Telling Miller’s Tale: A Reply to David Yassky

A recent article by Professor David Yassky suggests that there is a segment of legal academia that dissents from the Standard model and has started to generate alternatives to the Standard Model. Denning and Reynolds critique that part of Yassky\u27s theory dismissing United States v. Miller as providing the basis for an individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment

National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius: Five Takes

In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court found that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act-popularly known as Obamacare -was an unconstitutional assertion of Congress\u27 power to regulate commerce among the several states, but was nonetheless sustainable under Congress\u27 power to tax. This piece looks at some possible meanings and implications of the Supreme Court\u27s decision. Takes One and Two analogize Sebelius and two other famous cases-Marbury v. Madison and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke-whose opinions are held out as deftly straddling the line between principle and prudence. Takes Three and Four examine the opinion though the lens of constitutional theory, considering in particular whether the decision-Chief Justice John Roberts\u27 opinion especiallyserved what Charles Black called the Court\u27s legitimating function: quelling doubts about the Act\u27s constitutionality and, thus, its legitimacy. Finally, in Take Five, this piece considers whether the opinion\u27s peculiar construction handed the Administration a somewhat Pyrrhic victory while laying the foundation for robust judicially enforced limits on congressional power

Retconning Heller: Five Takes on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen was the first significant Second Amendment case that the Supreme Court had heard in nearly fifteen years since its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. This Article offers some preliminary observations about the opinion itself, as well as its likely effects, some of which are starting to manifest. Our first take concerns the question of opinion assignment. Why did Chief Justice Roberts—whose support for the Second Amendment has been suspect—assign the opinion to Justice Thomas? Takes Two and Three concern Justice Thomas’s substitution of text, history, and tradition for tiered security, and his call for courts to adopt analogical reasoning should the former fail to provide answers to resolve particular cases. In rejecting tiered scrutiny, Thomas argued that the lower courts had misread the Heller decision itself; that Heller rejected tiered security in favor of a textual, historical, and traditional inquiry. To make Bruen seem less like an abrupt departure, we argue, Justice Thomas had to “retcon” Heller—reading back into the latter decision the analytical framework adopted in Bruen. We also question how helpful his explanation of the method for analogizing to other extant gun regulations when history and tradition have run out is likely to be to lower courts who must rehear cases involving dozens of these laws in light of Bruen’s new standard. Take Four wonders about the status of what we earlier termed “the Heller safe harbor”—the list of “presumptively lawful” regulations that the Court said were not called into question by the decision. Critics at the time questioned whether these could be squared with the self-conscious originalism of the rest of the opinion. This tension is only heightened by Bruen’s text-history-tradition only approach. Finally, we look at the reaction of the lower courts post-Bruen. While approaches differ, a surprising number of these opinions seem to recognize Bruen for the sea change it portends and are attempting to implement it in good faith. Although, as was true with cases like United States v. Lopez and Heller itself, some courts are also trying to avoid the wider implications of Bruen using any available argument, however specious, and we detect in some an “uncivil obedience” intended to raise the Supreme Court’s costs of holding the line laid down in Bruen

The Constitutionality of State and Local Sanctions against Foreign Countries: Affairs State, States\u27 Affairs, or a Sorry State of Affairs?

Since the mid-1990s, many state and local governments have enacted a host of laws barring local governments\u27 procurement of goods and services from persons doing business with certain pariah governments, including Burma (Myanmar), the People\u27s Republic of China, Cuba, Nigeria and even Switzerland. Though ostensibly patterned after earlier laws, most notably longstanding Buy American laws and anti-apartheid laws of the 1980s, the latest wave of subnational sanctions statutes and ordinances is much broader in scope and application, raising troubling questions as to the constitutionality of such laws. An example is a Massachusetts statute forbidding the award of state contracts to companies with business ties to Myanmar. In November 1998, in National Foreign Trade Council v. Baker, the federal District Court for Massachusetts held that the statute encroached upon the Constitution\u27s assignment of plenary authority over foreign affairs to the federal government. The Baker decision has opened the possibility that many other examples of these laws will now be subjected to constitutional challenge. In this article, the authors analyze the constitutionality of state and local procurement sanctions on various grounds. The authors argue that such sanctions not only act as an unconstitutional infringement on the foreign affairs powers reserved to the federal government, as the Baker court held, but that they also violate the dormant Foreign Commerce Clause by impermissibly burdening foreign commerce. Contrary to suggestions that subnational sanctions are defensible under the market-participant exception to the dormant Commerce Clause, the authors conclude that such activities fall outside the intended scope of that exception

Cellular automaton rules conserving the number of active sites

This paper shows how to determine all the unidimensional two-state cellular automaton rules of a given number of inputs which conserve the number of active sites. These rules have to satisfy a necessary and sufficient condition. If the active sites are viewed as cells occupied by identical particles, these cellular automaton rules represent evolution operators of systems of identical interacting particles whose total number is conserved. Some of these rules, which allow motion in both directions, mimic ensembles of one-dimensional pseudo-random walkers. Numerical evidence indicates that the corresponding stochastic processes might be non-Gaussian.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Xk-Related Protein 8 and CED-8 Promote Phosphatidylserine Exposure in Apoptotic Cells

アポトーシス時のリン脂質暴露に関与する因子の同定. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2013-07-12.A classic feature of apoptotic cells is the cell-surface exposure of phosphatidylserine (PtdSer) as an "eat me" signal for engulfment. We show that the Xk-family protein Xkr8 mediates PtdSer exposure in response to apoptotic stimuli. Mouse Xkr8(-/-) cells or human cancer cells in which Xkr8 expression was repressed by hypermethylation failed to expose PtdSer during apoptosis and were inefficiently engulfed by phagocytes. Xkr8 was activated directly by caspases and required a caspase-3 cleavage site for its function. CED-8, the only Caenorhabditis elegans Xk-family homolog, also promoted apoptotic PtdSer exposure and cell-corpse engulfment. Thus, Xk-family proteins have evolutionarily conserved roles in promoting the phagocytosis of dying cells by altering the phospholipid distribution in the plasma membrane

Prochlo: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd

The large-scale monitoring of computer users' software activities has become commonplace, e.g., for application telemetry, error reporting, or demographic profiling. This paper describes a principled systems architecture---Encode, Shuffle, Analyze (ESA)---for performing such monitoring with high utility while also protecting user privacy. The ESA design, and its Prochlo implementation, are informed by our practical experiences with an existing, large deployment of privacy-preserving software monitoring. (cont.; see the paper

100 Years of Earth System Model Development

This is the final version. Available from American Meteorological Society via the DOI in this recordToday’s global Earth System Models began as simple regional models of tropospheric weather systems. Over the past century, the physical realism of the models has steadily increased, while the scope of the models has broadened to include the global troposphere and stratosphere, the ocean, the vegetated land surface, and terrestrial ice sheets. This chapter gives an approximately chronological account of the many and profound conceptual and technological advances that made today’s models possible. For brevity, we omit any discussion of the roles of chemistry and biogeochemistry, and terrestrial ice sheets