Modeling Terrorist Radicalization

Recent high-profile terrorism arrests and litigation in New York, Colorado, and Detroit have brought public attention to the question of how the government should respond to the possibility of domestic-origin terrorism linked to al Qaeda. This symposium essay identifies and discussing one emerging approach in the United States and Europe which attends to the process of terrorist “radicalization.” States on both sides of the Atlantic are investing increasingly in developing an epistemology of terrorist violence. The results have implications for how policing resources are allocated, whether privacy rights are respected, and how religious liberty may be exercised. This essay traces the development of state discourses on “radicalization” in the United States and the United Kingdom. It argues that understanding this new “radicalization” discourse entails attention to interactions between nations and between the federal government and states as well as to the political economy of counter-terrorism

Recycling and the Environment: a Comparative Review Between Mineral-based Plastics and Bioplastics

Since their conception in the 1950s, mineral-based plastics have completely revolutionised our society with production reaching record highs year upon year. This cheap, and durable material has seen usage across a plethora of diverse industries and products, replacing traditional materials such as metals and wood. However, our reliance on mineral-based plastics has led to their improper disposal across the global, affecting our environments and ecosystems. As a response, different methods have been developed to help dispose of the large amounts of plastic waste produced, such as incineration or dumping in landfill sites, but these methods are not without their drawbacks including release of toxic substances into the air and leachate into the soil and waters respectively. Consequently, much interest is generated and channelled in recent years to the introduction of several types of biopolymers. These include plastics based on cellulosic esters, starch derivatives, polyhydroxybutyrate and polylactic acid. These biopolymers have been viewed as a suitable replacement for mineral-based plastics, and their production a good strategy towards sustainable development as they are mainly composed of biocompounds such as starch, cellulose and sugars. This short review article provides an overview as to whether biopolymers can rival mineral-based plastics considering properties such as mechanical strength, Young’s modulus and crystallinity and could they be regarded as a suitable material to reduce our reliance on mineral-based plastics, whilst simultaneously reducing non-renewable energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions

Investigating Microbial Quorum Sensing Potential for Enhanced Production of Biodegradable Polymers

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are a type of biopolymer that can be biosynthesised and accumulated by several specialised bacterial species. Their favourable mechanical properties coupled with their ability to naturally biodegrade within the environment make PHAs a potential candidate to replace tradition plastics, which cause harm to our environment, our wildlife and ourselves. One of the main drawbacks associated with PHAs, is the difficulty of producing them in large quantities, which hinders their potential usage. However, the manipulation of quorum sensing circuits has yet to be explored in the context of increasing the amount of PHA produced by bacterial species. Quorum sensing is a process of cell-to-cell communication, that allows for bacteria to share information about cell densities and coordinate gene expression, such as altering the production of secondary metabolites like PHAs. During this study two Gram-negative bacterial species (Cupriavidus necator H16 and Pseudomonas putida KT2440) were grown in specific production media and supplemented with three different exogenous quorum molecules sensing (C4-HSL, C6-HSL and 3-oxo-C12-HSL), to study if there was a change in the amount of PHA produced. It was observed that C. necator H16 increased production of PHAs, specifically small chain length PHA (SCL PHA) poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (P(3HB)), by 13.03% and 17.85% when grown in shake flasks and bioreactors, when supplemented with the quorum sensing molecule 3-oxo-C12-HSL. Whilst PHA production increased in culture of P. putida KT2440, when supplemented with C4-HSL. PHA production of the medium chain length polymer (MCL PHA) of poly(3-hydroxyoctanoate-co-3-hydroxydecanoate-co-3-hydroxydodecanoate) (P(3HO-co-3HD-co-3HDD)) increased by 7.24% and 10.89% when grown in shake flasks and bioreactors, respectively. To understand as to why there was a change in production of PHAs produced by the two species of bacteria, qPCR was used to measure the expression of two key Pha genes (PhaC1 and PhaZ) when exposed to exogenous quorum sensing molecules in bioreactors. C. necator H16 displayed an increase in regulation of the PhaC1 gene, within 24 hours of fermentation by 2.53-fold when supplemented with 3-oxo-C12-HSL. Alternatively, PhaZ displayed an increase in transcription at the same time point, but by 1.48-fold. P. putida KT2440 cultures displayed a significant increase in regulation of PhaC1 at 48 hours of fermentation when supplemented with both C4-HSL and 3-oxo-C12-HSL. Although an increase of PhaZ was also observed, it was less than PhaC1

Monopolizing force?: police legitimacy and public attitudes towards the acceptability of violence

Why do people believe that violence is acceptable? In this paper we study people’s normative beliefs about the acceptability of violence to achieve social control (as a substitute for the police, for self-protection and the resolution of disputes) and social change (through violent protests and acts to achieve political goals). Addressing attitudes towards violence among young men from various ethnic minority communities in London, we find that procedural justice is strongly correlated with police legitimacy, and that positive judgments about police legitimacy are associated with more negative views about the use of violence. We conclude with the idea that police legitimacy has an additional, hitherto unrecognized, empirical property – by constituting the belief that the police monopolise rightful force in society, legitimacy has a ‘crowding out’ effect on positive views of private violence

What is Discriminatory Intent?

The Constitution’s protection of racial and religious groups is organized around the concept of discriminatory intent. But the Supreme Court has never provided a crisp, single definition of ‘discriminatory intent’ that applies across different institutions and public policy contexts. Instead, current jurisprudence tacks among numerous, competing conceptions of unconstitutional intent. Amplifying the doctrine’s complexity, the Court has also taken conflicting approaches to the question of how to go about substantiating impermissible motives with admissible evidence. The Court’s pluralistic view of intent is in theory plausible, and perhaps even unavoidable. But its lack of any consistent approach in practice to the question of how to sift and weigh different sorts of evidence of unconstitutional motive is not defensible. Rather, the current doctrinal apparatus for discovering discriminatory intent has hidden regressive effects: It subtly and silently moves evidentiary burdens between different plaintiffs and between different defendants. The resulting case outcomes are likely to shape the way in which the public perceives the extent and nature of unconstitutional discrimination. This perceptual effect, in turn, compounds and entrenches the doctrine’s regressive distributive effects. In lieu of current arrangements, I propose a revised doctrinal framework that acknowledges conceptual pluralism in the constitutional law of antidiscrimination, while encouraging courts to acknowledge frankly and manage responsibly that conceptual diversity. It also reorients the evidentiary framework for demonstrating discriminatory intent to mitigate the presently distorted allocation of judicial resources

The Counterdemocratic Difficulty

Since the 2020 elections, debate about the Supreme Court’s relationship with the mechanisms of national democracy has intensified. One important thread of that debate focuses critically on the possibility of a judicial decision flipping a presidential election or thwarting the will of national majorities respecting progressive legislation, and pushes concerns about the Court’s effect on national democracy. A narrow focus on specific interventions, however, does not exhaust the subtle and consequential ways in which the Court influences whether and how the American democratic system thrives or fails. A narrow focus is partial because it construes democracy as merely the aggregation of specific acts or moments, not a complex system made up of electoral institutions, the rule of law, and parties disposed to accept electoral loss. This Article offers a new analysis of the relation between judicial power and the quality of American democracy. This account is nested in a wider, systemic perspective accounting for both political and economic forces. Drawing on recent empirical work in political science and economics, this Article situates the Roberts Court at the nexus of three intersecting “long crises” of American democracy. The first is the democratic deficit embedded in the Constitution’s original 1787 design. The second is a sharp increase in wealth inequality since the 1970s. The third is the more recent reemergence of a sometimes violent “white identity politics” as a rift starkly bisecting the electorate. The fragility of American democracy arises from an untimely confluence of these three forces, which until now have been unfolding along separate tracks at different tempos. The Roberts Court arbitrages between these three counterdemocratic dynamics in ways that impose considerable pressure on the inclusive norms and representative mechanisms through which democracy works. Four lines of precedent merit attention in understanding the convergence of the “long” crises of democracy. These (1) guarantee economic capital, but not associations, a political return; (2) gerrymander civil society by rewarding hierarchical, but not egalitarian, mobilization; (3) facilitate a pernicious form of white identity politics; and (4) undermine electoral and nonelectoral foundations of democratic rotation. Through these lines of jurisprudence, economic, social, or cultural capital is parlayed into disproportionate political power. This doctrine hence entrenches such power into a form of durable incumbency. These decisions, in other words, “encase” extant distributions of economic and sociocultural power from democratic challenge. Drawing out these elements, this Article maps out the “counterdemocratic difficulty” of judicial review as presently employed

Why Judicial Independence Fails

Judicial independence seems under siege. President Trump condemns federal courts for their political bias; his erstwhile presidential opponents mull various court-packing plans; and courts, in turn, are lambasted for abandoning a long-held constitutional convention against institutional manipulation. At the same time, across varied lines of jurisprudence, the Roberts Court evinces a deep worry about judicial independence. This preoccupation with threats to judicial independence infuses recent opinions on administrative deference, bankruptcy, patent adjudication, and jurisdiction-stripping. Yet the Court has not offered a single, overarching definition of what it means by the term “judicial independence.” Nor has it explained how its disjointed doctrinal interventions add up to a coherent theory of institutional autonomy. And it remains unclear how debates on judicial independence among jurists relate to debates about the same term in the larger public sphere. This Article’s first contribution is to analyze how the Roberts Court understands the term judicial independence and how its doctrinal rules fall far short of realizing even the aspirations the Court has for that term. This case study in doctrinal specification illuminates the gap between the Justices’ own ethical aspiration toward judicial independence and its institutional realization—a gap that generates confusion, uncertainty, and opportunities for circumvention. This Article then abstracts away from the particulars of the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence to explore the origins of this aspiration– implementation gap. To motivate this more general analysis, it first demonstrates that there is a large range of constitutional-design options for a founder seeking to create independent courts. The Framers of Article III embraced certain of these options and rejected others. Specifically, they preferred ex post to ex ante checks on political interference in the judiciary. Subsequent experience, though, has demonstrated that their choice of judicial independence’s institutional forms rested on flawed presuppositions. In particular, the Framers failed to anticipate the rise of partisanship as a motivating principle for national political action, and also the unexpectedly strong incentives that push legislatures toward vague or ambiguous statutory texts, leaving ample discretion for judges’ policy preferences. Today, it is possible to identify a range of instruments through which elected actors can achieve such unraveling. The three most important can be labeled cracking, packing, and stacking by analogy to techniques of partisan gerrymandering. This taxonomical exercise illuminates how, in practice, the jurisprudence and politics of judicial independence fall so far short of professed ethical aspirations. This exercise further points toward the possibility of a more institutionally grounded account of what plausibly can be expected in terms of federal court autonomy from the partisan currents of American political life