2,889 research outputs found
The Influence of Government Defenders on Affirmative Civil Rights Enforcement
The focus of this brief Article will be on a conundrum, particularly in the area of civil rights enforcement: the federal governmentâin particular the DOJâcan be one of the most efficient and powerful vindicators of civil rights, while at the same time one of the most effective advocates for imposing barriers to affirmative civil rights enforcement. At the same time that the DOJâs Civil Rights Division (CRD) is entering federal court to âvindicat[e] rights and remedy[] inequities,â attorneys in the Civil Division (either from Main Justice or in any number of U.S. Attorneyâs offices) are appearing in court to prevent the same. No doubt the same observation applies to certain state governments that have active affirmative civil rights enforcement bodies while also maintaining well-resourced defensive litigation bureaus. For my purposes, this observation has important consequences. It might bear on the professional obligations of the government attorney who appears in a defensive posture, a topic that Bruce Green and others have addressed in many thoughtful articles. I will address some potential ethical implications toward the end of this Article, but it is not my principal focus because I am not convinced that that is where the solution lies. Instead, I want to concentrate on what the observation means for executive branch law enforcement priorities, how the dynamic impacts broad access-to-justice concerns, and the implications for institutional design. I am going to try to do so in four parts. First, this Article contrasts agenda setting in defensive bureaus with agenda setting in the affirmative posture. Part I compares the defensive positions taken in two extremely similar casesâAshcroft v. Iqbal and Ziglar v. Abbasiâthat were litigated by the DOJ across two different presidential administrations. This is to help illustrate (admittedly by anecdote) that, even while affirmative enforcement priorities can change significantly from one administration to the other, defensive litigating positions can remain remarkably stable. Parts II and III turn to showing what consequences this has in the context of civil rights enforcement. Part II starts with the DOJâs affirmative bureaus themselves, with a focus on the CRD. The goal is to show that the defensive bureaus impact the work of the CRD in at least two ways: (1) by channeling enforcement priorities into areas that will not conflict with defensive litigating positions and (2) by making affirmative enforcement priorities more difficult to secure through the spread of transsubstantive doctrine that suppresses rights enforcement, even in the areas in which there are no conflicts with defensive positions. Part III moves beyond the direct impact on CRD because defensive litigation positions taken by the DOJ can also suppress affirmative rights enforcement by âprivate attorneys general,â enforcement that nonetheless is consistent with the affirmative priorities of Main Justice. Finally, Part IV offers some thoughts on what lessons we might draw from these observations. For the most part, I devote my attention to how institutional design might ameliorate the tensions I identify in this Article
Darwin and the Body Politic: Schaffle, Veblen, and the Shift of Biological Metaphor in Economics
A long tradition of thought in Western political philosophy compares the body of man to the political body. This traditional cosmological frame of reference was, with the publication of Darwinâs Origin of Species, overcome by the emergence of evolutionary social systems. Albert SchĂ€ffle [1831-1903] can fruitfully be considered the last major representative of the old trajectory of thought, and Thorstein Veblen [1853-1929] the first of the new. By comparing and contrasting their uses of biological metaphors and the places these occupied in their larger visions of society and the economy, the author explores some of the tensions generated in late nineteenth century political philosophy by the dramatic change in biological paradigmâin other words by Darwinâs first encounter with the body politic.
Asymptotic behaviour of gossip processes and small world networks
Both small world models of random networks with occasional long range
connections and gossip processes with occasional long range transmission of
information have similar characteristic behaviour. The long range elements
appreciably reduce the effective distances, measured in space or in time,
between pairs of typical points. In this paper, we show that their common
behaviour can be interpreted as a product of the locally branching nature of
the models. In particular, it is shown that both typical distances between
points and the proportion of space that can be reached within a given distance
or time can be approximated by formulae involving the limit random variable of
the branching process.Comment: 30 page
The shortest distance in random multi-type intersection graphs
Using an associated branching process as the basis of our approximation, we
show that typical inter-point distances in a multitype random intersection
graph have a defective distribution, which is well described by a mixture of
translated and scaled Gumbel distributions, the missing mass corresponding to
the event that the vertices are not in the same component of the graph.Comment: 32 page
Low-Energy Scale Excitations in the Spectral Function of Organic Monolayer Systems
Using high-resolution photoemission spectroscopy we demonstrate that the
electronic structure of several organic monolayer systems, in particular
1,4,5,8-naphthalene tetracarboxylic dianhydride and Copper-phtalocyanine on
Ag(111), is characterized by a peculiar excitation feature right at the Fermi
level. This feature displays a strong temperature dependence and is immediatly
connected to the binding energy of the molecular states, determined by the
coupling between the molecule and the substrate. At low temperatures, the
line-width of this feature, appearing on top of the partly occupied lowest
unoccupied molecular orbital of the free molecule, amounts to only
meV, representing an unusually small energy scale for electronic excitations in
these systems. We discuss possible origins, related e.g. to many-body
excitations in the organic-metal adsorbate system, in particular a generalized
Kondo scenario based on the single impurity Anderson model.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted as PRB Rapid Communication
Textile and Clothing Safeguards: from the ATC to the Future
The Agreement on Textiles and Clothing established the textile and clothing safeguards regime from 1995 to 2004. The current safeguards regime for these products is defined in terms of the Agreement on Safeguards, the China Textile Safeguards, and the China Product-specific Safeguards. This article examines each of these three current safeguard options and assesses them in terms of a number of relevant dimensions. It also reviews safeguard actions to date to provide a sense of continued managed trade in this area.managed trade, protectionism, safeguards, textiles and clothing, International Relations/Trade,
The Burdens of Pleading
To preview my argument briefly, plausibility pleading formally asks judgesâfor the first time since the advent of the Federal Rulesâto engage in a merits-based analysis at the pleading stage based on their âjudicial experience and common sense.â Judges are expected to engage in this inquiry with only the factual allegations in the complaint at their disposal. Putting aside the difficulty of conducting this analysis under the best of circumstances, our federal judges have extremely limited judicial experience to apply to merits-based decisions. The number of trials, the ultimate arbiter of merit, has fallen precipitously in the past fifty years. Trials have been replaced by settlements (the terms of which are often secret, even to the judge handling the case), alternative dispute resolution (with outcomes that judges may review only for arbitrariness, if they review them at all), and summary judgment (a poor substitute for trial). With these gaps in judicial experience, a judge is left to compensate with âcommon sense,â relying on heuristics that may interfere with accurate decisionmaking
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