Post-Kiobel Procedure: Subject Matter Jurisdiction or Prescriptive Jurisdiction?

This essay evaluates whether Alien Tort Statute (ATS) cases involving foreign elements raise questions of prescriptive jurisdiction or subject matter jurisdiction after the Supreme Court’s decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. It concludes that the lower court trend treats Kiobel as going to subject matter jurisdiction, and that this trend is probably correct. It would have been helpful for the Supreme Court to clearly provide guidance on this question — which has major doctrinal and procedural consequences for the law and litigants. The procedural implications of viewing challenges based on Kiobel as going to judicial subject matter jurisdiction are that such challenges can be raised at any time during the course of litigation, including by the court sua sponte. The doctrinal implications are that when evaluating whether Kiobel’s exception for “claims that touch and concern the territory of the United States, ...with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application,” courts should look not only to whether the conduct alleged touches and concerns the United States, but instead, as some lower courts have found, to “all the facts that give rise to ATS claims, including the parties’ identities and their relationship to the causes of action.

The Unitary Executive in the Modern Era, 1945-2004

Since the impeachment of President Clinton, there has been renewed debate over whether Congress can create institutions such as special counsels and independent agencies that restrict the president\u27s control over the administration of the law. Initially, debate centered on whether the Constitution rejected the executive by committee used by the Articles of Confederation in favor of a unitary executive, in which all administrative authority is centralized in the president. More recently, the debate has focused on historical practices. Some scholars suggest that independent agencies and special counsels are such established features of the constitutional landscape that any argument in favor of a unitary executive is foreclosed by established practice. Others, led by Bruce Ackerman, claim that the New Deal represented a constitutional moment that ratified big changes in the distribution of power within the federal government. Still others argue that the added policymaking role of the modern administrative state means Congress ought to be able to impose greater limits on presidential control over the execution of the law. To date, however, a full assessment of the historical record has yet to appear. This Article is part of a larger project offering a comprehensive chronicle of the battles between the president and Congress over control of the administration of federal law. It reviews the period between 1945 and 2004, paying particular attention to the Clinton impeachment and the lapse of the independent-counsel statute. The record shows that presidents from Harry S. Truman through George W. Bush consistently defended the unitariness of the executive branch, vitiating any claim that a custom of allowing congressional incursions on the unitary executive has emerged. In fact, the episodes discussed herein eloquently illustrate both the legal and the normative arguments supporting the unitary executive

Molecular dynamics simulations of the intrinsically disordered protein amelogenin

Amelogenin refers to a class of intrinsically disordered proteins that are the major constituents of enamel matrix derivative (EMD), an extract of porcine fetal teeth used in regenerative periodontal therapy. Modifications in molecular conformation induced by external stresses, such as changes in temperature or pH, are known to reduce the effectiveness of EMD. However, detailed descriptions of the conformational behavior of native amelogenin are lacking in the open literature. In the present work, a molecular model for the secondary and tertiary structure of the full-length major porcine amelogenin P173 was constructed from its primary sequence by replica exchange molecular dynamics (REMD) simulations. The REMD results for isolated amelogenin molecules at different temperatures were shown to be consistent with the available spectroscopic data. They therefore represent an important first step toward the simulation of the intra- and intermolecular interactions that mediate self-organization in amelogenin and its behavior in the presence of other EMD components under conditions representative of its therapeutic application

Theory review on rare K decays: Standard Model and beyond

The theoretical status of the rare K --> pi nu nu, KL --> pi0 l+ l- and KL --> mu+ mu- decays in the Standard Model is reviewed. Their sensitivity to New Physics and their discriminating power is also illustrated.Comment: 5 pages. Talk given at the 7th International Conference on Hyperons, Charm And Beauty Hadrons (BEACH 2006), 2-8 July 2006, Lancaster, U

Exploring the flavour structure of the MSSM with rare K decays

We present an extensive analysis of rare K decays, in particular of the two neutrino modes K+->pi+ nu nu-bar and KL->pi0 nu nu-bar, in the Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model. We analyse the expectations for the branching ratios of these modes, both within the restrictive framework of the minimal flavour violation hypothesis and within a more general framework with new sources of flavour-symmetry breaking. In both scenarios, the information that can be extracted from precise measurements of the two neutrino modes turn out to be very useful in restricting the parameter space of the model, even after taking into account the possible information on the mass spectrum derived from high-energy colliders, and the constraints from B-physics experiments. In the presence of new sources of flavour-symmetry breaking, additional significant constraints on the model can be derived also from the two KL->pi0 l+l- modes.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures (high quality figures available on request

Supersymmetric models with minimal flavour violation and their running

We revisit the formulation of the principle of minimal flavor violation (MFV) in the minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model, both at moderate and large tan(beta), and with or without new CP-violating phases. We introduce a counting rule which keeps track of the highly hierarchical structure of the Yukawa matrices. In this manner, we are able to control systematically which terms can be discarded in the soft SUSY breaking part of the Lagrangian. We argue that for the implementation of this counting rule, it is convenient to introduce a new basis of matrices in which both the squark (and slepton) mass terms as well as the trilinear couplings can be expanded. We derive the RGE for the MFV parameters and show that the beta functions also respect the counting rule. For moderate tan(beta), we provide explicit analytic solutions of these RGE and illustrate their behaviour by analyzing the neighbourhood (also switching on new phases) of the SPS-1a benchmark point. We then show that even in the case of large tan(beta), the RGE remain valid and that the analytic solutions obtained for moderate tan(beta) still allow us to understand the most important features of the running of the parameters, as illustrated with the help of the SPS-4 benchmark point.Comment: plain latex, 38 pages and 5 figures Eq. (12) corrected and one reference added, conclusions unchanged. Published versio

Threonine 149 Phosphorylation Enhances ΔFosB Transcriptional Activity to Control Psychomotor Responses to Cocaine

Stable changes in neuronal gene expression have been studied as mediators of addicted states. Of particular interest is the transcription factor ΔFosB, a truncated and stable FosB gene product whose expression in nucleus accumbens (NAc), a key reward region, is induced by chronic exposure to virtually all drugs of abuse and regulates their psychomotor and rewarding effects. Phosphorylation at Ser[superscript 27] contributes to ΔFosB's stability and accumulation following repeated exposure to drugs, and our recent work demonstrates that the protein kinase CaMKIIα phosphorylates ΔFosB at Ser[superscript 27] and regulates its stability in vivo. Here, we identify two additional sites on ΔFosB that are phosphorylated in vitro by CaMKIIα, Thr[superscript 149] and Thr[superscript 180], and demonstrate their regulation in vivo by chronic cocaine. We show that phosphomimetic mutation of Thr[superscript 149] (T149D) dramatically increases AP-1 transcriptional activity while alanine mutation does not affect transcriptional activity when compared with wild-type (WT) ΔFosB. Using in vivo viral-mediated gene transfer of ΔFosB-T149D or ΔFosB-T149A in mouse NAc, we determined that overexpression of ΔFosB-T149D in NAc leads to greater locomotor activity in response to an initial low dose of cocaine than does WT ΔFosB, while overexpression of ΔFosB-T149A does not produce the psychomotor sensitization to chronic low-dose cocaine seen after overexpression of WT ΔFosB and abrogates the sensitization seen in control animals at higher cocaine doses. We further demonstrate that mutation of Thr[superscript 149] does not affect the stability of ΔFosB overexpressed in mouse NAc, suggesting that the behavioral effects of these mutations are driven by their altered transcriptional properties