British tradition and the American Constitution guarantee trial by jury for serious crime.1 But terrorism is not ordinary crime, and the presence of jurors may skew the manner in which terrorist trials unfold in at least three significant ways.

First, organized terrorist groups may deliberately threaten jury members so the accused escapes penalty. The more ingrained the terrorist organization in the fabric of society, the greater the degree of social control exerted under the ongoing threat of violence.

Second, terrorism, at heart a political challenge, may itself politicize a jury. Where nationalist conflict rages, as it does in Northern Ireland, juries may be sympathetic to those engaged in violence and may acquit the guilty. Alternatively, following a terrorist attack, juries may be biased. They may identify with the victims, or they may, consciously or unconsciously, seek to return a verdict that conforms to community sentiment. Jurors also may worry about becoming victims of future attacks.

Third, the presence of jurors may limit the type of information provided by the state. Where national security matters are involved, the government may not want to give ordinary citizens insight into the world of intelligence. Where deeply divisive political violence has been an issue for decades, the state may be concerned about the potential of jurors providing information to terrorist organizations.

These risks are not limited to the terrorist realm. Criminal syndicates, for instance, may try to intimidate juries into returning a verdict of not guilty, and public outrage often accompanies particularly heinous crimes. But the very reason why these other contexts give rise to a similar phenomenon is because terrorist crimes have certain characteristics-characteristics that may be reflected in other forms of crime, but which are, in many ways, at the heart of what it means for an act to be terrorist in nature: terrorist organizations are created precisely to coerce a population, or specific individuals, to accede to the group's demands. The challenge is political in nature, and the method of attack is chosen for maximum publicity. Terrorist organizations, moreover, can and often do use information about the state to guide their operations. It is in part because of these risks that the United Kingdom and United States have changed the rules governing terrorist trials-at times eliminating juries altogether.

This Article reflects on the relationship between terrorism and jury trial and explores the extent to which the three dangers identified can be mitigated within the criminal-trial framework.2 It does not provide a comprehensive analysis of the rich case law and literature that address jury trial-one of the most studied legal institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead, its aim is more modest: The text weighs the advantages and disadvantages of suspending juries specifically for terrorism. Here, the United Kingdom's experiences prove illustrative. The Article considers the extent to which similar concerns bear on the U.S. domestic realm, and the decision to try Guantánamo Bay detainees by military tribunal. It suggests that the arguments for suspending juries in Northern Ireland are more persuasive than for taking similar steps in Great Britain or the United States.

This Article then considers ways to address concerns raised by terrorism that stop short of suspending juries. Juror selection, constraints placed on jurors, and the conduct of the trial itself provide the focus. Of these, emphasis on juror selection, although not unproblematic, proves most promising. Again, distinctions need to be drawn between the United Kingdom and the United States. In the former, for instance, occupational bars to jury service could be lowered, while in the latter, increased emphasis on change in venue may prove particularly effective. Changes in the second category, constraints on jurors, may be the most damaging to the states' counterterrorist programs. Finally, while changes in the trial process may help to address risks, they also may prove contentious and be prone to seeping into the criminal realm. The Article concludes by questioning whether and to what extent such alterations could be insulated from the prosecution of non-terrorist criminal offenses.

ABSTRACT:

While the refugee protection system is one of international law's most recognizable features, it routinely places massive numbers of refugees in camps in the developing world, where they face chronic threats to their physical security from crime and disorder, physical coercion, and military attacks. Yet key actors responsible for refugee protection, including host states, advanced industrialized countries, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), have failed to prioritize refugee security.

This article asks: (1) Why? (2) What have been the consequences? and (3) What do these answers reveal about how organizations carry out legal mandates in complicated political environments?

Conventional wisdom holds that security only recently became a major problem in the refugee protection system; that UNHCR's role in enhancing refugees' physical security is limited by the agency's legal mandate and practical constraints; and that problems of violence and physical security are largely episodic concerns affecting small numbers in discrete refugee populations. Drawing on historical documents, interviews, data on budgets and performance measures, and legal doctrine, I show this conventional wisdom to be wrong. Only some of the problems associated with the current system can be explained by international geopolitics or by legal compromises reflected in refugee law.Instead, that system's brutal realities also reflect bureaucratic dynamics, political pressures, and legal interpretations shaping the discretionary choices of UNHCR and its nongovernmental organization partners. I develop the argument by tracing the remarkable history of UNHCR as it transformed itself from a refugee advocacy organization with a limited mandate into a modern relief agency.

This evolution helps explain the persistence of security problems and sheds light on the challenges of implementing ambitious legal mandates under uncertainty, particularly when the organizations doing so operate in complex political environments.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush stressed the importance of improving math education. He proposed to "train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced placement courses in math and science, bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms, and give early help to students who struggle with math."

But where will these teachers come from? And will the training of teachers be sufficient to increase the number of students choosing math and science careers? And why does all this matter?

Because mathematics is the foundation of the natural sciences. It is no coincidence that Isaac Newton, the man who formulated the law of gravitational attraction that revolutionized our understanding of the universe, was also the man who popularized the calculus. And the natural sciences, however pure, are what give us airplanes, cable TV and the Internet.

In the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment, a test that measures math literacy, American 15-year-olds performed worse than their peers in 23 countries, as well as those in Hong Kong. It's not hard to see why. According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 40 percent of the nation's middle school math teachers do not have the equivalent of an undergraduate minor in math. The average starting salary of a teacher is only $30,000, whereas the average starting salary for a recent college graduate in computer science or engineering is $50,000.

Short of following the British, who have proposed paying experienced math teachers more than $100,000, with a guaranteed minimum of $70,000, where will we find a way to attract the thousands of teachers George Bush wants?

New York State initiated an innovative program to bring teachers from Jamaica for two or four years to teach in New York schools. Jamaica, a developing nation where one U.S. dollar equals 65 Jamaican dollars, is nonetheless a stable, English-speaking nation with an unbroken democratic tradition; it stands poised to beat the United States in establishing the world's first Institute for Mathematical Methods in Counterterrorism. When teachers for the New York program were recruited on the campus of the University of the West Indies, recruiters found more experienced math and science teachers than they ever dreamed they would.

But you can have all the teachers in the world and still not inspire kids to learn math. My friend Autumn e-mailed me about her nephew, Joshua: "He's upset because he's asked several of the math teachers why math is important or what are certain formulas used for -- there has to be a use, correct?"

Autumn told her nephew about my work in counterterrorism and for the television crime drama "Numb3rs." Autumn reported, "He's told his math teachers about you as well, and about the show 'Numb3rs.' He's informing them that through something called lattice theory you are managing to fight terrorists -- all with math."

Mathematics is art, and should be appreciated for its beauty, not simply for its utility. But we cannot expect 11 year-olds to cherish totally order-disconnected topological spaces as much as professional mathematicians do.

As I first proposed in January 2005, television shows like "Numb3rs" (or "Medium") -- where the main characters are mathematicians -- could work with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to show kids how math is really used; the council and Texas Instruments are now working together to use "Numb3rs" to promote math literacy in schools.

Another way to inspire kids is to relate mathematics to something they see every day. In order to excite students and draw funding to his school, school superintendent Ronald Ross of Roosevelt, N.Y., has begun looking into the idea of creating a curriculum involving math and counterterrorism. What kinds of topics would students learn?

The opening line of the Oscar-winning movie "A Beautiful Mind" is "Mathematicians won the war." During World War II, the mathematics underlying cryptography played an important role in military planning. Winston Churchill admired Alan Turing, the mathematician who had mastered the German codes, recognizing him as the man who had perhaps made the single greatest individual contribution to defeating Hitler.

At Los Alamos, the lab that built the atomic bomb, Cliff Joslyn uses lattice theory to mine data drawn from thousands of reports of terrorist-related activity to discover patterns and relationships that were previously in shadow.

Lattice theoretical methods developed at MIT tell us the probability that we have disabled a terrorist cell, based on how many men we have taken out and what rank they hold in the organization. Lauren McGough, a Massachusetts high school student, tested the accuracy of this model by getting her classmates to pretend they were terrorists, passing orders down a fictitious chain of command, essentially confirming what the theory predicts.

High school students could learn algebra, trigonometry, calculus and logic while also learning concrete applications involving homeland security. No longer would students yawn and ask, "What is math good for?" Beauty could defeat both terror and boredom.

Whatever you may think of the State of the Union address, when it comes to supporting math education, we should all see pi to pi. President Bush is correct when he says that mathematics education in America must improve if the United States is to stay economically competitive, but the stakes are much higher than that. During the Cold War, the United States would not have tolerated a military gap between itself and its adversaries. Yet today, with 61 percent of all U.S. doctorates in math going to foreigners (15 percent to Chinese), we readily accept a "math gap."

Dollar for dollar, the best defense against our adversaries' weapons of mass destruction may be our allies in the Americas, armed with weapons of math instruction.

Improving math education is not merely a smart idea. It is a matter of national security. Algebra is one revolutionary Islamic concept we cannot afford to neglect or ignore.