“Inextricably Intertwined” Explicable at Last?: Rooker-Feldman Analysis After the Supreme Court’s Exxon Mobil Decision

The Supreme Court\u27s March 2005 decision in \u27Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp.\u27 substantially limited the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, under which lower federal courts largely lack jurisdiction to engage in what amounts to de facto review of state-court decisions. Exxon Mobil\u27s holding is quite narrow--entry of a final state-court judgment does not destroy federal-court jurisdiction already acquired over parallel litigation. But the Court\u27s articulation of when Rooker-Feldman applies, and its approach in deciding the case, have significant implications for several aspects of Rooker-Feldman jurisprudence. Chief among our claims is that although the Court did not expressly repudiate or limit the applicability of the inextricably intertwined formulation from prior cases, which had been a primary test for many lower courts, that concept appears to have been relegated to some secondary role and no longer to be a general or threshold test. The Exxon Mobil Court properly did not elaborate on just what the concept\u27s role should be, but we offer a suggestion based on an earlier Ninth Circuit decision. We also discuss the apparent impact of Exxon Mobil on other aspects of Rooker-Feldman doctrine as the lower federal courts had developed it, including relation to preclusion doctrines, the significance of whether the federal plaintiff was plaintiff or defendant in state court, and the doctrine\u27s applicability a) to those not parties to prior state-court litigation, b) to interlocutory state-court rulings and decisions of lower state courts, and c) when federal-court plaintiffs did not raise their federal claims in state court. A February 2006 per curiam decision applying Exxon Mobil, Lance v. Dennis, reinforces the Court\u27s position on some of these issues

A comparison of spectroscopic methods for detecting starlight scattered by transiting hot Jupiters, with application to Subaru data for HD 209458b and HD 189733b

The measurement of the light scattered from extrasolar planets informs atmospheric and formation models. With the discovery of many hot Jupiter planets orbiting nearby stars, this motivates the development of robust methods of characterisation from follow up observations. In this paper we discuss two methods for determining the planetary albedo in transiting systems. First, the most widely used method for measuring the light scattered by hot Jupiters (Collier Cameron et al.) is investigated for application for typical echelle spectra of a transiting planet system, showing that detection requires high signal-to-noise ratio data of bright planets. Secondly a new Fourier analysis method is also presented, which is model-independent and utilises the benefits of the reduced number of unknown parameters in transiting systems. This approach involves solving for the planet and stellar spectra in Fourier space by least-squares. The sensitivities of the methods are determined via Monte Carlo simulations for a range of planet-to-star fluxes. We find the Fourier analysis method to be better suited to the ideal case of typical observations of a well constrained transiting system than the Collier Cameron et al. method. We apply the Fourier analysis method for extracting the light scattered by transiting hot Jupiters from high resolution spectra to echelle spectra of HD 209458 and HD 189733. Unfortunately we are unable to improve on the previous upper limit of the planet-to-star flux for HD 209458b set by space-based observations. A 1{\sigma}upper limit on the planet-to-star flux of HD 189733b is measured in the wavelength range of 558.83-599.56 nm yielding {\epsilon} < 4.5 \times 10-4. Improvement in the measurement of the upper limit of the planet-to-star flux of this system, with ground-based capabilities, requires data with a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and increased stability of the telescope.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in press. Accepted 2011 March 17. Received 2011 March 17; in original form 2010 June 2

On elementary and composite particles

Imperial Users onl

Kepler Observations of Transiting Hot Compact Objects

Kepler photometry has revealed two unusual transiting companions orbiting an early A-star and a late B-star. In both cases the occultation of the companion is deeper than the transit. The occultation and transit with follow-up optical spectroscopy reveal a 9400 K early A-star, KOI-74 (KIC 6889235), with a companion in a 5.2 day orbit with a radius of 0.08 Rsun and a 10000 K late B-star KOI-81 (KIC 8823868) that has a companion in a 24 day orbit with a radius of 0.2 Rsun. We infer a temperature of 12250 K for KOI-74b and 13500 K for KOI-81b. We present 43 days of high duty cycle, 30 minute cadence photometry, with models demonstrating the intriguing properties of these object, and speculate on their nature.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ApJL (updated to correct KOI74 lightcurve

Kepler-7b: A Transiting Planet with Unusually Low Density

We report the discovery and confirmation of Kepler-7b, a transiting planet with unusually low density. The mass is less than half that of Jupiter, Mp = 0.43 Mj, but the radius is fifty percent larger, Rp = 1.48 Rj. The resulting density, 0.17 g/cc, is the second lowest reported so far for an extrasolar planet. The orbital period is fairly long, P = 4.886 days, and the host star is not much hotter than the Sun, Teff = 6000 K. However, it is more massive and considerably larger than the sun, Mstar = 1.35 Msun and Rstar = 1.84 Rsun, and must be near the end of its life on the Main Sequence.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figure

A history of Winthrop, Massachusetts

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1939. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Edward Rowe Snow Correspondence

Entries include brief biographical information and an evocative, handwritten biographical letter describing her Iowa birth on a covered wagon journey and subsequent move to Peaceful Valley Farm in Exeter, Maine

Synthesis of neopentyl derivatives of triphenyl carbinol and the kinetics of Bamberger's reaction

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston UniversityThe following new compounds were prepared by adaptations of standard methods: p-neopentylphenyldiphenyl carbinol, di-p-neopentylphenylphenyl carbinol, tri-p-neopentylphenyl carbinol, m-neopentylphenyldiphenyl carbinol, and di-m-neopentylphenylphenylmethyl chloride. The preparation of tri-m-neopentylphenyl carbinol was attempted unsuccessfully. Other compounds prepared for the first time as intermediates in these preparations are o- and p-nitroneopentylbenzene, o- and p-aminoneopentylbenzene, o-acetaminoneopentylbenzene, m-bromoneopentylbenzene, 3,5-di-bromoneopentylbenzene, 3-bromo-4-acetaminoneopentylbenzene, 3-bromo-4-aminoneopentylbenzene, p-bromoneopentylbenzene, p,p'-dineopentylbiphenyl, and ethyl-p-neopentylphenyldiphenylmethyl ether. [TRUNCATED