for the Project "International Fisheries Law and Mathematics/ Statistics: Quantifying the Reparation Obligations Arising from Breaches of Quotas"
General Information
The Southampton Law School, together with the School of Mathematical Sciences and Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI), is delighted to offer an opportunity for interdisciplinary PhD studentships starting in October 2015.
The key criteria for the final selection will be the excellence of the candidate and their aptitude for trans-disciplinary research. A full studentship will be funded at £67000 (over three years) to provide some limited funds for cohort training activities in addition to university fees and RCUK-level stipends.
Candidates will submit their online application by April, 20, 2015. As part of their online application, candidates shall submit a response in writing, maximum 1500 words, to one of the following questions:
Potential candidates will be interviewed. The provisional dates for the interviews are 27-28 April 2015.
Information on how to apply can be found on the following website: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/law/postgraduate/research_degrees/apply.page.
Applicants should specify in their application the name of the project for which they apply and that the submission is made under the ‘SMMI Understanding Maritime Futures Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarships’ scheme. Please note that these studentships are only open to candidates from the UK/EU.
Project information:
Title: International Fisheries Law and Mathematics/ Statistics: Quantifying the Reparation Obligations Arising from Breaches of Quotas
Compliance and enforcement are perennial weaknesses of international law; this is equally true of international fisheries law in terms of the non-implementation of the legal consequences for States of exceeding quotas held under a regional fisheries management organisation (RFMO). At present, when a State exceeds its fishing quota in a given year the responses of other States involved in the fishery are ad hoc and essentially political whereby the State sometimes suffers no penalty at all. This does not achieve the restoration of the fish stock to the size it would have been had the State complied with its original quota obligation and raises the following question: who should bear the resulting loss, the State or the world at large? The project aims to end this stagnation in the law and propel the debate forward by recourse to insights from other, specifically mathematical, disciplines.
We are looking for a PGR with background in both law and mathematics/statistics. One of the aims of the project will be to develop quantitative management measures that deliver robust outcomes in the face of incomplete data and considerable uncertainty about fishing, fish stocks and the wider ecosystem. This will require analysis and identification of the factors and their impacts on fish stocks for integration into a predictive compensation/ depensation model and revealing the relationships between the distribution of fishes and the impacting factors.
The successful candidate will be supervised by Dr Andrew Serdy (Law) and Prof. Zudi Lu (Mathematical Sciences and S3RI).