Lochner, Lawrence, and Liberty

Many of the states of the United States have statutes, constitutional provisions, and court decisions that deny individuals the right to have a family, specifically a spouse and children, based on sexual orientation. Advocates have made a wide variety of arguments attacking such restrictions. Scholars and litigants frequently argue that such acts violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection or invade a constitutional right to privacy. However, such arguments are often defeated by counter arguments presented with religious, moral, and even emotional fervor. This article presents and defends a new analytical framework based on liberty of contract to advance gay rights. The context explored in this article for this new paradigm is the area of gay rights to family. Thus, this article will begin in Part I by presenting a survey of the primary encroachments on the liberty of gay people to enter into formal arrangements to create a family. Part II of this article will discuss the Lochner decision and develop its potential for renewed application. Part II will also discuss the philosophy and history that led up to that decision and certain other decisions from that era. Finally, Part II will present critical analyses of the downfall of Lochner and its analytical framework. The goal of this part is to explain the meaning of the Lochnerian liberty of contract interest. Part III will explain that many of the traditional criticisms of Lochner are unfounded and are currently being re-considered by scholars. Part III will admit to certain shortcomings of the traditional Lochner framework but will set forth more fully the modification to that framework outlined briefly a bove, making the framework more balanced and appropriate for use by modern courts. Part III will then apply that approach to gay rights to family, hypothesizing the results in each of the three main areas under inquiry here: rights to marry, adopt, and enter into surrogacy arrangements. Finally, this article will conclude in part with a summary of what has been considered. It will then make some final remarks about the potential usefulness of a modified Lochnerian approach to liberty of contract, and thus to liberty itself

Simplifying the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act: If a Sovereign Acts like a Private Party, Treat It like One

This Article will begin in Section II by giving an overview of the development and structure of the FSIA. Section II will explain how the United States moved from its position in the nineteenth century of absolute sovereign immunity to the more appropriate restrictive theory of immunity that is embodied in the FSIA. Section III will then explain in detail why the current framework of the commercial activities exception to the FSIA is problematic. In this Section, the leading cases that have attempted to interpret the commercial activities exception to the FSIA will be analyzed. Finally, Section IV will present and support an argument for an alternative structure to the commercial activities exception of the FSIA, a more rational approach that simply treats a foreign sovereign like a private party when and if it acts like one. While the alternative structure could and should be introduced by way of a statutory amendment to the FSIA, this Article will also argue that pending such an amendment, courts should interpret the language of the current FSIA in a way that leads to the same results

Lochner, Lawrence, and Liberty

Many of the states of the United States have statutes, constitutional provisions, and court decisions that deny individuals the right to have a family, specifically a spouse and children, based on sexual orientation. Advocates have made a wide variety of arguments attacking such restrictions. Scholars and litigants frequently argue that such acts violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection or invade a constitutional right to privacy. However, such arguments are often defeated by counter arguments presented with religious, moral, and even emotional fervor. This article presents and defends a new analytical framework based on liberty of contract to advance gay rights. The context explored in this article for this new paradigm is the area of gay rights to family. Thus, this article will begin in Part I by presenting a survey of the primary encroachments on the liberty of gay people to enter into formal arrangements to create a family. Part II of this article will discuss the Lochner decision and develop its potential for renewed application. Part II will also discuss the philosophy and history that led up to that decision and certain other decisions from that era. Finally, Part II will present critical analyses of the downfall of Lochner and its analytical framework. The goal of this part is to explain the meaning of the Lochnerian liberty of contract interest. Part III will explain that many of the traditional criticisms of Lochner are unfounded and are currently being re-considered by scholars. Part III will admit to certain shortcomings of the traditional Lochner framework but will set forth more fully the modification to that framework outlined briefly a bove, making the framework more balanced and appropriate for use by modern courts. Part III will then apply that approach to gay rights to family, hypothesizing the results in each of the three main areas under inquiry here: rights to marry, adopt, and enter into surrogacy arrangements. Finally, this article will conclude in part with a summary of what has been considered. It will then make some final remarks about the potential usefulness of a modified Lochnerian approach to liberty of contract, and thus to liberty itself

The Narrow-band Ultraviolet Imaging Experiment for Wide-field Surveys (NUVIEWS)-I: Dust scattered continuum

We report on the first results of the Narrow-band Ultraviolet Imaging Experiment for Wide-field Surveys (NUVIEWS), a sounding rocket experiment designed to map the far-ultraviolet background in four narrow bands. This is the first imaging measurement of the UV background to cover a substantial fraction of the sky. The narrow band responses (145, 155, 161, and 174 nm, 7-10 nm wide) allow us to isolate background contributions from dust-scattered continuum, H2 fluorescence, and CIV 155 nm emission. In our first flight, we mapped one quarter of the sky with 5-10 arcminute imaging resolution. In this paper, we model the dominant contribution of the background, dust-scattered continuum. Our data base consists of a map of over 10,000 sq. degrees with 468 independent measurements in 6.25 by 6.25 sq. degree bins. Stars and instrumental stellar halos are removed from the data. We present a map of the continuum background obtained in the 174 nm telescope. We use a model that follows Witt, Friedman, and Sasseen (1997: WFS) to account for the inhomogeneous radiation field and multiple scattering effects in clouds. We find that the dust in the diffuse interstellar medium displays a moderate albedo (a=0.55+/-0.1) and highly forward scattering phase function parameter (g=0.75+/-0.1) over a large fraction of the sky, similar to dust in star forming regions. We also have discovered a significant variance from the model.Comment: 16 pages, 3 ps figures, submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letter

Higgs Boson Exempt No-Scale Supersymmetry and its Collider and Cosmology Implications

One of the most straightforward ways to address the flavor problem of low-energy supersymmetry is to arrange for the scalar soft terms to vanish simultaneously at a scale $M_{c}$ much larger than the electroweak scale. This occurs naturally in a number of scenarios, such as no-scale models, gaugino mediation, and several models with strong conformal dynamics. Unfortunately, the most basic version of this approach that incorporates gaugino mass unification and zero scalar masses at the grand unification scale is not compatible with collider and dark matter constraints. However, experimental constraints can be satisfied if we exempt the Higgs bosons from flowing to zero mass value at the high scale. We survey the theoretical constructions that allow this, and investigate the collider and dark matter consequences. A generic feature is that the sleptons are relatively light. Because of this, these models frequently give a significant contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, and neutralino-slepton coannihilation can play an important role in obtaining an acceptable dark matter relic density. Furthermore, the light sleptons give rise to a large multiplicity of lepton events at colliders, including a potentially suggestive clean trilepton signal at the Tevatron, and a substantial four lepton signature at the LHC.Comment: 36 pages, 16 figure

Higgs Boson Decays to Neutralinos in Low-Scale Gauge Mediation

We study the decays of a standard model-like MSSM Higgs boson to pairs of neutralinos, each of which subsequently decays promptly to a photon and a gravitino. Such decays can arise in supersymmetric scenarios where supersymmetry breaking is mediated to us by gauge interactions with a relatively light gauge messenger sector (M_{mess} < 100 TeV). This process gives rise to a collider signal consisting of a pair of photons and missing energy. In the present work we investigate the bounds on this scenario within the minimal supersymmetric standard model from existing collider data. We also study the prospects for discovering the Higgs boson through this decay mode with upcoming data from the Tevatron and the LHC.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, added references and discussion of neutralino couplings, same as journal versio