Effects of non-equilibrated topological charge distributions on pseudoscalar meson masses and decay constants

We study the effects of failure to equilibrate the squared topological charge $Q^2$ on lattice calculations of pseudoscalar masses and decay constants. The analysis is based on chiral perturbation theory calculations of the dependence of these quantities on the QCD vacuum angle $\theta$. For the light-light partially quenched case, we rederive the known chiral perturbation theory results of Aoki and Fukaya, but using the nonperturbatively-valid chiral theory worked out by Golterman, Sharpe and Singleton, and by Sharpe and Shoresh. We then extend these calculations to heavy-light mesons. Results when staggered taste-violations are important are also presented. The derived $Q^2$ dependence is compared to that of simulations using the MILC collaboration's ensembles of lattices with four flavors of HISQ dynamical quarks. We find agreement, albeit with large statistical errors. These results can be used to correct for the leading effects of unequilibrated $Q^2$, or to make estimates of the systematic error coming from the failure to equilibrate $Q^2$. In an appendix, we show that the partially quenched chiral theory may be extended beyond a lower bound on valence masses discovered by Sharpe and Shoresh. Subtleties occurring when a sea-quark mass vanishes are discussed in another appendix.Comment: 46 pages, 5 figures; added section on the effect of staggered taste violations and made other improvements for clarity. Version to be published in Phys. Rev.

The New Gospel of Wealth: On Social Impact Bonds and the Privatization of Public Good

Since Andrew Carnegie penned his famous Gospel of Wealth in 1889, corporate philanthropists have championed considerable public good around the world, investing in a wide range of social programs addressing a diversity of public issues, from poverty to healthcare to criminal justice. Nevertheless, the problem of “the Rich and the Poor,” as termed by Andrew Carnegie in his famous essay, remains unsolved. Socially conscious investors have recently called for America to reimagine a new “gospel of wealth”, one that not only grapples with the what of social injustice, but also explores the how and the why of systemic social and economic inequality. An emerging social finance tool, the social impact bond (“SIB”), has been praised as a promising platform that can help solve many of our social challenges by targeting impact investments toward traditionally underfunded social welfare programs. This Article sets forth a critical examination of the new SIB model, highlighting some of the opportunities for the social finance tool to promote social impact, while also revealing several of its challenges that may hinder its broader adoption in communities across America. In the process, this Article exposes key flaws inherent in the design of the SIB model, including its neoliberal emphasis on market-based economic development strategies and its disregard for the primary role of government in the protection and advancement of the public good. It concludes by calling for a more progressive economic development framework to guide the implementation of the SIB model, one that can help development practitioners, philanthropists, and impact investors wrestle with the deficiencies of our global capitalist economic system and overcome the entrenched systemic barriers to economic justice in America

Dismantling the Master’s House: Toward a Justice-Based Theory of Community Economic Development

Since the end of the American Civil War, scholars have debated the efficacy of various models of community economic development, or CED. Historically, this debate has tracked one of two approaches: place-based models of CED, seeking to stimulate community development through market-driven economic growth programs, and people-based models of CED, focused on the removal of structural barriers to social and economic mobility that prevent human flourishing. More recently, scholars and policymakers have turned to a third model from the impact investing community—the social impact bond, or SIB. The SIB model of CED ostensibly finds a middle ground by leveraging funding from private impact investors to finance social welfare programs within marginalized communities. SIBs seemingly answer the call of local government law scholars of the New Regionalists movement who advocate for governmental mechanisms that facilitate regional cooperation, address equity concerns, and respect local government autonomy. However, this Article argues that the SIB model of impact investing will struggle to advance metropolitan equity due to its grounding in the politics of neoliberalism. After highlighting limitations of the SIB, this Article links contemporary debates about CED theory to historical contestations within the black community about economically-oriented racial uplift strategies. Placing historical figures, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, in conversation with more contemporary theorists of political philosophy, this Article offers an alternative conceptual framework of CED. Termed justice-based CED, this framing distinguishes a typology of social change that places democracy at the epicenter of the development debate and points toward the political principles of the solidarity economy as guideposts for law reform. The justice-based approach rests upon three core values: social solidarity, economic democracy, and solidarity economy. Taken together, this perspective reflects a vision of political morality that embodies one of America’s most foundational democratic values—human moral dignity

Black Urban Ecologies and Structural Extermination

Residents of low-income, metropolitan communities across the United States frequently live in “food apartheid” neighborhoods—areas with limited access to nutrient-rich and fresh food. Local government law scholars, poverty law scholars, and political theorists have long argued that structural racism embedded in America’s political economy influences the uneven development of such Black urban ecologies. Accordingly, food justice scholars have called for local governments to develop urban agricultural markets that combat racism in global corporatized food systems by localizing food development. These demands have only amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has ravaged Black communities where residents suffer from preexisting health conditions and weakened immune systems associated with food insecurity. However, while local governments are increasing development of urban agriculture in Black urban spaces, in some instances, this has only driven Black and minoritized residents to compete against one another for access to healthy food and scarce farmland. Thus, the development of urban agriculture may function to recreate the very problems of racial capitalism and neoliberalism embedded in America’s political economy that animate food insecurity in the first place. This Article argues that urban agriculture imbued with racial capitalist norms and neoliberal politics—e.g., “neutral” and “colorblind” policies that ignore historic state-sponsored racial discrimination, limit governmental market interventions, and promote individualistic competition and private ownership—will fail to mitigate the structural oppression that drives food insecurity in Black urban landscapes marred by environmental degradation, or Black urban ecologies. Instead, such forces distort urban agriculture into a weapon of exploitation, expropriation, and erasure, each foundational elements of a social theory of ecological systems change this Author calls structural extermination. This Article illustrates the theory of structural extermination, which has broad explanatory power, by examining Washington, D.C.’s history of urban farming legislation, beginning with the passage of the Food Production and Urban Gardens Program Act of 1986 and continuing, most recently, with the Urban Farming Land Lease Amendment Act of 2019. By documenting a visible shift in political discourse about Washington, D.C.’s urban farming program, from a community-oriented initiative for gardening and food donation to a market-centered program for land leasing and tax abatement, this analysis reveals how decontextualized and dehistoricized urban agriculture risks legitimating and rationalizing competitive market structures that enact violence upon the poor, and push low-income residents out of the city altogether. Finally, this Article calls for the democratization of ecological placemaking in Black urban geographies, a decolonial praxis that would embrace a justice-based vision of community economic development premised upon the principles of social solidarity, economic democracy, and solidarity economy

Blackness as Fighting Words

The resurgence of worldwide protests by activists of the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) has ushered a global reckoning with the meaning of this generation’s rallying cry – “Black Lives Matter.” As citizens emblazon their streets with this expression in massive artistic murals, the Trump administration has responded with the militarized policing of non-violent public demonstrations, revealing not merely a disregard for public safety, but far worse, a concerted dismantling of protestors’ First Amendment rights. Nevertheless, BLM protests have persisted. Accordingly, this Essay considers the implications of this generation’s acclamation of Black humanity amidst the social tensions exposed during the era of COVID-19. What does the Trump administration’s militarized response to BLM protests mean in a world mutilated by the scars of racial oppression, a wound laid bare by America’s racially biased, aggressive, and supervisory culture of policing? In response, much in the way Cheryl Harris revealed Whiteness as Property, this Essay suggests and defends Black identity itself, or Blackness – whether articulated by the pure speech of racial justice activists who affirm Black humanity, or embodied by the symbolic speech of Black bodies assembled in collective dissent in the public square – as “fighting words” in the consciousness of America, a type of public speech unprotected by the Constitution. The very utterance of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” tends to incite imminent violence and unbridled rage from police in city streets across America. Discussions of “Black Lives Matter” by pundits conjure images of subversion, disorder, and looting, the racialized narratives of social unrest commonly portrayed by the media. Yet, the words “Black Lives Matter” and the peaceful assembly of Black protestors also encapsulate the fire of righteous indignation burning in the hearts of minoritized citizens. This dynamic reflects unresolved tensions in the First Amendment’s treatment of race relations in America. Even more, it exposes the role of policing in smothering the Constitutional rights of Black and Brown citizens. This Essay provides three contributions to the ongoing discourse on policing in the United States. First, it reveals how unresolved racial tensions in the First Amendment – focusing specifically on ambiguities in the fighting words doctrine – perpetuate the racially biased, aggressive, and supervisory culture of American policing. Second, it analyzes how such unresolved racial tensions cast a dark shadow over the liberty of Black and Brown citizens who experience racism at the hands of police officers, yet avoid acts of protest for fear of bodily harm or arrest. Third, it illuminates the embeddedness of racism in American policing culture, more generally; a culture that not only constructs and reconstitutes the racial social order, but also degrades the dignity of Black and Brown citizens. Collectively, these insights lend support toward demands for police abolition from BLM activists. As this Essay concludes, until we as a nation wrestle with the unresolved racial subtext of modern policing – a racist culture woven into law that not only silences the legitimate protests of minoritized citizens in violation of their First Amendment rights, but also rationalizes callous violence at the hands of law enforcement – Black America will remain a peril to the veil of white supremacy that looms over the American constitutional order

The Miseducation of Public Citizens

The American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct calls upon lawyers, as public citizens, to embrace a special responsibility for the quality of justice in the legal profession and in society. Yet, some law professors have historically adopted a formalistic and doctrinally neutral approach to law teaching that elides critical perspectives of law, avoids the intersection of law and politics, and tends to overlook the way law can construct the very social injustices that it seeks to contain. The objective, apolitical, and so-called “colorblind” jurisprudential stance in many law classrooms inflicts intellectual violence upon law students who discover a legal doctrine in conflict with their own lived experiences, yet who feel silenced and unprepared to reckon with the moral legitimacy of unjust laws. Perhaps as a result, in recent years, law schools have begun to rethink legal education altogether, devising anti-racist curricula, professional identity trainings, and novel experiential learning programs to produce a new generation of critically conscious lawyers for the crises of our modern age. Building upon such efforts, alongside recent scholarship in legal education and philosophical legal ethics, this Essay proposes foundational pedagogical principles to teach public citizenship lawyering. This Essay defines public citizenship lawyering as a democratic conception of professional responsibility whereby lawyers engage in routine critique of their lawyering practice through the lens of justice as a moral virtue. This pedagogy finds normative grounding in the ABA Model Rules based upon the contention that a skewed vision of professional lawyering identity has hindered a justice-oriented interpretation of the lawyer’s public citizen charge. Specifically, this Essay articulates four pedagogical principles: (1) deconstructive framing, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty of candor; (2) ethical reposturing, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty of competence and professional judgment; (3) reconstructive ordering, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty to improve the law; and (4) liberatory lawyering, which guides the law professor in teaching the lawyer’s ethical duty to assist the client and others in gaining competence. Collectively, these principles assert a counter-cultural vision of practice readiness that empowers law students to affirmatively challenge social and economic injustice in the legal profession and the rule of law. More than exalting a democratic conception of professional lawyering identity, these principles affirm the legal academy as law’s laboratory for progressive social change

The Gluon Propagator in Momentum Space

We give preliminary numerical results for the gluon propagator evaluated both in coordinate and momentum space on a 16^3X40 quenched lattice at beta=6.0. Our findings are compared with earlier results in the literature at zero momentum. In addition, by considering nonzero momenta we attempt to extract the form of the propagator and compare it to continuum predictions formulated by Gribov and others. latex, file espcrc2.sty needed (appended at the end: search for espcrc2.sty).Comment: 4 page