Searching for Adequate Accountability: Supervisory Priests and the Church’s Child Sex Abuse Crisis

In 2002, the Boston Globe published a report exposing child sex abuse by priests and a cover-up by supervisory priests. Supervisory priests—church officials who supervise lower-ranking priests—concealed reports of sexual abuse by lower-ranking priests and created substantial risks of sexual abuse to children. Prosecutors tried to hold supervisory priests accountable by turning to statutes that either did not capture the moral culpability of priests, like statutes prohibiting obstruction of justice or contributing to the delinquency of a minor; or that did not legally encompass their misconduct, like child-endangerment statutes. Child endangerment captures the moral culpability of supervisory priests’ misconduct, but child-endangerment statutes based on the Model Penal Code (MPC) do not legally cover supervisory priests or their acts. Though supervisory priests chose to suppress reports of child sex abuse, prosecutors cannot constitutionally shoehorn misconduct into statutes—like child endangerment—that were never before interpreted to apply to individuals like supervisory priests. Instead of breaching the supervisory priests’ constitutionally guaranteed notice that their conduct constituted child endangerment, prosecutors should encourage state legislatures to: 1) extend statutes of limitations for crimes against minors and include clergy as mandatory reporters; 2) amend child-endangerment statutes to include supervisory priests and those similarly situated; and 3) criminalize the reckless creation of a substantial risk of child sex abuse, and the reckless failure to alleviate that risk when there is a duty to do so. Absent legislative action, prosecutors should use statutes that represent a lesser degree of moral culpability, such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor or mandatory-reporter statutes. Enacting statutes that both legally encompass and adequately reflect the blameworthiness of supervisory priests will hopefully deter similar misconduct and protect children from sex abuse in institutional settings

Mutual Assent in the Corporate Contract: Forum Selection Bylaws

In recent years, frivolous and inefficient multijurisdictional stockholder litigation has become a costly burden on corporations in the United States. A popular solution among boards of directors has been to adopt bylaws with forum selection provisions (which require certain disputes to be litigated before one forum). Those who oppose this solution have challenged these provisions on the grounds that they were passed as bylaws—which are unilaterally adopted by boards without stockholder consent. These challengers argue that bylaws are like contracts, and, therefore, require the mutual assent of both stockholders and the corporation to be enforceable. This argument implicates a classic theory of corporate law—the contractarian theory—but vastly oversimplifies the relationship between a stockholder, her corporation and the board of directors. When the contractarian theory of corporate law is applied to the full legal and practical reality of that relationship, the mutual assent argument falls apart and the contractarian theory is shown to support the enforceability of bylaws

Perceiving Smellscapes

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments

Who Builds the Motherland?

I was born in 2002 into a middle-class Jewish family, in a very Jewish town. The town was our Zion, our Mini-Israel, our bubble. It prided itself on being a sleepy town where any American can feel safe and comfortable. At the best of times, the town felt like a family; everyone knew your name and many children born in the town decided to live the rest of their adult lives there. It was a place where the support of Israel was of utmost importance. Although everyone prided themselves on the security, there was always this unease that our human rights could be taken away by those others that outnumbered us. After all, it only took two years from Hitler\u27s rise to power to his passing of the Nuremberg laws. With this fear of history repeating itself, every Jew in the bubble, whether they be Reform or Orthodox, Ashkenazi or Sephardic, talked of the grandeur of the Israeli state. Because no matter how slim the odds may seem that the worst-case scenario could happen, any chance that it could happen again was unacceptable for the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust. [excerpt

Beyond Sufficiency: G.A. Cohen's Community Constraint on Luck Egalitarianism

G. A. Cohen conceptualizes socialism as luck egalitarianism constrained by a community principle. The latter mitigates certain inequalities to achieve a shared common life. This article explores the plausibility of the community constraint on inequality in light of two related problems. First, if it is voluntary, it fails as a response to “the abandonment objection” to luck egalitarianism, as it would not guarantee imprudent people sufficient resources to avoid deprivation and to function as equal citizens in a democratic society. Contra Cohenite socialism, this appears unjust. Second, if it is instead enforced, coercive equalization beyond sufficiency-constrained luck egalitarianism, which is possibly necessary to achieve a shared common life, seems to require unjustified restrictions on liberty. I therefore argue that the constraint is most plausibly specified as requiring enforcement of sufficiency and only voluntary equalization thereafter. I also note, skeptically, why this constraint might be morally preferable to a purely sufficientarian alternative

Smell's puzzling discrepancy: Gifted discrimination, yet pitiful identification

Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 90-114, February 2020

Measurements of the scattering characteristics of sediment suspensions with different mineralogical compositions

Acoustic studies of suspended sediments often assume the dominant mineral in suspension is quartz, the density and intrinsic scattering properties of which are implemented when inverting acoustic backscatter data collected at sea. However, compositional analysis studies of suspended and sea-bed particulate material show a wide range of mineral species contribute to the inorganic fraction of sediments in the marine environment. Whilst no theoretical framework exists to predict the acoustic properties of irregularly shaped sediment grains, the density, compressional, and shear wave velocities of common marine mineral species can vary by up to a factor of two. In this study, we present and compare measurements of the intrinsic scattering parameters, namely the normalized total scattering cross section, χ, and the backscatter form function, f, obtained from homogenous suspensions of irregularly shaped sand sized grains of both magnetite and quartz. Our preliminary measurements suggest that in the geometric scattering regime, χ is enhanced for magnetite sands by ~ 100 % relative to quartz. Similarly, measurements of the form function for magnetite sands are enhanced by ~ 33 % relative to quartz in the geometric regime, though no measurable difference was observed in the Rayleigh regime. The implications of these results for acoustic backscatter data collected at sea are discussed