting man I’d put money on this new implementing agreement also being informal. And the reason it hasnt been released is likely due to the technical sensitivity of the details that have been worked out between the parties. People like Kittrie who are opposed to the deal, may be simply trying to sow seeds of suspicion, and thereby mobilize opposition to it.

Readers may remember Kittrie as one of the co-authors (along with David Albright and Sandy Spector) of a rather infamous report last year on how to address proliferation problems in the ME. I wrote about it at the time, and included links to critics’ comments, here.

Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs

I’ve been meaning to draw readers’ attention to the current issue of the Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs, which includes the papers written by those of us who presented at the excellent symposium on Iran’s nuclear program held at Penn State Law School last February. I blogged about it at the time here.

You can see the symposium issue of the journal, with links to full text copies of the papers here (just scroll down the page a bit and you’ll see it).

Authors include Flynt and Hillary Leverett, Richard Butler, James Houck, Mary Ellen O’Connell, and myself.