Protecting Natural Resources - Forever: The Obligations of State Officials to Uphold Forever Constitutional Provisions

This Article analyzes the attacks on a state constitutional conservation lands program since the election of a governor and state legislature opposed to environmental regulation in 2010 – a precursor to current happenings at the federal level under the Trump administration. Former Florida Governor Rick Scott and his administration have spent an average of over $40 million a year in taxpayer money to defend and, in most cases, pay judgments, in lawsuits challenging mandates of the Florida Constitution. I examine this issue of ignoring or deliberately violating constitutional requirements through the lens of state constitutional provisions that protect natural resources, focusing on Florida and New York. Both states have explicit and specific protections for conservation and forest lands, which differ from constitutional provisions in other states that establish policies and delegate implementation authority to state legislatures. New York adopted its Forever Wild constitutional provision in 1894, and the text of that provision has remained intact, despite attempts to amend the provision or to pass legislation that would violate it. In Florida, there are two constitutional provisions that protect conservation lands under the Florida Forever program. This program has widespread public support and, at its inception, had non-partisan political support as well, until Rick Scott was elected to be governor. During his tenure, there have been repeated attempts to sell or trade conservation lands protected under the Florida Constitution. Instead of spending taxpayer money to defend violations of these constitutional provisions, Florida state officials should uphold the oaths they made to “support, protect, and defend” the state constitution. Natural resource protections in the Florida and New York constitutions provide noteworthy guidance for other states to initiate constitutional amendments for similar protections. In addition, there should be personal repercussions for state officials who willfully violate these state constitutional commands and restitution of taxpayer money spent to defend unlawful behavior

The Ideal Psychiatry Training Program: A Resident\u27s Viewpoint

The journey between medical school graduation and specialty board certification in one\u27s chosen field of medicine may comprise the most challenging, exciting and important times of a young professional\u27s life. This journey is called residency education. While the most obvious objectives are cognitive education and practice in the field, trainees also face fundamental life challenges such as developing identity, intimacy and a direction for their own generative goals in the world. Psychiatry residency should be viewed as a personal as well as professional developmental process (1). It contains all of the turbulence of adolescence revisited (2), where normative crises (3) can be expected to occur. This journey through fundamental stages of emotional development actually begins long before one enters residency (4), but dealing with disorders of thought, behavior and action will constitute a major challenge to the trainee\u27s identity. Yager (5) contends that some degree of identity crisis may in fact be beneficial to growth, but that training programs should identify and control factors which magnify this crisis unnecessarily. Taintor et al (6) discussed specific stress factors and their contributions to personal and professional growth. An excellent paper by Lindy (7) presented a training director\u27s perspective on a phase-specific model for psychiatric training based on maturational steps

Vortex Noise from Rotating Cylindrical Rods

A series of round rods of the some diameter were rotated individually about the mid-point of each rod. Vortices are shed from the rods when in motion, giving rise to the emission of sound. With the rotating system placed in the open air, the distribution of sound in space, the acoustical power output, and the spectral distribution have been studied. The frequency of emission of vortices from any point on the rod is given by the formula von Karman. From the spectrum estimates are made of the distribution of acoustical power along the rod, the amount of air concerned in sound production, the "equivalent size" of the vortices, and the acoustical energy content for each vortex

Tunable, Functional Diblock Copolypeptide Hydrogels Based on Methionine Homologs.

The preparation of new diblock copolypeptide hydrogels derived from homologs of l-methionine, that is, l-homomethionine and l-6-(methylthio)-l-norleucine is described. Compared to l-methionine residues, use of l-methionine homologs allow improved copolymerization with l-leucine residues to give well-defined block copolypeptides. These copolypeptides are subsequently modified using robust thioether alkylation reactions employing a variety of functional epoxides, which yield samples capable of forming transparent, self-healing hydrogels in water. The facile variation of different functional epoxides for postpolymerization modification is found to allow predictable functionalization and tuning of hydrogel properties by the modification of simple precursors

The Big Chill: Are Public Participation Rights Being Slapp-Ed?

This article focuses on the Petition Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and addresses a confounding situation caused by Supreme Court precedents that give greater protection to persons who engage in illegal business practices than to citizens who petition their governments. This dichotomy is especially detrimental to environmental protection. The crux of the conflict lies in which standard courts should use to determine whether the petitioning activity is protected: the subjective Free Speech standard grafted onto Petition Clause activities or the objective standard initially developed by the Supreme Court for petition activities in antitrust cases. The result has been the application of the subjective standard for tort allegations, including business torts, and the objective standard for alleged illegal business practices. The Supreme Court’s failure to protect petition activities in some cases has resulted in a phenomenon known as SLAPPs, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. The essential characteristic of these lawsuits is that the litigant, usually a business, does not bring the lawsuit to win; the lawsuit is brought to make it costly and difficult for the petitioner to protest for fear of being enmeshed in a protracted legal proceeding. Unfortunately, many environmental activists have tort claims brought against them, especially when the economic stakes are high. The difficulties presented in defending against tort allegations have significantly chilled citizen engagement with their governments on a variety of issues, but a major portion of SLAPPs involve environmental concerns. This article also examines the myriad of state laws enacted to prevent chilling citizen petition activities, along with the recently released Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA). Many states have enacted anti-SLAPP laws, but those laws vary widely plus not all states have them. The resulting gaps mean that the choice of forum has a significant impact on how protected a citizen’s petitioning activities are from a SLAPP. Widespread adoption of UPEPA should help to reduce some procedural differences by creating uniform rules for court management of these lawsuits. However, UPEPA’s definition section could perpetuate the disparate treatment of tort and illegal business petitioning activities. To give citizens the full benefit of their rights under the Petition Clause, courts should create a uniform rule, applying the objective standard developed in antitrust cases to all Petition Clauses activities. This solution would raise a question with which the Supreme Court has struggled before: whether protections of the Speech and Petition Clauses should be treated the same. In the two Supreme Court decisions addressing this issue, the Court did so but clearly struggled to reach that conclusion in the more recent case. It also limited its holding to the situation presented in that case: whether an individual government employee could bring an employment claim under the Petition Clause that was barred by the Free Speech Clause. The result of the Court’s application of Free Speech standards to Petition Clause cases brought by government employees, however, perpetuates an inequality in the application of the Petition Clause overall: greater protection for people who may engage in illegal business practices than for citizens seeking to protect the environment. To address the demonstrable and significant chilling effect on citizen participation in governance, courts should apply the objective Noerr-Pennington standard to Petition Clause cases related to all forms of governmental regulation

Rapid, quantitative determination of bacteria in water

A bioluminescent assay for ATP in water borne bacteria is made by adding nitric acid to a water sample with concentrated bacteria to rupture the bacterial cells. The sample is diluted with sterile, deionized water, then mixed with a luciferase-luciferin mixture and the resulting light output of the bioluminescent reaction is measured and correlated with bacteria present. A standard and a blank also are presented so that the light output can be correlated to bacteria in the sample and system noise can be substracted from the readings. A chemiluminescent assay for iron porphyrins in water borne bacteria is made by adding luminol reagent to a water sample with concentrated bacteria and measuring the resulting light output of the chemiluminescent reaction