This chapter examines the relationship between the prohibition of the use of force in article 2(4) of the UN Charter and customary international law: if they are identical, the role the customary rule plays in the interpretation of article 2(4) and which one to interpret or apply to determine the meaning of a prohibited ‘use of force’. In doing so it examines the following concepts: the use of pre-existing or subsequently developing custom to fill gaps in the treaty, the use of subsequently developing custom to informally modify the interpretation of the treaty, an evolutive interpretation of the UN Charter and informal treaty modification through subsequent practice. It argues that since article 2(4) is the origin of the customary prohibition, it is not appropriate to use pre-existing or subsequently developing customary international law to fill gaps in interpretation of article 2(4) nor to use subsequently developing custom to modify article 2(4). It concludes that due to the present relationship between the customary and Charter prohibitions, the preferable approach to determine the meaning of prohibited force under international law is to focus on interpreting the UN Charter.

Chapter 15, “Interviewing Suspects in Criminal Investigations: Decisions and their Consequences,” Mark Snow and Joseph Eastwood identified many factors that affect decisions made by police officers. As a retired Sheriff Sergeant, I comment on this chapter and provide a first-hand observation of how police officers make decisions in interrogations and investigations. Factors that influence these decisions include the training officers receive, legal and procedural rules, the officer’s personality and ability, time, and witness memory, among others.

Snow and Joseph Eastwood break down the interviewing of suspects into the five “W’s” (and discussions of each) includes considerations of the real-world constraints. In practice, and as the authors correctly identify, there is little training provided to patrol officers on the most effective techniques and best practices for productive interviews of suspects.

The use of expert psychological testimony by the courts involves a series of decisions. The initial decision involves an attorney or judge seeking out an expert to provide testimony. The second set of decisions – usually made by the expert in consultation with the attorney – concerns whether the potential testimony will be helpful or harmful to the case. A third set of decisions – made by the judge in a specific case – concerns the admissibility and scope of expert testimony at trial. If the testimony is admitted at trial, a final decision involves how much or how little weight jurors give the expert testimony while arriving at a verdict. These decisions are strongly shaped by the adversarial system. Drawing on empirical research and their experiences as expert witnesses, the authors explore how these decisions are made. Relevant research is reviewed, particularly on the content and impact of expert psychological testimony. New directions for research are discussed.

This chapter describes recognizing seizures, brief potentially ictal rhythmic discharges (BIRDs), and sporadic epileptiform discharges using a case-based approach. Electrographic seizures are patterns 10 seconds or longer of epileptic activity occurring at >2.5 Hz or other evolving patterns. If these patterns are associated with a clinical correlate, they are called electroclinical seizures, even if they are less than 10 seconds in duration. A high seizure burden may be associated with neurological decline. Patterns of rhythmic activity too short to qualify as seizures are termed BIRDs. Sporadic epileptiform discharges such as spikes or sharp waves are associated with increased seizure risk and epilepsy. Epilepsy itself is a clinical diagnosis of recurrent and unprovoked seizures.

In this chapter, our main objective is to provide a succinct description of four leading models of discourse: Rhetorical Structure Theory, Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, the Penn Discourse Treebank project, and the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations. We present the main goals of each model, and discuss their advantages and limitations. We also list their specificities compared to other models, and analyze the main differences between them. We focus more specifically on the aspects of these models that have to do with the description of discourse relations. For each model, we present the type of research to which it has been applied, and the data that have been produced in the form of annotated corpora. As we will see, all these models have been used to annotate large corpora with discourse relations. An important issue is therefore to establish mappings between the relations annotated in each of them, in order to compare data from one corpus to the others. At the end the chapter, we discuss various options for comparing annotations across models.