Securities Class Actions, CAFA and a Countrywide Crisis: A Call for Clarity and Consistency

The unfolding of the credit crisis raises novel issues in securities litigation. This Note explores the conflict between the nonremoval provision of the Securities Act of 1933 (’33 Act) and the removal provisions of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA), and their interplay in the context of class actions involving mortgage-backed securities. Circuits are currently split over whether or not such class actions are removable under CAFA. The Seventh Circuit and the Southern District of New York have held that class actions asserting only ’33 Act claims are removable under CAFA unless they fall within one of CAFA’s exceptions, while the Ninth Circuit has found that the ’33 Act’s nonremoval provision trumps CAFA. This Note unpacks the historical purposes and legislative histories of CAFA and the federal securities laws, and examines them under the lens of the current financial crisis. The Note argues that the Seventh Circuit interpretation is superior because it gives effect to all of CAFA’s provisions, as well as the historical purposes of the ’33 Act. CAFA applies to all class actions, including securities class actions, but not to individual securities actions. Individual securities actions are not removable under the ’33 Act, thus giving effect to the nonremoval provision and its historical purposes of providing investor protection. While looking to the past is instructive, courts should consider the present situation. Though they are not traded on a national exchange, mortgage-backed securities are currently at the heart of the countrywide credit crisis. To that end, this Note proposes that the approach with the most clarity and consistency is to allow for removal to federal courts of securities cases that are of real national importance

Light Higgsino from Axion Dark Radiation

The recent observations imply that there is an extra relativistic degree of freedom coined dark radiation. We argue that the QCD axion is a plausible candidate for the dark radiation, not only because of its extremely small mass, but also because in the supersymmetric extension of the Peccei-Quinn mechanism the saxion tends to dominate the Universe and decays into axions with a sizable branching fraction. We show that the Higgsino mixing parameter mu is bounded from above when the axions produced at the saxion decays constitute the dark radiation: mu \lesssim 300 GeV for a saxion lighter than 2m_W, and mu less than the saxion mass otherwise. Interestingly, the Higgsino can be light enough to be within the reach of LHC and/or ILC even when the other superparticles are heavy with mass about 1 TeV or higher. We also estimate the abundance of axino produced by the decays of Higgsino and saxion.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure; published in JHE

National Juries for National Cases: Preserving Citizen Participation in Large-Scale Litigation

Procedural evolution in complex litigation seems to have left the civil jury behind. Reliance on aggregating devices, such as multidistrict litigation and class actions, as well as settlement pressure created by “bellwether” cases, has resulted in cases of national scope being tried by local juries. Local juries thus have the potential to impose their values on the rest of the country. This trend motivates parties to forum-shop, and some commentators suggest eliminating jury trials in complex cases altogether. Yet the jury is at the heart of our uniquely American understanding of civil justice, and the Seventh Amendment mandates its use in federal cases. This Article makes a bold proposal to align the jury assembly mechanism with the scope of the litigation: In cases of national scope, juries would be assembled from a national pool. This proposal would eliminate incentives for parties to forum-shop, and it would make the decisionmaking body representative of the population that will feel the effects of its decision. The Article argues that we would see greater legitimacy for decisions rendered by a national jury in national cases. Moreover, it argues that geographic diversification of the jury would enhance the quality of decisionmaking. Finally, national juries would preserve the functional and constitutional values of citizen participation in the civil justice system

Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Allapattah Services Inc.

In diversity cases, only one plaintiff or class member must satisfy the amount in controversy requirement

Improving Environments for Children with Asthma

Reviews the environmental triggers of asthma and disparities in the incidence of the disease. Looks at the advocacy work of local coalitions of the Community Action to Fight Asthma initiative and policy outcomes of their efforts

BUSCA: An integrative web server to predict subcellular localization of proteins

Here, we present BUSCA (http://busca.biocomp.unibo.it), a novel web server that integrates different computational tools for predicting protein subcellular localization. BUSCA combines methods for identifying signal and transit peptides (DeepSig and TPpred3), GPI-anchors (PredGPI) and transmembrane domains (ENSEMBLE3.0 and BetAware) with tools for discriminating subcellular localization of both globular and membrane proteins (BaCelLo, MemLoci and SChloro). Outcomes from the different tools are processed and integrated for annotating subcellular localization of both eukaryotic and bacterial protein sequences. We benchmark BUSCA against protein targets derived from recent CAFA experiments and other specific data sets, reporting performance at the state-of-the-art. BUSCA scores better than all other evaluated methods on 2732 targets from CAFA2, with a F1 value equal to 0.49 and among the best methods when predicting targets from CAFA3. We propose BUSCA as an integrated and accurate resource for the annotation of protein subcellular localization

Do the Second Circuit’s Legal Standards on Class Certification Incentivize Forum Shopping?: A Comparative Analysis of the Second Circuit’s Class Certification Jurisprudence

The Class Action Fairness Act altered the jurisdictional landscape of class actions by relaxing the barriers to satisfying diversity jurisdiction in federal court. As a result, plaintiffs’ attorneys frequently find themselves filing class actions in federal court, and face the critical question of where to initiate their lawsuit. Many plaintiffs’ attorneys consider the favorability of legal standards when determining the forum in which to file their class action. Among other substantive and procedural considerations, the applicable class certification standards of the forum are an important forum selection factor. The Second Circuit, in particular, is a forum that plaintiffs’ attorneys might consider due to its novel class certification standards on a range of unique areas of certification. Plaintiffs seeking certification of very discrete class actions will be mindful of the Second Circuit’s certification criteria when deciding on a forum for their class action. This Note details the Second Circuit’s class certification jurisprudence on the standard of appellate review of interlocutory appeals, satisfaction of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(3)’s predominance requirement in Rule 23(c)(4) single issue class actions, and certification of defendant classes under Rule 23(b)(2). This Note assesses whether these certification standards encourage forum shopping in district courts within the Second Circuit in light of the contrasting standards that other circuits have adopted on these issues

ProLanGO: Protein Function Prediction Using Neural~Machine Translation Based on a Recurrent Neural Network

With the development of next generation sequencing techniques, it is fast and cheap to determine protein sequences but relatively slow and expensive to extract useful information from protein sequences because of limitations of traditional biological experimental techniques. Protein function prediction has been a long standing challenge to fill the gap between the huge amount of protein sequences and the known function. In this paper, we propose a novel method to convert the protein function problem into a language translation problem by the new proposed protein sequence language "ProLan" to the protein function language "GOLan", and build a neural machine translation model based on recurrent neural networks to translate "ProLan" language to "GOLan" language. We blindly tested our method by attending the latest third Critical Assessment of Function Annotation (CAFA 3) in 2016, and also evaluate the performance of our methods on selected proteins whose function was released after CAFA competition. The good performance on the training and testing datasets demonstrates that our new proposed method is a promising direction for protein function prediction. In summary, we first time propose a method which converts the protein function prediction problem to a language translation problem and applies a neural machine translation model for protein function prediction.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure