A central problem in the history of nuclear weapons has been how to assure that they will only be used when directed and authorized) not in an accident, not by terrorists, not by allies, and not by battlefield commanders acting on their own. Permissive Action Links (PALs) were developed in the 1960s as a technological solution to this problem. This book first examines the factors of that led to the first decision to develop PALs. It then describes the subsequent expansion of PALs. Co-published with Harvard University's Center for Science and International Affairs.
Peter G. Stein was Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Queen’s College. He wrote on legal history, Roman law, legal evolution, and was an editor of the Glasgow edition of Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence.
Peter Stein was born on May 29th, 1926, and grew up in Liverpool. He entered Liverpool College for his secondary education in 1938.
The delay in Stein’s formal education caused by the War years had two affects on his later career. It provided time to convince him that the classics were not, after all, to be his chosen field, and once he had opted for law, it shortened his legal training. Stein was twenty one by the time he resumed academic studies in 1947, and his return to Caius was accompanied by a fundamental change in his academic aspirations. He chose the Roman Law option when he tackled Law Qualifying II, and inevitably he fell under the spell of the charismatic Roman Law tutor David Daube. This was probably the most crucial of all his professional relationships.
During the years 1951 to 1953 Peter Stein pondered his career options, one of which took him to high scholastic achievement. In the first year, rather than become a solicitor, he took a scholarship studying Roman Law and learning Italian at Borromeo College in the University of Pavia. The second year at the University of Nottingham as Assistant Lecturer, gave him his first taste of formal teaching, while in 1953 he re-formed his partnership with David Daube. By then, Daube was Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Aberdeen, and Peter’s move to the “Granite City” initiated his interest in Scots law and the relationship between it and Roman Law.
One of the main pillars on which Peter Stein’s reputation rests, was his realisation that Roman Law, as conventionally taught, at least in the English speaking world (and Italy, apparently), was considered, somehow, to have stopped developing with the production of Justinian’s Corpus iuris (Digest, Institutes and revised Code) in 533AD. Stein’s thesis is that to understand their own legal regimes, students need to study the influence of Roman law on them as they matured over the centuries. It was during his early years at Aberdeen, while still under the influence of Daube, that such notions impressed themselves on him, and led him to write what he considered his most original work (Regulae Iuris: From Juristic Rules to Legal Maxims). In this he traced the evolution of the rules that underpinned Roman law through mediaeval and renaissance civil law into modern European jurisdictions. It was a theme he developed in a series of books over the years, culminating, in his retirement, in what he admitted was his best seller “the only one I’ve made any money out of!”, currently (2007) in its tenth printing. This is his beautifully crafted Roman Law in European History, wherein he presented the conclusions he had developed during his years of teaching LLB classes on the legacy Rome has passed on to modern European legal codes. He finishes this survey with a comment that “..the institutions of European Community law are frequently described as forming the beginning of a new ius commune”. He concludes however (p. 130) that whereas the mediaeval ius commune was adopted voluntarily because of its innate superiority, this new ius commune is imposed from above in the interests of uniformity.
Finally, in 1968, two years before Daube moved to the University of California at Berkeley, together with Professor Patrick Duff (the retiring incumbent), he recommended Peter’s name to the Patronage Secretary of Prime Minister Harold Wilson for appointment to the Regius chair of Civil Law at Cambridge.