Protecting the Anti-Oppression Legacy of Obergefell After Dobbs

(Excerpt) This Article contributes to the task of revitalizing Justice Kennedy’s analysis after its absence from Dobbs by explaining the inadequacies not only of the Glucksberg substantive due process test, but also of the Court’s interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause. The flaws in equal protection doctrine include the Court’s overly narrow view of which groups are entitled to protection as “suspect classifications” and its failure to address unintentional government support of systemic discrimination. When these gaps in equal protection doctrine are viewed together with the gaps in the Glucksberg test for substantive due process, the need for Justice Kennedy’s anti-oppression approach becomes even more clear than an isolated consideration of due process would suggest. The Article also adds specificity to Justice Kennedy’s approach by proposing a new framework for its application that is built on precedent and that seals the gaps in Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence without spilling over into the wild west of judicial policymaking of concern to conservatives. Its third contribution is to ground Justice Kennedy’s approach in textual and originalist arguments of the type that several Justices sitting on the Court currently seem to favor. Part I of the Article covers the Glucksberg test and uses Bowers v. Hardwick, the Court’s since-reversed opinion upholding anti-sodomy laws, and the recent opinion in Dobbs to identify the problematic aspects of the test’s focus on historical analysis of rights. Part II explains why equal protection doctrine fails as a possible alternative to substantive due process that could adequately protect identity groups from government-supported oppression. Part III explains the promising new path that Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell laid out to address the gaps in the Glucksberg test and equal protection doctrine. It also explains the failure of the majority opinion in Dobbs to apply Obergefell’s analysis. Part IV defends Obergefell’s anti-oppression approach to due process by grounding it in textualist and originalist arguments regarding the Fourteenth Amendment. Part V attempts to remedy the lack of a specific framework for Obergefell’s approach that can respond to conservative criticisms by using Obergefell and other Court opinions to derive boundaries. Part VI establishes that despite its silent repudiation of Obergefell’s analysis, Dobbs leaves room for the proposed framework. It also explains the relevance of the framework to recent legislative initiatives affecting the queer community

Project 2025 and Due Process After \u3ci\u3eDobbs\u3c/i\u3e

Project 2025 supporters have been appointed to prominent federal offices in the second Trump Administration. This includes, most notably, the Office of Management and Budget, for a key strategy of implementing the Project’s goals is manipulation of federal funding. This Essay explores what this might mean for women’s rights and suggests a legal theory with which to challenge Project initiatives. Project 2025 repackages a platform that is fully anti-feminist. It is not a new platform. It is the same set of tools that has been used against feminism since the movement’s inception. It expansively seeks policy changes for abortion, contraception, the nuclear family, single motherhood, childcare, child support, no-fault divorce, sex education, and women’s employment. Women have been here before—in the late 1890s when patriarchy responded to first-wave feminism, in the post-World-War-II era when men wanted their jobs back, and in the 1970s and 1980s in response to second-wave feminism. But now opponents of women’s rights use the guise of federal funding and incrementalism to erode women’s rights and return women to the constraints of a subordinate domestic role. This Essay exposes the anti-feminist policies urged by the Project and then explores a strategic use of due process doctrine to legally challenge the

Measuring sunk costs in agricultural and food industry assets: why some assets sell below appraisal

Asset obsolescence or external obsolescence is a decline in the economic value of capital because of a decrease in demand for the capital’s services. Measurements of sunk costs typically use appraised values of capital. In food and agricultural industries facing asset obsolescence due to government policy, appraised values may be greatly overstated and this has implications for research on industrial structure. A theoretical model to account for the appraisal error is developed and the method is applied to the U.S. sugar beet industry. The sugar beet industry displays symptoms of asset obsolescence. Our estimates indicate that plant appraisals using currently accepted practices greatly overstated the true value of these assets in 2006

Potential Effects of an Invasive Nitrogen-Fixing Tree on a Hawaiian Stream Food Web.

v. ill. 23 cm.QuarterlyFalcataria moluccana (albizia) is an exotic nitrogen (N)-fixing tree currently invading riparian forests in Hawai‘i, U.S.A. This study examined how this invasion is impacting stream ecosystems by using naturally occurring stable isotopes of carbon (C) and N to compare food web structure between a noninvaded and an albizia-invaded stream reach on the island of Hawai‘i. Isotopic signatures of particulate organic matter (POM), macroalgae, invertebrates, and fishes were collected and compared between the two stream reaches. Stable C isotopic signatures of organic matter sources (POM and macroalgae) and consumers (amphipods, caddisflies, crayfish, and fishes) from the invaded site were depleted in 13C compared with the noninvaded site. In contrast, all samples from the invaded site were enriched in 15N compared with the noninvaded site. Results from IsoSource and two-source mixing models suggested that albizia was a major contributor to diets of lower-level consumers within the invaded site, displacing POM and macroalgae as their major food sources. Albizia was also an indirect C and N source for higher-level consumers within the invaded site because albizia was the major dietary constituent of their prey. In addition, 15N enrichment of the macroalgae at the invaded site suggests that albizia may be an important N source to benthic primary producers and could be further altering the food web from bottom up. Our study provides some of the first evidence that invasive riparian N-fixing trees can potentially alter the structure of stream food webs

Land use regulation, homeownership and wealth inequality

We examine the role that housing market regulatory restrictiveness plays in differentially affecting the net wealth of owners and renters over time, and its contribution to wealth inequality. In tightly regulated desirable cities, house prices and rents rise strongly in response to growing demand. Rising prices financially benefit existing homeowners. Rising rents hurt renters. Because credit constraints prevent many households from becoming homeowners, this can lead to growing differences in wealth accumulation between homeowners and renters and, consequently, rising wealth inequality. Employing the confidential version of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we explore to what extent changes in household net wealth can be explained by regulatory restrictiveness and demand shock-induced spatial differences in house price growth. We find that, accounting for sorting, a household with average characteristics that owns instead of rents in a tightly regulated location accumulates 56% more in net wealth between 1999 and 2019. This effect explains 59% of the observed difference in net wealth accumulation between actual owners and renters in these locations, consistent with an observed increase in the Gini-coefficient of wealth inequality during our sample period of 13%. In less regulated metro areas, we do not find a difference in wealth accumulation by homeownership status nor rising wealth inequality. Examining homeowners only and accounting for sorting, our findings suggest that if a homeowner with average characteristics had resided in a tightly rather than loosely regulated metro area, their predicted twenty-year net wealth increase would be 81% higher. We examine transition and timing effects and find theoretically plausible results that the housing boom yielded net wealth changes that varied by regulatory status, but the housing bust did not. We conduct robustness checks that examine the potential endogeneity of initial homeownership, account for unobserved heterogeneity and test for homeowner cash-out/reinvest behavior. In a falsification test, we show that our findings cannot be explained by correlations between local house price growth, a rising college premium and local variation in stock investment behavior. Taken as a whole, our findings imply that expected gains provide powerful financial incentives to existing homeowners in tightly regulated markets to maintain regulatory stringency, further exacerbating housing unaffordability and wealth inequality

Theories of identity and the analysis of face

This paper explores the insights that theories of identity can offer for the conceptualisation and analysis of face. It argues that linguists will benefit from taking a multidisciplinary approach, and that by drawing on theory and research in other disciplines, especially in social psychology, they will gain a clearer and deeper understanding of face. The paper starts by examining selected theories of identity, focusing in particular on Simon's (2004) self-respect model of identity and Brewer and Gardner's (1996) theory of levels of identity. Key features from these theories are then applied to the conceptualisation and analysis of face. With the help of authentic examples, the paper demonstrates how inclusion of these multiple perspectives can offer a richer and more comprehensive understanding of face and the frameworks needed for analysing it

Testing High-dimensional Multinomials with Applications to Text Analysis

Motivated by applications in text mining and discrete distribution inference, we investigate the testing for equality of probability mass functions of $K$ groups of high-dimensional multinomial distributions. A test statistic, which is shown to have an asymptotic standard normal distribution under the null, is proposed. The optimal detection boundary is established, and the proposed test is shown to achieve this optimal detection boundary across the entire parameter space of interest. The proposed method is demonstrated in simulation studies and applied to analyze two real-world datasets to examine variation among consumer reviews of Amazon movies and diversity of statistical paper abstracts