The American Civil Rights Tradition: Anticlassification or Antisubordination?

With the publication of Groups and the Equal Protection Clause, Owen Fiss inaugurated the antisubordination tradition in legal scholarship of the Second Reconstruction. Antisubordination theorists contend that guarantees of equal citizenship cannot be realized under conditions of pervasive social stratification and argue that law should reform institutions and practices that enforce the secondary social status of historically oppressed groups. As elaborated by Fiss and subsequent proponents, including Catharine MacKinnon, Charles Lawrence, Derrick Bell, Laurence Tribe, and Kenneth Karst, this principle is variously called the antisubordination principle, the antisubjugation principle, the equal citizenship principle, or the anticaste principle. The latter expression evokes the famous statement of John Marshall Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson that there is no caste in the United States, as well statements made by framers of the Fourteenth Amendment that the amendment was designed to prohibit “class legislation” and practices that reduce groups to the position of a lower or disfavored caste. Fiss called his version of the antisubordination approach the “group disadvantaging principle” and he defined it as the principle that laws may not “aggravate” or “perpetuate” “the subordinate status of a specially disadvantaged group.

Principles, Practices, and Social Movements

Consider two current controversies in American law and politics: the first is whether the expansion of copyright, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property conflicts with the free speech principle; the second is whether government collection and use of racial data (in the census or in law enforcement) violates the antidiscrimination principle. What do these controversies have in common? Both involve constitutional challenges that call into question the legitimacy of existing practices. More importantly, these examples teach us something about how constitutional principles operate. In each case, controversy arises as people apply a longstanding principle to a longstanding practice—a practice that heretofore has not been understood to be implicated by the principle. People exercise creativity by applying the principles to these previously uncontroversial practices, and as they do, they can reshape the meaning of both the principle and the practice

The Robertson v. Princeton Case: Too Important to Be Left to the Lawyers

Offers comments from eleven contributors on the Robertson family's donor rights suit against the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for violation of donor intent. Explores its effects on and implications for the nonprofit sector

Thermodynamic Profiles of Galaxy Clusters from a Joint X-ray/SZ Analysis

We jointly analyze Bolocam Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect and Chandra X-ray data for a set of 45 clusters to derive gas density and temperature profiles without using spectroscopic information. The sample spans the mass and redshift range $3 \times 10^{14} M_{\odot} \le M_{500} \le 25 \times 10^{14} M_{\odot}$ and $0.15\le z \le 0.89$. We define cool-core (CC) and non-cool core (NCC) subsamples based on the central X-ray luminosity, and 17/45 clusters are classified as CC. In general, the profiles derived from our analysis are found to be in good agreement with previous analyses, and profile constraints beyond $r_{500}$ are obtained for 34/45 clusters. In approximately 30% of the CC clusters our analysis shows a central temperature drop with a statistical significance of $>3\sigma$; this modest detection fraction is due mainly to a combination of coarse angular resolution and modest S/N in the SZ data. Most clusters are consistent with an isothermal profile at the largest radii near $r_{500}$, although 9/45 show a significant temperature decrease with increasing radius. The sample mean density profile is in good agreement with previous studies, and shows a minimum intrinsic scatter of approximately 10% near $0.5 \times r_{500}$. The sample mean temperature profile is consistent with isothermal, and has an intrinsic scatter of approximately 50% independent of radius. This scatter is significantly higher compared to earlier X-ray-only studies, which find intrinsic scatters near 10%, likely due to a combination of unaccounted for non-idealities in the SZ noise, projection effects, and sample selection.Comment: 42 pages, 52 figure

A Comparison and Joint Analysis of Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Measurements from Planck and Bolocam for a set of 47 Massive Galaxy Clusters

We measure the SZ signal toward a set of 47 clusters with a median mass of $9.5 \times 10^{14}$ M$_{\odot}$ and a median redshift of 0.40 using data from Planck and the ground-based Bolocam receiver. When Planck XMM-like masses are used to set the scale radius $\theta_{\textrm{s}}$, we find consistency between the integrated SZ signal, $Y_{\textrm{5R500}}$, derived from Bolocam and Planck based on gNFW model fits using A10 shape parameters, with an average ratio of $1.069 \pm 0.030$ (allowing for the $\simeq 5$% Bolocam flux calibration uncertainty). We also perform a joint fit to the Bolocam and Planck data using a modified A10 model with the outer logarithmic slope $\beta$ allowed to vary, finding $\beta = 6.13 \pm 0.16 \pm 0.76$ (measurement error followed by intrinsic scatter). In addition, we find that the value of $\beta$ scales with mass and redshift according to $\beta \propto M^{0.077 \pm 0.026} \times (1+z)^{-0.06 \pm 0.09}$. This mass scaling is in good agreement with recent simulations. We do not observe the strong trend of $\beta$ with redshift seen in simulations, though we conclude that this is most likely due to our sample selection. Finally, we use Bolocam measurements of $Y_{500}$ to test the accuracy of the Planck completeness estimate. We find consistency, with the actual number of Planck detections falling approximately $1 \sigma$ below the expectation from Bolocam. We translate this small difference into a constraint on the the effective mass bias for the Planck cluster cosmology results, with $(1-b) = 0.93 \pm 0.06$.Comment: Updated to include one additional co-author. Also some minor changes to the text based on initial feedbac

Infinities within graviton scattering amplitudes

We present unitarity as a method for determining the infinities present in graviton scattering amplitudes. The infinities are a combination of IR and UV. By understanding the soft singularities we may extract the UV infinities and relate these to counter-terms in the effective action. As an demonstration of this method we rederive the UV infinities present at one-loop when gravity is coupled to matter.Comment: revised versio

Two-loop effective potential for a general renormalizable theory and softly broken supersymmetry

I compute the two-loop effective potential in the Landau gauge for a general renormalizable field theory in four dimensions. Results are presented for the \bar{MS} renormalization scheme based on dimensional regularization, and for the \bar{DR} and \bar{DR}' schemes based on regularization by dimensional reduction. The last of these is appropriate for models with softly broken supersymmetry, such as the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. I find the parameter redefinition which relates the \bar{DR} and \bar{DR}' schemes at two-loop order. I also discuss the renormalization group invariance of the two-loop effective potential, and compute the anomalous dimensions for scalars and the beta function for the vacuum energy at two-loop order in softly broken supersymmetry. Several illustrative examples and consistency checks are included.Comment: 38 pages. Typos in equations (3.5), (3.11), and (6.3) are fixed. Explicit claim of renormalization group invariance in the general case of softly-broken supersymmetry is added. Additional discussion of cases of multiple simple or U(1) groups. Equations in Appendix B rewritten in a more useful for

Two-Loop Renormalization Group Equations for Soft Supersymmetry-Breaking Couplings

We compute the two-loop renormalization group equations for all soft supersymmetry-breaking couplings in a general softly broken N=1 supersymmetric model. We also specialize these results to the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.Comment: 26 pages. [v4: Signs of equations (4.2) and (4.3) are fixed.

Chiral Anomaly and CPT invariance in an implicit momentum space regularization framework

This is the second in a series of two contributions in which we set out to establish a novel momentum space framework to treat field theoretical infinities in perturbative calculations when parity-violating objects occur. Since no analytic continuation on the space-time dimension is effected, this framework can be particularly useful to treat dimension-specific theories. Moreover arbitrary local terms stemming from the underlying infinities of the model can be properly parametrized. We (re)analyse the undeterminacy of the radiatively generated CPT violating Chern-Simons term within an extended version of $QED_4$ and calculate the Adler-Bardeen-Bell-Jackiw triangle anomaly to show that our framework is consistent and general to handle the subtleties involved when a radiative corretion is finite.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, version to appear in PR