Modalities of Social Change Lawyering

The last decade has seen the rise of new kinds of grassroots social movements. Movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sunrise, and #MeToo pushed back against long-standing political, economic, and social crises, including income inequality, racial inequality, police violence, climate change, and the widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment. As these social change efforts evolve, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize the role of lawyers within these new social movements and to identify lawyering characteristics that contribute to sustaining social movements over time. This Article surveys this body of literature and proposes a typology of terminology that names, identifies, and distinguishes the underlying characteristics and principles of prominent models of social change lawyering. Our typology is intended to create common conceptual ground in the field. The Article then applies this typology to the case study of one social change campaign to illustrate the ways scholars and advocates can use the framework to think strategically about tailoring goals and strategies to various sociological and theoretical factors. By mapping advocacy to theories of social change lawyering and tailoring such work to socio–legal factors, our goals are several. We hope our typology will launch a conversation that enables scholars and lawyers to evaluate diverse lawyering modalities in light of lawyers’ conception of their roles, their theory of social change, and the contexts in which they work. We also hope that our typology provokes engagement and correction, in the spirit of collectively imagining new ways of inhabiting the lawyering role that support critical social change efforts

An Innovative Approach to Movement Lawyering: An Immigrant Rights Case Study

The role of lawyers in social change movements is more important than ever as communities mobilize around systemic racism, police killings, xenophobia, rising unemployment, and widening economic inequality. The immigrant rights movement is a critical part of these efforts to foment change. This Article leverages an in-depth case study – the rise and fall of the controversial immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities - to explore how lawyers work as part of a community to challenge power and effectuate change. The dismantling of Secure Communities was widely credited to a relentless campaign to thwart the government’s then-expanding deportation strategy. The authors reviewed over 23,000 internal DHS documents, as well as media accounts and court transcripts, and interviewed 30 administrative officials, congressional actors, organizers, clients, activists, and lawyers involved in the Secure Communities campaigns. This Article draws on extensive evidence to identify an innovative approach to movement lawyering that involved coordinated efforts of movement actors on the micro level (achieving immediate goals), the meso level (effecting broader policy change), and the macro level (organizing communities around narrative identities). The Article concludes that efforts at change were optimized when lawyers, organizers, and activists together built a nimble, adaptive, and modular strategy to enhance concerted power from the ground up. Within this new construct, lawyers might develop new ways of working with communities that synergistically exploit the advantages of various social change strategies at any given time, producing strengthened relationships and lasting investments in organized resistance

Human brain activity and functional connectivity associated with verbal long-term memory consolidation across 1 month

IntroductionDeclarative memories are initially dependent on the hippocampus and become stabilized through the neural reorganization of connections between the medial temporal lobe and neocortex. The exact time-course of these neural changes is not well established, although time-dependent changes in retrieval-related brain function can be detected across relatively short time periods in humans (e.g., hours to months).MethodsIn a study involving older adults with normal cognition (N = 24), we investigated changes in brain activity and functional connectivity associated with the long-term memory consolidation of verbal material over one month. Participants studied fact-like, three-word sentences at 1-month, 1-week, 1-day, and 1-hour intervals before a recognition memory test inside an MRI scanner. Old/new recognition with confidence ratings and response times were recorded. We examined whole-brain changes in retrieval-related brain activity, as well as functional connectivity of the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), as memories aged from 1 hour to 1 month. Secondary analyses minimized the effect of confounding factors affected by memory age (i.e., changes in confidence and response time or re-encoding of targets).ResultsMemory accuracy, confidence ratings, and response times changed with memory age. A memory age network was identified where retrieval-related brain activity in cortical regions increased or decreased as a function of memory age. Hippocampal brain activity in an anatomical region of interest decreased with memory age. Importantly, these changes in retrieval-related activity were not confounded with changes in activity related to concomitant changes in behavior or encoding. Exploratory analyses of vmPFC functional connectivity as a function of memory age revealed increased connectivity with the posterior parietal cortex, as well as with the vmPFC itself. In contrast, hippocampal functional connectivity with the vmPFC and orbitofrontal cortex decreased with memory age.DiscussionThe observed changes in retrieval-related brain activity and functional connectivity align with the predictions of standard systems consolidation theory. These results suggest that processes consistent with long-term memory consolidation can be identified over short time periods using fMRI, particularly for verbal material

Randomised pragmatic waitlist trial with process evaluation investigating the effectiveness of peer support after brain injury: protocol.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an important global health problem. Formal service provision fails to address the ongoing needs of people with TBI and their family in the context of a social and relational process of learning to live with and adapt to life after TBI. Our feasibility study reported peer support after TBI is acceptable to both mentors and mentees with reported benefits indicating a high potential for effectiveness and likelihood of improving outcomes for both mentees and their mentors. To (a) test the effectiveness of a peer support intervention for improving participation, health and well-being outcomes after TBI and (b) determine key process variables relating to intervention, context and implementation to underpin an evidence-based framework for ongoing service provision. A randomised pragmatic waitlist trial with process evaluation. Mentee participants (n=46) will be included if they have moderate or severe TBI and are no more than 18 months post-injury. Mentor participants (n=18) will be people with TBI up to 6 years after injury, who were discharged from inpatient rehabilitation at least 1 year prior. The primary outcome will be mentee participation, measured using the Impact on Participation and Autonomy questionnaire after 22 weeks. Primary analysis of the continuous variables will be analysis of covariance with baseline measurement as a covariate and randomised treatment as the main explanatory predictor variable at 22 weeks. Process evaluation will include analysis of intervention-related data and qualitative data collected from mentors and service coordinators. Data synthesis will inform the development of a service framework for future implementation. Ethics approval has been obtained from the New Zealand Health and Disability Ethics Committee (19/NTB/82) and Auckland University of Technology Ethics Committee (19/345). Dissemination of findings will be via traditional academic routes including publication in internationally recognised peer-reviewed journals. ACTRN12619001002178. [Abstract copyright: © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

Accessing the purity of a single photon by the width of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference

We demonstrate a method to determine the spectral purity of single photons. The technique is based on the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between a single photon state and a suitably prepared coherent field. We show that the temporal width of the HOM dip is not only related to reciprocal of the spectral width but also to the underlying quantum coherence. Therefore, by measuring the width of both the HOM dip and the spectrum one can directly quantify the degree of spectral purity. The distinct advantage of our proposal is that it obviates the need for perfect mode matching, since it does not rely on the visibility of the interference. Our method is particularly useful for characterizing the purity of heralded single photon states.Comment: Extended version, 16 pages, 9 figure

Historical summer distribution of the endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis): a hypothesis based on environmental preferences of a congeneric species

Aim: To obtain a plausible hypothesis for the historical distribution of North Atlantic right whales (NARWs) (Eubalaena glacialis) in their summer feeding grounds. Previously widespread in the North Atlantic, after centuries of hunt- ing, these whales survive as a small population off eastern North America. Because their exploitation began before formal records started, information about their historical distribution is fragmentary

Estimating entropies from molecular dynamics simulations

The methods to compute the excess entropy and the entropy of solvation using liquid water as a test system were studied. The accuracy and convergence behavior of five methods based on thermodynamic integration and perturbation techniques was evaluated. Through the thermodynamic integration accurate entropy differences were obtained in which many copies of a solute were desolvated. Only two methods yield useful results, the calculation of solute-solvent entropy through thermodynamic integration and the calculation of solvation entropy through the temperature derivative of the corresponding free-energy difference, when one solute molecule is involved

Pathologic gene network rewiring implicates PPP1R3A as a central regulator in pressure overload heart failure

Heart failure is a leading cause of mortality, yet our understanding of the genetic interactions underlying this disease remains incomplete. Here, we harvest 1352 healthy and failing human hearts directly from transplant center operating rooms, and obtain genome-wide genotyping and gene expression measurements for a subset of 313. We build failing and non-failing cardiac regulatory gene networks, revealing important regulators and cardiac expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs). PPP1R3A emerges as a regulator whose network connectivity changes significantly between health and disease. RNA sequencing after PPP1R3A knockdown validates network-based predictions, and highlights metabolic pathway regulation associated with increased cardiomyocyte size and perturbed respiratory metabolism. Mice lacking PPP1R3A are protected against pressure-overload heart failure. We present a global gene interaction map of the human heart failure transition, identify previously unreported cardiac eQTLs, and demonstrate the discovery potential of disease-specific networks through the description of PPP1R3A as a central regulator in heart failure

De novo assembly of the cattle reference genome with single-molecule sequencing.

BackgroundMajor advances in selection progress for cattle have been made following the introduction of genomic tools over the past 10-12 years. These tools depend upon the Bos taurus reference genome (UMD3.1.1), which was created using now-outdated technologies and is hindered by a variety of deficiencies and inaccuracies.ResultsWe present the new reference genome for cattle, ARS-UCD1.2, based on the same animal as the original to facilitate transfer and interpretation of results obtained from the earlier version, but applying a combination of modern technologies in a de novo assembly to increase continuity, accuracy, and completeness. The assembly includes 2.7 Gb and is >250× more continuous than the original assembly, with contig N50 >25 Mb and L50 of 32. We also greatly expanded supporting RNA-based data for annotation that identifies 30,396 total genes (21,039 protein coding). The new reference assembly is accessible in annotated form for public use.ConclusionsWe demonstrate that improved continuity of assembled sequence warrants the adoption of ARS-UCD1.2 as the new cattle reference genome and that increased assembly accuracy will benefit future research on this species