Victims’ Rights in an Adversary System

The victims\u27 rights movement argues that because the outcome of criminal prosecutions affects crime victims, the justice system should consider their interests during proceedings. In 2004, Congress passed the Crime Victims\u27 Rights Act (CVRA), giving victims some rights to participate in the federal criminal justice system. This Note probes both the theoretical assumptions and practical implications of the CVRA. It demonstrates that the victims\u27 rights movement revisits a long-acknowledged tension between adversary adjudication and third-party interests. It shows, however, that American law has resolved this tension by conferring party or quasi-party status on third parties. Despite some pro-victims rhetoric, Congress reaffirmed the public-prosecution model when it passed the CVRA. Instead of making victims parties or intervenors in criminal prosecutions, the CVRA asks courts and prosecutors to vindicate victims\u27 interests. This unusual posture creates substantial conflicts for courts and prosecutors and undermines defendants\u27 rights. To avoid these consequences, this Note argues, courts can interpret the CVRA\u27s substantive rights narrowly. Rather than reading the CVRA as conferring broad rights on crime victims, courts should interpret the statute to simply require institutional courtesy toward crime victims. This interpretation reflects victims\u27 nonparty status and preserves the rights and responsibilities of courts, prosecutors, and defendants

Federalism, Liberty, and Equality in United States v. Windsor

This essay argues that federalism played a profoundly important role in the Supreme Court\u27s decision in United States v. Windsor, which struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Arguments to the contrary have failed to appreciate how Justice Kennedy\u27s opinion employed federalism not as a freestanding argument but as an essential component of his rights analysis. Far from being a muddle, as many have claimed, Justice Kennedy\u27s analysis offered one of the most sophisticated examples to date of the interconnections between federalism, liberty, and equality

Searches for Clean Anomalous Gauge Couplings effects at present and future e+e−e^+e^- colliders

We consider the virtual effects of a general type of Anomalous (triple) Gauge Couplings on various experimental observables in the process of electron-positron annihilation into a final fermion-antifermion state. We show that the use of a recently proposed "$Z$-peak subtracted" theoretical description of the process allows to reduce substantially the number of relevant parameters of the model, so that a calculation of observability limits can be performed in a rather simple way. As an illustration of our approach, we discuss the cases of future measurements at LEP2 and at a new 500 GeV linear collider.Comment: 23 pages incl. 5 figures (e-mail [email protected]

The Structure of Criminal Federalism

Scholars and courts have long assumed that a limited federal government should stick to genuinely “federal” crimes and leave “local” crimes to the states. By that measure, criminal federalism has failed; federal criminal law largely overlaps with state crime, and federal prosecutors regularly do seemingly “local” cases. Despite nearly unlimited paper jurisdiction, however, the federal enforcement footprint has remained tiny and virtually static for a century. Something is strongly limiting the federal system, just not differences in substantive coverage. The answer is different enforcement responsibilities. The police power means states alone provide basic public safety and criminal justice. Rather than inefficiently duplicate that role, the federal system leverages the states’ existing people and infrastructure, supplementing and correcting inevitable enforcement breakdowns. Far from signaling a federalism failure, overlapping law and cooperative enforcement thus powerfully constrain the federal system by keeping it secondary and small. Overlapping criminal enforcement, this Article demonstrates, is deeply rooted in law and tradition. Overlapping enforcement also offers a novel federalism model in which the states are neither separate nor servants but entrenched on the front lines, genuinely cooperating with federal backup to enforce criminal policy. Scholars, courts, and policymakers can and should embrace, rather than resist, the real structure of criminal federalism

La gestion des risques et analyse comportementale d’une pratique inversée : une exemple avec le risque pays

La gestion des risques, présentée en théorie comme parfaitement scientifique, suit souvent en  pratique un cycle inverse à celui préconisé, la réalisation du risque conditionnant les décisions  prises. L’application de la théorie des perspectives de Kahneman et Tversky permet de  comprendre pourquoi « tout change » lorsqu’une catastrophe survient. Le point de vue, via le  point de référence, n’est plus le même. A titre d’exemple, ceci explique, les variations rapides  des notations dans l’analyse du risque pays

Risk management and the reference point: an example with country risk

International audienc

Quantum finite automata and linear context-free languages: a decidable problem

We consider the so-called measure once finite quantum automata model introduced by Moore and Crutchfield in 2000. We show that given a language recognized by such a device and a linear context-free language, it is recursively decidable whether or not they have a nonempty intersection. This extends a result of Blondel et al. which can be interpreted as solving the problem with the free monoid in place of the family of linear context-free languages. © 2013 Springer-Verlag

ORIGAMIX, a CdTe-based spectro-imager development for nuclear applications

The Astrophysics Division of CEA Saclay has a long history in the development of CdTe based pixelated detection planes for X and gamma-ray astronomy, with time-resolved imaging and spectrometric capabilities. The last generation, named Caliste HD, is an all-in-one modular instrument that fulfills requirements for space applications. Its full-custom front-end electronics is designed to work over a large energy range from 2 keV to 1 MeV with excellent spectroscopic performances, in particular between 10 and 100 keV (0.56 keV FWHM and 0.67 keV FWHM at 13.9 and 59.5 keV). In the frame of the ORIGAMIX project, a consortium based on research laboratories and industrials has been settled in order to develop a new generation of gamma camera. The aim is to develop a system based on the Caliste architecture for post-accidental interventions or homeland security, but integrating new properties (advanced spectrometry, hybrid working mode) and suitable for industry. A first prototype was designed and tested to acquire feedback for further developments. In this study, we particularly focused on spectrometric performances with high energies and high fluxes. Therefore, our device was exposed to energies up to 700 keV (133Ba, 137Cs) and we measured the evolution of energy resolution (0.96 keV at 80 keV, 2.18 keV at 356 keV, 3.33 keV at 662 keV). Detection efficiency decreases after 150 keV, as Compton effect becomes dominant. However, CALISTE is also designed to handle multiple events, enabling Compton scattering reconstruction, which can drastically improve detection efficiencies and dynamic range for higher energies up to 1408 keV (22Na, 60Co, 152Eu) within a 1-mm thick detector. In particular, such spectrometric performances obtained with 152Eu and 60Co were never measured before with this kind of detector.Comment: Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment. Available online 9 January 2015, ISSN 0168-9002 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900215000133). Keywords: CdTe; X-ray; Gamma-ray; Spectrometry; Charge-sharing; Astrophysics Instrumentation; Nuclear Instrumentation; Gamma-ray camera

The Identity Correspondence Problem and its Applications

In this paper we study several closely related fundamental problems for words and matrices. First, we introduce the Identity Correspondence Problem (ICP): whether a finite set of pairs of words (over a group alphabet) can generate an identity pair by a sequence of concatenations. We prove that ICP is undecidable by a reduction of Post's Correspondence Problem via several new encoding techniques. In the second part of the paper we use ICP to answer a long standing open problem concerning matrix semigroups: "Is it decidable for a finitely generated semigroup S of square integral matrices whether or not the identity matrix belongs to S?". We show that the problem is undecidable starting from dimension four even when the number of matrices in the generator is 48. From this fact, we can immediately derive that the fundamental problem of whether a finite set of matrices generates a group is also undecidable. We also answer several question for matrices over different number fields. Apart from the application to matrix problems, we believe that the Identity Correspondence Problem will also be useful in identifying new areas of undecidable problems in abstract algebra, computational questions in logic and combinatorics on words.Comment: We have made some proofs clearer and fixed an important typo from the published journal version of this article, see footnote 3 on page 1