220 research outputs found
Antidiscrimination versus Nondiscrimination: Competing Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act is perhaps the most successful civil rights law ever. Yet while one set of scholars regards the legislation’s success as evidence that it remains necessary and appropriate, another set of scholars regards that success as a sign that the VRA is obsolete and inappropriate. In this article, I argue that disagreement about the VRA stems from two fundamentally different analytical approaches. The antidiscrimination paradigm focuses on how key indicators of political empowerment have progressed since 1965. The nondiscrimination paradigm focuses on how far those indicators are from what would be observed in the absence of racial discrimination. By identifying these two perspectives, this analysis illuminates sources of scholarly disagreement about the Voting Rights Act and clears a path both to resolving related debates within Congress and the courts, and to investigating the empirical impact of each interpretation on the sustainability of the VRA
Observations of ocean fluctuations between 15 and 23 hour periods in the Pacific
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Ocean Engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution September 1990Pulse-like acoustic signals are transmitted from an acoustic source near Oahu to seven
receivers off the west coast of the United States for a 124-day period in 1988. Acoustic
travel-time oscillations are observed in the received signal at periods between 15 and 23
hours, which are caused by barotropic (or first or second mode baroclinic) flu ctuations
in the ocean. It is shown that these fluctuations cannot be local processes isolated to
either the source or to the receivers. It is further shown that resonant barotropic gravity
wave modes (Platzman et al., 1981) are not consistent with the data. The cause of these
flu ctuations remains unresolved, but the data and other oceanographic measurements put
many constraints on the process causing these fluctuations
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