Environmental Personhood and Standing for Nature: Examining the Colorado River case

As the planet faces the growing threat of climate change, environmental advocates are searching for alternative legal avenues to protect natural entities in the courts. In 2017, the Colorado River Ecosystem brought a lawsuit against the State of Colorado for violating its constitutional rights. The advocates behind this action were seeking to establish in federal court two doctrines that have made strides in other countries as part of the international Rights of Nature movement: environmental personhood and standing for nature. Environmental personhood would recognize natural entities as legal persons, endowing them with corresponding rights and duties under the law. Standing for nature would allow such entities to litigate their grievances on their own behalf in court. If courts were to recognize these doctrines, advocates would gain a significant tool to protect natural entities from ecological catastrophe. However, as an analytical reading of the pleadings in the Colorado River case illustrates, litigants must draft robust complaints that specifically address the standing requirements in order to make progress on this front. In Part I, this Note examines corporate personhood as a possible analogy for the development of environmental personhood. Part II discusses Article III standing as background for the justiciability standard environmental litigants must meet and analyzes animal standing as another comparative path. In Part III, the Note turns to the Colorado River lawsuit, critiques its pleadings, and suggests that a stronger litigation strategy would have increased the likelihood of surviving a justiciability challenge. Part IV recounts the international successes of the Rights of Nature movement to provide a global context for the Colorado River case. In Part V, the Note explores the issues around representation of natural entities in court and how some of these challenges might be navigated. Finally, this Note provides a few concluding thoughts on the path forward for environmental personhood and standing for nature

[Review of] Continuing Perspectives on the Black Diaspora. Revised Edition. Eds. Aubrey W. Bonnett and Calvin B. Holder

As a follow-up to their Emerging Perspectives on the Black Diaspora (published in 1990), authors/editors Aubrey Bonnett and Calvin Holder have given another serious treatment of the African diaspora. In this new volume, they take on new trends, ones that are often underappreciated or neglected within the scholarly community. Continuing Perspectives proffers an examination of some of the new and nuanced challenges which forcibly test the themes of persistence and resilience of the black diaspora communities (xvii). As the authors proclaim in their introduction, the essays in this volume [. . .] try to look back, access current positions, and project into the future and, as such, attempt to make an ongoing contribution to the scholarship and pedagogy in this multi disciplinary, academic field (xvii). With this objective in mind, these authors have fallen short at times through this book

Competition Among Spatially Differentiated Firms: An Empirical Model with an Application to Cement

The theoretical literature of industrial organization shows that the distances between consumers and firms have first-order implications for competitive outcomes whenever transportation costs are large. To assess these effects empirically, we develop a structural model of competition among spatially differentiated firms and introduce a GMM estimator that recovers the structural parameters with only regional-level data. We apply the model and estimator to the portland cement industry. The estimation fits, both in-sample and out-of-sample, demonstrate that the framework explains well the salient features of competition. We estimate transportation costs to be $0.30 per tonne-mile, given diesel prices at the 2000 level, and show that these costs constrain shipping distances and provide firms with localized market power. To demonstrate policy-relevance, we conduct counter-factual simulations that quantify competitive harm from a hypothetical merger. We are able to map the distribution of harm over geographic space and identify the divestiture that best mitigates harm.

Inconsistency of Pitman-Yor process mixtures for the number of components

In many applications, a finite mixture is a natural model, but it can be difficult to choose an appropriate number of components. To circumvent this choice, investigators are increasingly turning to Dirichlet process mixtures (DPMs), and Pitman-Yor process mixtures (PYMs), more generally. While these models may be well-suited for Bayesian density estimation, many investigators are using them for inferences about the number of components, by considering the posterior on the number of components represented in the observed data. We show that this posterior is not consistent --- that is, on data from a finite mixture, it does not concentrate at the true number of components. This result applies to a large class of nonparametric mixtures, including DPMs and PYMs, over a wide variety of families of component distributions, including essentially all discrete families, as well as continuous exponential families satisfying mild regularity conditions (such as multivariate Gaussians).Comment: This is a general treatment of the problem discussed in our related article, "A simple example of Dirichlet process mixture inconsistency for the number of components", Miller and Harrison (2013) arXiv:1301.270

Constraining the Milky Way's Hot Gas Halo with OVII and OVII Emission Lines

The Milky Way hosts a hot ($\approx 2 \times 10^6$ K), diffuse, gaseous halo based on detections of z = 0 OVII and OVIII absorption lines in quasar spectra and emission lines in blank-sky spectra. Here we improve constraints on the structure of the hot gas halo by fitting a radial model to a much larger sample of OVII and OVIII emission line measurements from XMM-Newton EPIC-MOS spectra compared to previous studies ($\approx$ 650 sightlines). We assume a modified $\beta$-model for the halo density distribution and a constant-density Local Bubble from which we calculate emission to compare with the observations. We find an acceptable fit to the OVIII emission line observations with $\chi^{2}_{red}$ (dof) = 1.08 (644) for best-fit parameters of $n_o r_c^{3\beta} = 1.35 \pm 0.24$ cm$^{-3}$ kpc$^{3\beta}$ and $\beta = 0.50 \pm 0.03$ for the hot gas halo and negligible Local Bubble contribution. The OVII observations yield an unacceptable $\chi^{2}_{red}$ (dof) = 4.69 (645) for similar best-fit parameters, which is likely due to temperature or density variations in the Local Bubble. The OVIII fitting results imply hot gas masses of $M$(< 50 kpc) = $3.8_{-0.3}^{+0.3} \times 10^{9} M_{\odot}$ and $M$(< 250 kpc) = $4.3_{-0.8}^{+0.9} \times 10^{10} M_{\odot}$, accounting for $\lesssim$ 50% of the Milky Way's missing baryons. We also explore our results in the context of optical depth effects in the halo gas, the halo gas cooling properties, temperature and entropy gradients in the halo gas, and the gas metallicity distribution. The combination of absorption and emission line analyses implies a sub-solar gas metallicity that decreases with radius, but that also must be $\geq 0.3 Z_{\odot}$ to be consistent with the pulsar dispersion measure toward the LMC.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures, Accepted to Ap