The Puzzle of the Constitutional Home

The home enjoys a special place in American constitutional law. A doctrinal thread runs across the first five amendments that demarcates the home as a realm in which rights enjoy elevated protection. That thread covers rights involving smut, guns, soldiers, searches, and self-incrimination, but inexplicably does not extend to takings. This stark dichotomy between the solicitude of the home for most rights and the opposite for takings produces a deep puzzle.This Article contends that the answer to this fundamental puzzle is that the Court’s takings doctrine, unlike the home-centric doctrines in the Bill of Rights, is infected with post-Lochner v. New York judicial deference to economic regulation. This has influenced the Court’s aversion to a special protections doctrine to homes under the Takings Clause. This Article argues that, as a matter of constitutional coherence theory, which prizes doctrinal symmetry and harmony, the Court should, in limited circumstances, extend the home-centric thread to protect homes in takings that expropriate title to or impact the economic value of homes.This Article also grapples with several broader methodological, doctrinal, and theoretical implications. First, the Court consistently applies atextual methods of interpretation of the home. Second, this atextual interpretive pattern of influence supports this Article’s proposition that the home-centric doctrinal thread should extend to takings. Finally, a congruent home-centric Bill of Rights that extends to takings aligns neatly with constitutional coherence theory

Tax Theory & Feral AI

This essay is a sci-fi thought experiment about the significance of personhood in income taxation, meant to explore the validity of currently prevailing justifications for the tax

Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this articles investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development

Simulation of the Long-Term Effects of Decentralized and Adaptive Investments in Cross-Agency Interoperable and Standard IT Systems

Governments have come under increasing pressure to promote horizontal flows of information across agencies, but investment in cross-agency interoperable and standard systems have been minimally made since it seems to require government agencies to give up the autonomies in managing own systems and its outcomes may be subject to many external and interaction risks. By producing an agent-based model using 'Blanche' software, this study provides policy-makers with a simulation-based demonstration illustrating how government agencies can autonomously and interactively build, standardize, and operate interoperable IT systems in a decentralized environment. This simulation designs an illustrative body of 20 federal agencies and their missions. A multiplicative production function is adopted to model the interdependent effects of heterogeneous systems on joint mission capabilities, and six social network drivers (similarity, reciprocity, centrality, mission priority, interdependencies, and transitivity) are assumed to jointly determine inter-agency system utilization. This exercise simulates five policy alternatives derived from joint implementation of three policy levers (IT investment portfolio, standardization, and inter-agency operation). The simulation results show that modest investments in standard systems improve interoperability remarkably, but that a wide range of untargeted interoperability with lagging operational capabilities improves mission capability less remarkably. Nonetheless, exploratory modeling against the varying parameters for technology, interdependency, and social capital demonstrates that the wide range of untargeted interoperability responds better to uncertain future states and hence reduces the variances of joint mission capabilities. In sum, decentralized and adaptive investments in interoperable and standard systems can enhance joint mission capabilities substantially and robustly without requiring radical changes toward centralized IT management.Public IT Investment, Interoperability, Standardization, Social Network, Agent-Based Modeling, Exploratory Modeling

Private military and security companies, territoriality and the transformation of western security governance

The field of security governance holds a special place within the context of the debate over the diffusion of power from state to non-state actors, from national to international authorities and from governments to markets in Western democracies. Not only has the provision of the ‘public good’ security been considered one of the main functions of government, but also has it played a major role in justifying the centralization of power and authority within and by the nation-state (Krahmann, 2010; Leander 2006). The contemporary proliferation of private military and security companies, i.e. companies that sell armed and non-armed security services to public and private customers, poses a particular challenge to state-centric notions of national and global governance. This chapter seeks to examine the consequences of the diffusion of security governance functions among military and security companies in Europe and North America

Indigenous African Leadership: Key differences from Anglo-centric thinking and writings

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article draws on historical explorers’ accounts, ethnography and organisational approaches to examine practices, discourses and perceptions of leadership in 12 prototypical indigenous communities in West and Central Africa. By so doing, it highlights how leadership meanings from this context differ from Anglo-centric thinking and writings. Key to this contribution is an unravelling of ways in which historical cultural hegemonies impose particular discursive formations, constructed practices and mind-programming in a non-Anglo-Saxon socio-cultural context. Dramaturgical power arrangement, lucid role substitution and the notion of leadership as nonhuman emerge as dominant themes in the analysis. Also, featuring significantly are representations of leadership in symbols, mythology and as transcendental and metaphysical. These conceptualisations are different from predominant Anglo-Saxon writings that frequently present leadership as linear hierarchies, dyadic (leader-follower) relationship, acts and behaviours of heroic figures and as an essentially human action. An Afro-centric indigenous concept of leadership reflecting the context is proposed which challenges heroism, linearity, individualism and objectivism

Privacy in transformational government (t-government): an investigation of citizens' privacy preferences and perceptions

No Abstract

Citizen-centric governance indicators : measuring and monitoring governance by listening to the people and not the interest groups

Governance indicators are now widely used as tools for conducting development dialogue, allocating external assistance, and influencing foreign direct investment. This paper argues that available governance indicators are not suitable for these purposes as they do not conceptualize governance and fail to capture how citizens perceive the governance environment and outcomes in their countries. The paper attempts to fill this void by conceptualizing governance and implementing a uniform and consistent framework for measuring governance quality across countries and over time based on citizens'evaluations. Using data from the World Values Survey (and other sources) we implement this framework into practice and build citizen-centric governance indicators for 120 countries over the period 1994 to 2005.Governance Indicators,National Governance,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Policy, Institutions and Governance

Citizen-centric Governance Indicators: Measuring and Monitoring Governance by Listening to the People

Governance-Ansatz; Sozialer Indikator; Gesellschaft; Welt