Zoned Secular: Seattle\u27s Prohibition of New Religious Facilities in Industrial Zones Violates the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act\u27s Equal Terms Rule

The equal terms rule of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) prohibits federal, state, and local governments from enacting land use regulations that place religious assemblies or institutions on less than equal terms with nonreligious assemblies or institutions. The plain language of RLUIPA makes it clear that the equal terms rule prohibits unequal treatment of religious assemblies and institutions as compared to non-religious assemblies and institutions. RLUIPA\u27s legislative history further reveals that Congress enacted the equal terms rule to counter zoning laws that favor secular assemblies and institutions over religious assemblies and institutions. Accordingly, federal courts have interpreted the equal terms rule to require that zoning laws treat religious assemblies and institutions no less favorably than non-religious assemblies and institutions, except where such laws are narrowly tailored to advance state interests of the highest order. In Midrash Sephardi, Inc. v. Town of Surfside, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that a zoning law allowing private clubs and lodges in a business district while prohibiting synagogues and churches violated the equal terms rule. The Midrash court further held that the zoning law was not narrowly tailored because private clubs and lodges did not further the purpose of the business district any more than synagogues and churches. The city of Seattle prohibits the establishment of new religious facilities in industrial zones, while allowing the establishment of new lecture and meeting halls and new community centers. This Comment argues that Seattle\u27s disparate treatment of religious facilities as compared to lecture and meeting halls and community centers violates the equal terms rule under a plain reading of RLUIPA, as supported by the Act\u27s legislative history. In fact, Seattle\u27s laws are analogous to a number of zoning laws that were amended in response to equal terms lawsuits. Seattle\u27s laws also bear close resemblance to the law at issue in Midrash. Under Midrash, Seattle\u27s laws are not narrowly tailored to advance interests of the highest order because religious facilities, lecture and meeting halls, and community centers are all similarly unrelated to Seattle\u27s goal of promoting industrial development

Why negotiate when you can criminalise? Lessons for conflict transformation from Northern Ireland and South Africa

Research on negotiating with criminalised actors generally assumes the criminal label as a given, neglecting the significance of criminalisation itself. This article addresses this gap arguing that the processes of criminalisation and decriminalisation embody important incentive structures affecting peace negotiations. Specifically, for conflict transformation to effectively occur, criminalisation needs to be orientated away from a criminalisation of actors and on to specific acts to legitimise nonviolent political expression and negotiations. These arguments will be advanced through a comparative study of Northern Ireland and South Africa, adopting a conflict transformation framework, and drawing on sixty-three original interviews and archival material

Silencing Dissent: A comparative study of criminalising political expression and conflict transformation

This thesis analyses the relationship between criminalising political expression and conflict transformation. It begins with a discussion of traditional approaches to researching crime in conflict contexts, arguing that the assumptions of state legitimacy and 'criminal' illegitimacy are particularly problematic in the contested contexts of deeply divided societies. Instead, drawing on critical legal and criminological research, it argues that through considering the process by which such categories of 'crime' are created - criminalisation - it is possible to analyse the contested role they can have. This means taking crime to embody a social construction which contributes towards a wider social reality of crime and the criminal. How this takes effect is through what the thesis describes as the interaction between formal criminalisation - the legal processes which codify and embody legal norms and principles established by a government - and informal criminalisation - the social reality of the formal process which is given expression through the way it is implemented, interpreted, resisted, or accepted by the wider population. From the perspective of conflict transformation, conflict is not the problem but rather encapsulates a problem, and frequently embodies at least part of the solution. Indeed it is through dialogue and communication which transformation can occur (both constructively and destructively), and so the thesis narrowed its focus onto the criminalisation of political expression. Criminalising political expression, therefore, can directly shape the nature of an intergroup conflict in deeply divided societies undermining the ability of actors to find a peaceful resolution to their conflict, or potentially enhancing it depending on how it operates. Accordingly the thesis argues that this can be distinguished into an explanatory typology of three 'targets' of criminalisation: identity, activity, and violence. These, together with the nature of informal criminalisation, have important implications for conflict transformation depending on the context. Through considering four conflict contexts which criminalisation responds towards - namely non-violent movements, collective political violence, negotiations, and peacebuilding - the thesis argues that when criminalisation targets non-violent political expression it will likely undermine conflict transformation in the short and long-term by closing down opportunities for dialogue, contributing towards intergroup polarisation, and dehumanising actors. On the other hand, criminalising political violence may facilitate conflict transformation, but this depends on the legitimacy of criminal justice and the nature of its enforcement. Employing an interpretivist methodology, the research involved an in-depth comparative analysis of the case studies of Northern Ireland and South Africa through poststructuralist discourse analysis and practice tracing, drawing on original interviews with key actors, and archival research. Furthermore, the thesis then employed a small-n study of Belgium, Canada, Turkey, and Sri Lanka to consider how this theoretical relationship between conflict transformation and criminalising political expression applies to crucial, typical, and counterfactual cases. The thesis concludes by discussing the implications these findings have for a number of policy areas including criminalising non-violent extremism and legacy issues associated with criminal records for political offences

Why negotiate when you can criminalise? Lessons for conflict transformation from Northern Ireland and South Africa

Research on negotiating with criminalised actors generally assumes the criminal label as a given, neglecting the significance of criminalisation itself. This article addresses this gap arguing that the processes of criminalisation and decriminalisation embody important incentive structures affecting peace negotiations. Specifically, for conflict transformation to effectively occur, criminalisation needs to be orientated away from a criminalisation of actors and on to specific acts to legitimise nonviolent political expression and negotiations. These arguments will be advanced through a comparative study of Northern Ireland and South Africa, adopting a conflict transformation framework, and drawing on sixty-three original interviews and archival material

Discovery of the brightest T dwarf in the northern hemisphere

We report the discovery of a bright (H=12.77) brown dwarf designated SIMP J013656.5+093347. The discovery was made as part of a near-infrared proper motion survey, SIMP (Sondage Infrarouge de Mouvement Propre), which uses proper motion and near-infrared/optical photometry to identify brown dwarf candidates. A low resolution (lambda/dlambda~40) spectrum of this brown dwarf covering the 0.88-2.35 microns wavelength interval is presented. Analysis of the spectrum indicates a spectral type of T2.5+/-0.5. A photometric distance of 6.4+/-0.3 pc is estimated assuming it is a single object. Current observations rule out a binary of mass ratio ~1 and separation >5 AU. SIMP 0136 is the brightest T dwarf in the northern hemisphere and is surpassed only by Eps Indi Bab over the whole sky. It is thus an excellent candidate for detailed studies and should become a benchmark object for the early-T spectral class.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, To be published in November 1, 2006 issue of ApJL. Following IAU recommendation, the survey acronym (IBIS) was changed to SIM

Towards Answering Climate Questionnaires from Unstructured Climate Reports

The topic of Climate Change (CC) has received limited attention in NLP despite its urgency. Activists and policymakers need NLP tools to effectively process the vast and rapidly growing unstructured textual climate reports into structured form. To tackle this challenge we introduce two new large-scale climate questionnaire datasets and use their existing structure to train self-supervised models. We conduct experiments to show that these models can learn to generalize to climate disclosures of different organizations types than seen during training. We then use these models to help align texts from unstructured climate documents to the semi-structured questionnaires in a human pilot study. Finally, to support further NLP research in the climate domain we introduce a benchmark of existing climate text classification datasets to better evaluate and compare existing models

Spitzer Photometry of WISE-Selected Brown Dwarf and Hyper-Luminous Infrared Galaxy Candidates

We present Spitzer 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m photometry and positions for a sample of 1510 brown dwarf candidates identified by the WISE all-sky survey. Of these, 166 have been spectroscopically classified as objects with spectral types M(1), L(7), T(146), and Y(12); Sixteen other objects are non-(sub)stellar in nature. The remainder are most likely distant L and T dwarfs lacking spectroscopic verification, other Y dwarf candidates still awaiting follow-up, and assorted other objects whose Spitzer photometry reveals them to be background sources. We present a catalog of Spitzer photometry for all astrophysical sources identified in these fields and use this catalog to identify 7 fainter (4.5 $\mu$m $\sim$ 17.0 mag) brown dwarf candidates, which are possibly wide-field companions to the original WISE sources. To test this hypothesis, we use a sample of 919 Spitzer observations around WISE-selected high-redshift hyper-luminous infrared galaxy (HyLIRG) candidates. For this control sample we find another 6 brown dwarf candidates, suggesting that the 7 companion candidates are not physically associated. In fact, only one of these 7 Spitzer brown dwarf candidates has a photometric distance estimate consistent with being a companion to the WISE brown dwarf candidate. Other than this there is no evidence for any widely separated ($>$ 20 AU) ultra-cool binaries. As an adjunct to this paper, we make available a source catalog of $\sim$ 7.33 $\times 10^5$ objects detected in all of these Spitzer follow-up fields for use by the astronomical community. The complete catalog includes the Spitzer 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m photometry, along with positionally matched $B$ and $R$ photometry from USNO-B; $J$, $H$, and $K_s$ photometry from 2MASS; and $W1$, $W2$, $W3$, and $W4$ photometry from the WISE all-sky catalog