“‘Relentless Geography’: Los Angeles’ Imagined Cartographies in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,”

What would a map of Los Angeles drawn from the ground up look like? In his groundbreaking work The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre argues that the conceived space of urban planners is fundamentally distinct from lived space, which cannot be mapped out. In her impressive city-wide narrative, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) demonstrates the effects of imposing conceived space upon the lived space of inner city Los Angeles residents, and what happens when the counter-model of space being lived by a city’s inhabitants rebels. Yamashita’s text mirrors this disjuncture between represented and lived space through the use of narrative surrealism. Space is magically reconfigured in the city, shrinking the uninhabited Downtown and expanding over-populated yet underrepresented neighborhoods, literally shifting geographically until its mapping matches the social space of those on the ground rather than those who map it from above. Literary criticism on the novel to date has largely interpreted Tropic of Orange as a commentary on the effects of globalization; not enough attention has been paid to the novel’s surreal expansion of Los Angeles’ inner city. Using Lefebvre’s “science of space,” anchored by Los Angeles’ city planning schemas, I argue that Yamashita offers a different map, one perceived by the subsets of LA’s population that fall through the cracks of the city’s grid. Tropic of Orange’s unorthodox formal structure, when combined with its narrative surrealism, creates a differential space in the text, transforming the novel into the Los Angeles imagined by its anonymous users

Toeplitz operators and Wiener-Hopf factorisation: an introduction

Wiener-Hopf factorisation plays an important role in the theory of Toeplitz operators. We consider here Toeplitz operators in the Hardy spaces $H^p$ of the upper half-plane and we review how their Fredholm properties can be studied in terms of a Wiener-Hopf factorisation of their symbols, obtaining necessary and sufficient conditions for the operator to be Fredholm or invertible, as well as formulae for their inverses or one-sided inverses when these exist. The results are applied to a class of singular integral equations in $L^p(\mathbb R)$.Comment: 26 page

The Early Bird Waits for the Worm: May Federal Judgments Be Registered Prior to Appeal?

The federal registration statute, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1963, permits a judgment creditor to register his or her judgment in another state by simply filing a copy of the judgment with the clerk of the registering court. Registration is permitted when the judgment becomes final by appeal, when the time to appeal expires, or when the court that entered the judgment orders registration for good cause shown. The majority of courts have interpreted good cause as a showing that the judgment debtor lacks assets in the forum jurisdiction to fulfill the judgment, but possesses substantial assets in the registering jurisdiction. District courts are split, however, on whether there must be a pending appeal before registration can be ordered. Registration gives the judgment creditor power to create a lien on the judgment debtor’s property in another district. The effect of the registered judgment depends on a state’s laws regarding liens. Liens in some states may reach personal property, creating the potential for a registered judgment to have harsh effects on the debtor’s livelihood and placing restrictions on the alienability of real property. The posting of a supersedeas bond can stay the enforcement of a judgment and alleviate the need for registration. This Note argues that a judgment creditor should be permitted to register her judgment without waiting for the judgment debtor to file an appeal. However, a court should have discretion to consider whether permitting registration when the judgment debtor has not yet posted a supersedeas bond would cause irreparable harm to a good faith debtor, and if so, grant the debtor time to post a bond

The Early Bird Waits for the Worm: May Federal Judgments Be Registered Prior to Appeal?

The federal registration statute, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1963, permits a judgment creditor to register his or her judgment in another state by simply filing a copy of the judgment with the clerk of the registering court. Registration is permitted when the judgment becomes final by appeal, when the time to appeal expires, or when the court that entered the judgment orders registration for good cause shown. The majority of courts have interpreted good cause as a showing that the judgment debtor lacks assets in the forum jurisdiction to fulfill the judgment, but possesses substantial assets in the registering jurisdiction. District courts are split, however, on whether there must be a pending appeal before registration can be ordered. Registration gives the judgment creditor power to create a lien on the judgment debtor’s property in another district. The effect of the registered judgment depends on a state’s laws regarding liens. Liens in some states may reach personal property, creating the potential for a registered judgment to have harsh effects on the debtor’s livelihood and placing restrictions on the alienability of real property. The posting of a supersedeas bond can stay the enforcement of a judgment and alleviate the need for registration. This Note argues that a judgment creditor should be permitted to register her judgment without waiting for the judgment debtor to file an appeal. However, a court should have discretion to consider whether permitting registration when the judgment debtor has not yet posted a supersedeas bond would cause irreparable harm to a good faith debtor, and if so, grant the debtor time to post a bond

Constraint through Delegation: The Case of Executive Control over Immigration Policy

This Article proposes recalibrating the separation of powers between the political branches in the context of their regulation of immigration law\u27s core questions: how many and what types of immigrants to admit to the United States. Whereas Congress holds a virtual monopoly over formal decisionmaking, the executive branch makes de facto admissions decisions using its discretionary enforcement power. As a result of this structure, stasis and excessive prosecutorial discretion characterize the regime, particularly with respect to labor migration. Both of these features exacerbate pathologies associated with illegal immigration and call for a structural response. This Article contends that Congress should create an executive branch agency, marked by indicia of independence, to set visa policy-an avenue increasingly contemplated by reformers. Though it may seem counterintuitive, delegation of greater authority can help constrain executive power by substituting a transparent process, subject to monitoring, for decisionmaking that occurs hidden from view. Delegation can also help overcome limitations in the legislative process that contribute to the current regime\u27s dysfunction, making immigration policy more efficient and effective. The Refugee Act of 1980 provides a parallel that is helpful in thinking through what it would mean to delegate ex ante admissions power to the executive

Highly Degenerate Harmonic Mean Curvature Flow

We study the evolution of a weakly convex surface $\Sigma_0$ in $\R^3$ with flat sides by the Harmonic Mean Curvature flow. We establish the short time existence as well as the optimal regularity of the surface and we show that the boundaries of the flat sides evolve by the curve shortening flow. It follows from our results that a weakly convex surface with flat sides of class $C^{k,\gamma}$, for some $k\in \mathbb{N}$ and $0 < \gamma \leq 1$, remains in the same class under the flow. This distinguishes this flow from other, previously studied, degenerate parabolic equations, including the porous medium equation and the Gauss curvature flow with flat sides, where the regularity of the solution for $t >0$ does not depend on the regularity of the initial data