Deconstructing Carmona: The U.S. War on Drugs and Black Men as Non-Citizens

Article published in the VaLaw U.Law Review

Brown v. Board of Education and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius: A Comparative Analysis of Social Change

Article published in the U. Ark. Little Rock Law Review

An Ever Closer Union? Examining The Evolution Of The Integration Of European Equity Markets Via Minimum Spanning Trees

The concept of a minimum spanning tree (MST) is used to study the process of comovements for 21 European Union stock market indices. We show how the asset tree and its related hierarchical tree evolve over time and describe the dynamics. Over the period studied, 1999-2006, the French equity market provides the main linkages in the system. The 2004 Accession states are more loosely connected to the other markets; they form two groupings, with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland having tighter links to the main markets than the remaining accession markets. The consequence for global investors is a potential reduction of the benefits of international portfolio diversification in European markets, with the possible exception of those markets at the outer limits of the MST.Minimum Spanning Tree, Equity Market Integration, Europe, Econophysics

The Case for a Reparations Clinic: A Proposal for Investigation, Documentation, and Remediation of Historic Housing Discrimination Through the Law School Clinic Model

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

The Case for a Reparations Clinic: A Proposal for Investigation, Documentation, and Remediation of Historic Housing Discrimination Through the Law School Clinic Model

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Comparative Genomics of Vancomycin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Strains and Their Positions within the Clade Most Commonly Associated with Methicillin-Resistant S. aureus Hospital-Acquired Infection in the United States

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains are leading causes of hospital-acquired infections in the United States, and clonal cluster 5 (CC5) is the predominant lineage responsible for these infections. Since 2002, there have been 12 cases of vancomycin-resistant S. aureus (VRSA) infection in the United States—all CC5 strains. To understand this genetic background and what distinguishes it from other lineages, we generated and analyzed high-quality draft genome sequences for all available VRSA strains. Sequence comparisons show unambiguously that each strain independently acquired Tn1546 and that all VRSA strains last shared a common ancestor over 50 years ago, well before the occurrence of vancomycin resistance in this species. In contrast to existing hypotheses on what predisposes this lineage to acquire Tn1546, the barrier posed by restriction systems appears to be intact in most VRSA strains. However, VRSA (and other CC5) strains were found to possess a constellation of traits that appears to be optimized for proliferation in precisely the types of polymicrobic infection where transfer could occur. They lack a bacteriocin operon that would be predicted to limit the occurrence of non-CC5 strains in mixed infection and harbor a cluster of unique superantigens and lipoproteins to confound host immunity. A frameshift in dprA, which in other microbes influences uptake of foreign DNA, may also make this lineage conducive to foreign DNA acquisition