UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles was a hotspot of growing homelessness and severe housing insecurity for renter households. A stark manifestation of race and class inequality, this crisis is now set to get much worse. This UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy report, UD Day: Impending Evictions and Homelessness in Los Angeles, authored by Gary Blasi, Professor Emeritus at UCLA Law, projects a surge in evictions and homelessness that will follow the lifting of COVID-19 emergency orders. As argued in the report, and as repeatedly noted by community organizations and legal and policy advocates, such devastation could have been avoided through robust tenant protections, rent relief, and eviction moratoria at local, state, and federal levels of government. The first publication in our Housing Justice in the Time of COVID-19 series, the report foregrounds the urgency of organizing and pressing public officials at all levels of government to plan and prepare for a potential humanitarian disaster of hunger and homelessness on a scale not seen in any urban area of any industrialized country in the past 90 years

Lawyers, Guns and Money: Content Contextualism and the Cognitive Foundations of Statutory Interpretation

The field of statutory interpretation is one of central importance to both lawyers and judges, perhaps even more central to their daily work than the analysis of appellate opinions. As a field of academic inquiry, however, the field has become rather stagnant and seems now at a stalemate between contending schools of thought, with most siding against the pure forms of textualism sometimes associated with Justice Scalia and arguing for some form of contextualism. What kinds of context should matter is disputed. Thus far, however, scholars have paid remarkably little attention to one crucial contextual factor: What is the statute about? What domain of human activity does the law seek to regulate? Justice Scalia urges courts to attend to the plain language of a statute -- any statute -- in order to encourage legislators to clearly say what they mean. This argument is easier to sustain in substantive areas where great precision is obtainable. But should legislatures be barred from acting in substantive areas where precision in very difficult? Legal scholars have acknowledged, then turned away from, this question. This is so in part because scholarship in this area has not thus far taken account of advances in cognitive science and communications theory. In this article I explain how the cognitive science of categorization, along with signal detection theory and complexity theory, allow us to compare substantive domains according to the degree of difficulty in legislating in them, by establishing a metric for the theorization of a substantive domain. The implications of this approach extend well beyond informing the process of drafting legislation. The theoretical foundations of statutory interpretation depend on unspoken, and often incorrect, assumptions about the possibilities of precision in crafting statutes. Once statutory interpretation is understood as an inevitably human process, relying on the tools of human cognition and categorization, the field of statutory interpretation itself might be reconstructed on a more solid, even scientific, foundation

Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language

The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Experimental evidence suggests these form-to-meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development, and communication: systematicity facilitates category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. Processes of cultural evolution help to explain how these competing motivations shape vocabulary structure

TeV Particle Astrophysics II: Summary comments

A unifying theme of this conference was the use of different approaches to understand astrophysical sources of energetic particles in the TeV range and above. In this summary I review how gamma-ray astronomy, neutrino astronomy and (to some extent) gravitational wave astronomy provide complementary avenues to understanding the origin and role of high-energy particles in energetic astrophysical sources.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures; Conference summary talk for "TeV Particle Astrophysics II" at University of Wisconsin, Madison, 28-31 August 200

Severe Asthma Standard-of-Care Background Medication Reduction With Benralizumab: ANDHI in Practice Substudy

Background: The phase IIIb, randomized, parallel-group, placebo-controlled ANDHI double-blind (DB) study extended understanding of the efficacy of benralizumab for patients with severe eosinophilic asthma. Patients from ANDHI DB could join the 56-week ANDHI in Practice (IP) single-arm, open-label extension substudy. Objective: Assess potential for standard-of-care background medication reductions while maintaining asthma control with benralizumab. Methods: Following ANDHI DB completion, eligible adults were enrolled in ANDHI IP. After an 8-week run-in with benralizumab, there were 5 visits to potentially reduce background asthma medications for patients achieving and maintaining protocol-defined asthma control with benralizumab. Main outcome measures for non-oral corticosteroid (OCS)-dependent patients were the proportions with at least 1 background medication reduction (ie, lower inhaled corticosteroid dose, background medication discontinuation) and the number of adapted Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) step reductions at end of treatment (EOT). Main outcomes for OCS-dependent patients were reductions in daily OCS dosage and proportion achieving OCS dosage of 5 mg or lower at EOT. Results: For non-OCS-dependent patients, 53.3% (n = 208 of 390) achieved at least 1 background medication reduction, increasing to 72.6% (n = 130 of 179) for patients who maintained protocol-defined asthma control at EOT. A total of 41.9% (n = 163 of 389) achieved at least 1 adapted GINA step reduction, increasing to 61.8% (n = 110 of 178) for patients with protocol-defined EOT asthma control. At ANDHI IP baseline, OCS dosages were 5 mg or lower for 40.4% (n = 40 of 99) of OCS-dependent patients. Of OCS-dependent patients, 50.5% (n = 50 of 99) eliminated OCS and 74.7% (n = 74 of 99) achieved dosages of 5 mg or lower at EOT. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate benralizumab's ability to improve asthma control, thereby allowing background medication reduction