Is the Rehnquist Court an Activist Court? The Commerce Cause Cases

In United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court, for the first time in sixty years, declared an act of Congress unconstitutional because Congress had exceeded its powers under the Commerce Clause. In 2000, the Court reaffirmed the stance it took in Lopez in the case of United States v. Morrison, once again finding that Congress had exceeded its powers. Are these examples of something properly called judicial activism ? To answer this question, we must clarify the meaning of the term judicial activism. With this meaning in hand, the author examines the Court\u27s Commerce Clause cases. The answer he gives to the question of whether the Rehnquist Court is an activist court is no

Obituary: Jacob Brodzinsky (January 17,1918 - February 25, 2003)

Earlier this year, at the age of 85, Major Jacob Brodzinsky passed away at his home in Santo Domingo. It is with great sadness that I write this obituary, because Jake was a great personal friend and professional colleague for over 30 years. He leaves a wife, Marianela (Mañeña) Lopez-Penha, whom he married on April 26,1964, and two lovely daughters, Sibylla and Raquel

Toward Determining ATPase Mechanism in ABC Transporters: Development of the Reaction Path–Force Matching QM/MM Method

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-binding cassette (ABC) transporters are ubiquitous ATP-dependent membrane proteins involved in translocations of a wide variety of substrates across cellular membranes. To understand the chemomechanical coupling mechanism as well as functional asymmetry in these systems, a quantitative description of how ABC transporters hydrolyze ATP is needed. Complementary to experimental approaches, computer simulations based on combined quantum mechanical and molecular mechanical (QM/MM) potentials have provided new insights into the catalytic mechanism in ABC transporters. Quantitatively reliable determination of the free energy requirement for enzymatic ATP hydrolysis, however, requires substantial statistical sampling on QM/MM potential. A case study shows that brute force sampling of ab initio QM/MM (AI/MM) potential energy surfaces is computationally impractical for enzyme simulations of ABC transporters. On the other hand, existing semiempirical QM/MM (SE/MM) methods, although affordable for free energy sampling, are unreliable for studying ATP hydrolysis. To close this gap, a multiscale QM/MM approach named reaction path-force matching (RP-FM) has been developed. In RP-FM, specific reaction parameters for a selected SE method are optimized against AI reference data along reaction paths by employing the force matching technique. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated for a proton transfer reaction in the gas phase and in solution. The RP-FM method may offer a general tool for simulating complex enzyme systems such as ABC transporters

Limiting Raich

On Monday, November 29th, 2004, at 10:30 a.m., I rose to argue the case of Gonzales v. Raich in the Supreme Court on behalf of Angel Raich and Diane Monson. On Monday, June 6th, 2005, at 10:00 a.m., the Court announced its decision. Even today it is painful to read the opinions in the case. I am saddened for my clients, and the thousands like them, whose suffering is alleviated by the use of cannabis for medical purposes, as recommended by their physicians and permitted by the laws of their states, but who are nevertheless considered criminals by the federal government. I am saddened for the millions of voters in the ten states who enacted compassionate relief laws to allow these seriously ill persons to obtain cannabis without becoming criminals, at least under state law. And I am saddened for the Constitution, which established a system of limited and enumerated powers that had been virtually eliminated since the 1940s before being partially revived in the cases of United States v. Lopei and United States v. Morrison. . . . with its decision in Raich, six justices at once dashed the hopes of medical cannabis users and those who believe in the value of federalism to protect individual liberty. Given this setback, what hope is left for the principle of limited national power, so staunchly endorsed by the late-Chief Justice Rehnquist in his opinions in Lopez and Morrison? Will the New Federalism survive the demise of its greatest champion? The superb articles in this Symposium do little to raise hopes. They argue alternatively that Lopez and Morrison never comprised a serious federalism revival, that the doctrines announced by these cases were too unstable to have lasted, or that little, if anything, of these cases survives the Court\u27s ruling in Raich. In this Foreword, I do not mean to take issue with any of these contentions, except perhaps the last, and I urge serious students of the Constitution to read each and every article in this issue. Instead, I intend to describe how a future majority of the Supreme Court, once again willing to apply the first principles,,6 announced by the Chief Justice in Lopez and reaffirmed in Morrison-principles that no Supreme Court in our history has ever expressly disclaimed--can limit the Court\u27s decision in Raich. Where there is a will to do so, there is certainly a way

Editorial: Security and privacy in Internet of Things

J. M. de Fuentes, L. Gonzalez-Manzano and P. Peris-Lopez have been partially supported by MINECO grants TIN2013-46469-R and TIN2016-79095-C2-2-R, and CAM grant S2013/ICE-3095