Federalism and the Limits on Regulating Products Liability Law, 1977-1981.

The political movement of the early 1980s that sought to increase manufacturer liability for defective products by converting state tort law into federal law raised core questions about federalism. The effort at wholesale federalization failed, and tort law has been (and largely remains) within the purview of the states. However, the tort federalization movement of the early 1980s, which by the end of that decade would become popularly known as tort reform, did result in federal legislation affecting tort law in America. This article attempts to explain why tort law was never fully federalized during this period and how the legislation that was enacted reduced the chances of tort law ever being federalized

Free-Speech Rights versus Property and Privacy Rights: Ag-Gag Laws and the Limits of Property Rights

Beginning in the 1990s, private agricultural firms, research institutions, and their political allies began seeking governmental protection from undercover investigations conducted by animal rights activists. Some state governments responded by enacting statutes that regulate undercover investigatory behavior, creating statutory prohibitions on trespasses and on evidence gathering without permission and requiring undercover investigators to quickly turn over evidence of animal abuse or face civil and criminal fines and penalties (Lin 2015, 474). To date, three such state laws-popularly known as ag-gag laws, a term used by critics of the laws-have been successfully challenged based on claims that they violate First Amendment free-speech rights, and most scholars have agreed with the analytical approach taken by federal courts\u27 doctrinal approach. However, in this article, using tort and property rights theory, I contend that so-called ag-gag laws are efforts to protect property rights that do not threaten free-speech rights. The doctrine applied by federal courts to date, the false speech doctrine, is an unwarranted expansion of speech protection that threatens to eviscerate the common-law rights of property owners to exclude others from their property and maintain their privacy. Ag-gag laws and the free-speech claims they have produced are important beyond the insular doctrinal debates among lawyers and judges. The expansion of the false-speech doctrine is a threat to private businesses, for-profit and nonprofit alike, because they are faced with the possibility of undercover investigations without recourse to the courts under traditional property rights protections

The Tort Revolution: Product Liability and the Rule of Courts

This dissertation is a history of the changes in tort law, specifically in products liability law, from the fault-based negligence standard to the no-fault strict liability standard. It covers a period from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. The historical questions this dissertation seeks to answer are i) what caused the change from negligence to strict liability, ii) who were the historical actors responsible for this change, iii) what was the political character of this change, and iv) what were the political consequences of this change. This dissertation reveals that the revolutionary expansion in product liability law in the states in the 1960s was the product of the Progressive ideologies of state court judges. During the Progressive Era, American legal education responded and adapted to the political climate of the wider society by adopting a new philosophical disposition regarding how the courts should address civil wrongs. The political and ideological responses to the industrialization of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century resulted in legal academics and practitioners advocating new ideologically oriented theories about how law does and should affect citizens. These theories, known as sociological jurisprudence and legal realism, became popular in American law schools. The law students of the 1920s became the judges and legal academics of the 1950s and 1960s. In the latter decades, Progressive state court judges instituted dramatic, revolutionary changes in the area of law known as torts, particularly products liability law. Products liability law was changed from a fault-based system to an insurance or no-fault system. These politically motivated changes in the courts had the unintended consequence of making a theretofore non-political issue into an inherently political issue, subjecting tort law to the pluralism of the American political system at the state and federal levels. Accordingly, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the process of legal change, and explores the methods by which social and political changes filter into court decisions

Spitzer/MIPS 24 μm Observations of HD 209458b: Three Eclipses, Two and a Half Transits, and a Phase Curve Corrupted by Instrumental Sensitivity Variations

We report the results of an analysis of all Spitzer/MIPS 24 μm observations of HD 209458b, one of the touchstone objects in the study of irradiated giant planet atmospheres. Altogether, we analyze two and a half transits, three eclipses, and a 58 hr near-continuous observation designed to detect the planet's thermal phase curve. The results of our analysis are: (1) a mean transit depth of 1.484% ± 0.033%, consistent with previous measurements and showing no evidence of variability in transit depth at the 3% level. (2) A mean eclipse depth of 0.338% ± 0.026%, somewhat higher than that previously reported for this system; this new value brings observations into better agreement with models. From this eclipse depth we estimate an average dayside brightness temperature of 1320 ± 80 K; the dayside flux shows no evidence of variability at the 12% level. (3) Eclipses in the system occur 32 ± 129 s earlier than would be expected from a circular orbit, which constrains the orbital quantity ecos ω to be 0.00004 ± 0.00033. This result is fully consistent with a circular orbit and sets an upper limit of 140 m s^(–1) (3σ) on any eccentricity-induced velocity offset during transit. The phase curve observations (including one of the transits) exhibit an anomalous trend similar to the detector ramp seen in previous Spitzer/IRAC observations; by modeling this ramp we recover the system parameters for this transit. The long-duration photometry which follows the ramp and transit exhibits a gradual ~0.2% decrease in flux over ~30 hr. This effect is similar to that seen in pre-launch calibration data taken with the 24 μm array and is better fit by an instrumental model than a model invoking planetary emission. The large uncertainties associated with this poorly understood, likely instrumental effect prevent us from usefully constraining the planet's thermal phase curve. Our observations highlight the need for a thorough understanding of detector-related instrumental effects on long timescales when making the high-precision mid-infrared measurements planned for future missions such as EChO, SPICA, and the James Webb Space Telescope

TITAN Wireless Camera Control System

The Titan Camera Control System is an eletromechanical device that allows the user to wirelessly control a camera’s digital operations as well as physical orientation through the use of a mobile device application. The Titan system accepts input in the form of virtual user commands on the mobile app and performs system output in the form of sending photos/video from the camera back to the app as well as changing the orientation of the camera in accordance with the user’s commands

Effect of milk type and processing on iodine concentration of organic and conventional winter milk at retail: implications for nutrition

Milk is the largest source of iodine in UK diets and an earlier study showed that organic summer milk had significantly lower iodine concentration than conventional milk. There are no comparable studies with winter milk or the effect of milk fat class or heat processing method. Two retail studies with winter milk are reported. Study 1 showed no effect of fat class but organic milk was 32.2% lower in iodine than conventional milk (404 vs. 595 μg/L; P < 0.001). Study 2 found no difference between conventional and Channel Island milk but organic milk contained 35.5% less iodine than conventional milk (474 vs. 306 μg/L; P < 0.001). UHT and branded organic milk also had lower iodine concentrations than conventional milk (331 μg/L; P < 0.001 and 268 μg/L: P < 0.0001 respectively). The results indicate that replacement of conventional milk by organic or UHT milk will increase the risk of sub-optimal iodine status especially for pregnant/lactating women

The Heating of Test Particles in Numerical Simulations of Alfvenic Turbulence

We study the heating of charged test particles in three-dimensional numerical simulations of weakly compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence (``Alfvenic turbulence''); these results are relevant to particle heating and acceleration in the solar wind, solar flares, accretion disks onto black holes, and other astrophysics and heliospheric environments. The physics of particle heating depends on whether the gyrofrequency of a particle is comparable to the frequency of a turbulent fluctuation that is resolved on the computational domain. Particles with these frequencies nearly equal undergo strong perpendicular heating (relative to the local magnetic field) and pitch angle scattering. By contrast, particles with large gyrofrequency undergo strong parallel heating. Simulations with a finite resistivity produce additional parallel heating due to parallel electric fields in small-scale current sheets. Many of our results are consistent with linear theory predictions for the particle heating produced by the Alfven and slow magnetosonic waves that make up Alfvenic turbulence. However, in contrast to linear theory predictions, energy exchange is not dominated by discrete resonances between particles and waves; instead, the resonances are substantially ``broadened.'' We discuss the implications of our results for solar and astrophysics problems, in particular the thermodynamics of the near-Earth solar wind. We conclude that Alfvenic turbulence produces significant parallel heating via the interaction between particles and magnetic field compressions (``slow waves''). However, on scales above the proton Larmor radius, Alfvenic turbulence does not produce significant perpendicular heating of protons or minor ions.Comment: Submitted to Ap

Constraints on the Atmospheric Circulation and Variability of the Eccentric Hot Jupiter XO-3b

We report secondary eclipse photometry of the hot Jupiter XO-3b in the 4.5~$\mu$m band taken with the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on the Spitzer Space Telescope. We measure individual eclipse depths and center of eclipse times for a total of twelve secondary eclipses. We fit these data simultaneously with two transits observed in the same band in order to obtain a global best-fit secondary eclipse depth of $0.1580\pm 0.0036\%$ and a center of eclipse phase of $0.67004\pm 0.00013$. We assess the relative magnitude of variations in the dayside brightness of the planet by measuring the size of the residuals during ingress and egress from fitting the combined eclipse light curve with a uniform disk model and place an upper limit of 0.05$\%$. The new secondary eclipse observations extend the total baseline from one and a half years to nearly three years, allowing us to place an upper limit on the periastron precession rate of $2.9\times 10^{-3}$ degrees/day the tightest constraint to date on the periastron precession rate of a hot Jupiter. We use the new transit observations to calculate improved estimates for the system properties, including an updated orbital ephemeris. We also use the large number of secondary eclipses to obtain the most stringent limits to date on the orbit-to-orbit variability of an eccentric hot Jupiter and demonstrate the consistency of multiple-epoch Spitzer observations.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, published by Ap