The Walking Dead: How the Criminal Regulation of Sodomy Survived Lawrence v. Texas

Eighteen years after the Supreme Court held in Lawrence v. Texas that a law criminalizing sodomy violated the constitutional guarantee to substantive due process, individuals are still arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated pursuant to statutes that are the material equivalent of the one at issue in Lawrence. Though this seems both strange and unfair, it is neither unusual nor accidental. Because the constitutional order renders the judiciary a passive institution and radically fragments authority across a polycentric collection of governments, noncompliance with judicial decisions is endemic to American institutional design

Pacific offshore record of plinian arc volcanism in Central America: 1. Along-arc correlations

We collected 56 marine gravity cores from the Pacific seafloor offshore Central America which contain a total of 213 volcanic ash beds. Ash-layer correlations between cores and with their parental tephras on land use stratigraphic, lithologic, and compositional criteria. In particular, we make use of our newly built database of bulk-rock, mineral, and glass major and trace element compositions of plinian and similarly widespread tephras erupted since the Pleistocene along the Central American Volcanic Arc. We thus identify the distal ashes of 11 Nicaraguan, 8 El Salvadorian, 6 Guatemalan, and 1 Costa Rican eruptions. Relatively uniform pelagic sedimentation rates allow us to determine ages of 10 previously undated tephras by their relative position between ash layers of known age. Linking the marine and terrestrial records yields a tephrostratigraphic framework for the Central American volcanic arc from Costa Rica to Guatemala. This is a useful tool and prerequisite to understand the evolution of volcanism at a whole-arc scale

Genomic Relationships, Novel Loci, and Pleiotropic Mechanisms across Eight Psychiatric Disorders

Genetic influences on psychiatric disorders transcend diagnostic boundaries, suggesting substantial pleiotropy of contributing loci. However, the nature and mechanisms of these pleiotropic effects remain unclear. We performed analyses of 232,964 cases and 494,162 controls from genome-wide studies of anorexia nervosa, attention-deficit/hyper-activity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome. Genetic correlation analyses revealed a meaningful structure within the eight disorders, identifying three groups of inter-related disorders. Meta-analysis across these eight disorders detected 109 loci associated with at least two psychiatric disorders, including 23 loci with pleiotropic effects on four or more disorders and 11 loci with antagonistic effects on multiple disorders. The pleiotropic loci are located within genes that show heightened expression in the brain throughout the lifespan, beginning prenatally in the second trimester, and play prominent roles in neurodevelopmental processes. These findings have important implications for psychiatric nosology, drug development, and risk prediction.Peer reviewe

Dissecting the Shared Genetic Architecture of Suicide Attempt, Psychiatric Disorders, and Known Risk Factors

Background Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, and nonfatal suicide attempts, which occur far more frequently, are a major source of disability and social and economic burden. Both have substantial genetic etiology, which is partially shared and partially distinct from that of related psychiatric disorders. Methods We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 29,782 suicide attempt (SA) cases and 519,961 controls in the International Suicide Genetics Consortium (ISGC). The GWAS of SA was conditioned on psychiatric disorders using GWAS summary statistics via multitrait-based conditional and joint analysis, to remove genetic effects on SA mediated by psychiatric disorders. We investigated the shared and divergent genetic architectures of SA, psychiatric disorders, and other known risk factors. Results Two loci reached genome-wide significance for SA: the major histocompatibility complex and an intergenic locus on chromosome 7, the latter of which remained associated with SA after conditioning on psychiatric disorders and replicated in an independent cohort from the Million Veteran Program. This locus has been implicated in risk-taking behavior, smoking, and insomnia. SA showed strong genetic correlation with psychiatric disorders, particularly major depression, and also with smoking, pain, risk-taking behavior, sleep disturbances, lower educational attainment, reproductive traits, lower socioeconomic status, and poorer general health. After conditioning on psychiatric disorders, the genetic correlations between SA and psychiatric disorders decreased, whereas those with nonpsychiatric traits remained largely unchanged. Conclusions Our results identify a risk locus that contributes more strongly to SA than other phenotypes and suggest a shared underlying biology between SA and known risk factors that is not mediated by psychiatric disorders.Peer reviewe

Albiglutide and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (Harmony Outcomes): a double-blind, randomised placebo-controlled trial

Background: Glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists differ in chemical structure, duration of action, and in their effects on clinical outcomes. The cardiovascular effects of once-weekly albiglutide in type 2 diabetes are unknown. We aimed to determine the safety and efficacy of albiglutide in preventing cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or stroke. Methods: We did a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial in 610 sites across 28 countries. We randomly assigned patients aged 40 years and older with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (at a 1:1 ratio) to groups that either received a subcutaneous injection of albiglutide (30–50 mg, based on glycaemic response and tolerability) or of a matched volume of placebo once a week, in addition to their standard care. Investigators used an interactive voice or web response system to obtain treatment assignment, and patients and all study investigators were masked to their treatment allocation. We hypothesised that albiglutide would be non-inferior to placebo for the primary outcome of the first occurrence of cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or stroke, which was assessed in the intention-to-treat population. If non-inferiority was confirmed by an upper limit of the 95% CI for a hazard ratio of less than 1·30, closed testing for superiority was prespecified. This study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT02465515. Findings: Patients were screened between July 1, 2015, and Nov 24, 2016. 10 793 patients were screened and 9463 participants were enrolled and randomly assigned to groups: 4731 patients were assigned to receive albiglutide and 4732 patients to receive placebo. On Nov 8, 2017, it was determined that 611 primary endpoints and a median follow-up of at least 1·5 years had accrued, and participants returned for a final visit and discontinuation from study treatment; the last patient visit was on March 12, 2018. These 9463 patients, the intention-to-treat population, were evaluated for a median duration of 1·6 years and were assessed for the primary outcome. The primary composite outcome occurred in 338 (7%) of 4731 patients at an incidence rate of 4·6 events per 100 person-years in the albiglutide group and in 428 (9%) of 4732 patients at an incidence rate of 5·9 events per 100 person-years in the placebo group (hazard ratio 0·78, 95% CI 0·68–0·90), which indicated that albiglutide was superior to placebo (p<0·0001 for non-inferiority; p=0·0006 for superiority). The incidence of acute pancreatitis (ten patients in the albiglutide group and seven patients in the placebo group), pancreatic cancer (six patients in the albiglutide group and five patients in the placebo group), medullary thyroid carcinoma (zero patients in both groups), and other serious adverse events did not differ between the two groups. There were three (<1%) deaths in the placebo group that were assessed by investigators, who were masked to study drug assignment, to be treatment-related and two (<1%) deaths in the albiglutide group. Interpretation: In patients with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, albiglutide was superior to placebo with respect to major adverse cardiovascular events. Evidence-based glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists should therefore be considered as part of a comprehensive strategy to reduce the risk of cardiovascular events in patients with type 2 diabetes. Funding: GlaxoSmithKline

The Walking Dead: How the Criminal Regulation of Sodomy Survived Lawrence v. Texas

Eighteen years after the Supreme Court held in Lawrence v. Texas that a law criminalizing sodomy violated the constitutional guarantee to substantive due process, individuals are still arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated pursuant to statutes that are the material equivalent of the one at issue in Lawrence. Though this seems both strange and unfair, it is neither unusual nor accidental. Because the constitutional order renders the judiciary a passive institution and radically fragments authority across a polycentric collection of governments, noncompliance with judicial decisions is endemic to American institutional design

All Their Eggs in One Basket? Ideological Congruence in Congress and the Bicameral Origins of Concentrated Delegation to the Bureaucracy

What drives congressional choices to concentrate implementation authority for legislative enactments among relatively few bureaucratic institutions? And are increased levels of concentration in implementation power associated with intercameral ideological proximity in Congress? I theorize that greater ideological congruity between the House and Senate drives increased levels of concentration in delegated implementation authority to federal agencies. By examining every significant legislative enactment from 1947 to 2012 that delegates implementation responsibility to at least one federal agency, I consider the legislative dynamics of decisions regarding the range of institutions charged with policy implementation in the American administrative state. I find that increased concentration of implementation authority is associated with greater ideological congruence between pivotal members of the House and the Senate. These results suggest that the preferences of key officials in Congress contribute to defining the breadth of bureaucratic implementation authority in the federal policy process

Partisanship Drives State Agencies’ Resistance to Federal Regulation

The vertical fragmentation of regulatory authority in the U.S. political system creates numerous opportunities for conflict between federal and state governments. In the context of energy policy, one such opportunity arises from the dual authority of the states and federal government to regulate electricity markets and infrastructure. This dual authority over utility policy allows state regulators with preferences different from their federal counterparts to resist national utility policy. Under what conditions do states resist these federal regulatory efforts? The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and various state-level energy regulators have recently debated the respective responsibilities of the federal and state governments in the energy regulation context. Some state regulators argue that authority over utility regulation ought to be decentralized, reserving as much power to the states as possible. But FERC has maintained that barriers to interstate cooperation ought to be lifted, stripping some power from those state agencies that cannot regulate commerce outside their geographical borders. These arguments concerning centralization play out frequently in American politics. In the context of energy policy, the regulatory scheme engendered by the Federal Power Act of 1920 serves as the venue for such arguments. The Federal Power Act authorized the federal government to regulate “the transmission of electric energy in interstate commerce and…the sale of electric energy at wholesale in interstate commerce,” while implicitly reserving all remaining aspects of service and delivery to the states through the Tenth Amendment. This scheme of dual federalism, where federal and state authority do not overlap, was appropriately tailored to the United States in the 1920s. But as energy markets have evolved, the clear divide between state and federal authority has blurred. Energy markets have become increasingly interstate in nature. In addition, FERC has affirmatively expanded its own jurisdiction by encouraging firms to engage in interstate commerce through Order No. 1000, a rule that set requirements for public utility transmission planning and cost allocation. In response to FERC’s Order, public utility commissions in Alabama, Illinois, and South Carolina sued FERC, objecting to the Order as an impermissible extension of federal authority. Although all three commissions eventually lost in federal court, these agencies strongly signaled their objection to FERC policy. This federalist contretemps should come as no surprise to careful observers of regulatory politics. We know that state agencies often attempt to resist federal policy either through discourse, such as press releases or conference statements, or through action, such as litigation or rulemaking. We do not know, however, the conditions under which state agencies will resist a federal agency. We lack a general theory of state bureaucratic behavior with respect to federal policy. Observers and journalists often argue that jurisdictional chauvinism motivates resistance. States attempt to secure as much power as they can—full stop. Similarly, some observers assert that agencies led by Republicans resist federal policy more often because Republican principles object to centralization. However, new research we conducted on the determinants of state bureaucratic resistance to federal administrative policy demonstrates that, rather than jurisdictional parochialism or a philosophical commitment to federalism, partisanship drives resistance. Simply put, state agencies—whether led by Republicans or Democrats—resist their federal counterparts more often when opposing parties control the state and federal agencies. To test empirically what drives bureaucratic resistance, we collected data on state utility regulators’ decisions to initiate or join resistance litigation against FERC across all 50 states over an eight-year period, from 2010 to 2017. We found that the decision to resist via litigation rarely occurred, as only 5.5 percent of state utility regulators resisted across our sample of eight years. But we also found that two factors disproportionately affect an agency’s decision to resist: conflicting partisanship within FERC itself, and whether the agency is from a state in the U.S. South. To test this proposition, we were faced with the task of collecting information on all public utility regulators at the state and federal levels from 2010 to 2017. This task was made much simpler due to the work of Janice Beecher, who has collected the names and parties of all state utility regulators from the 19th century to today. Using multivariate logistic regression—a statistical method that estimates the probability of some action or outcome while holding key variables constant—we found that, although a state utility regulator controlled by the same party as FERC has about a 1.7 percent chance of resisting FERC decisions, a state regulator whose partisanship conflicts with that of FERC has about a 6.6 percent chance of resisting. Additionally, state utility agencies from non-Southern states have only about a 2.6 percent chance of resisting, while those from Southern states have about a 10.8 percent chance of resisting FERC. These probabilities control for various political, demographic, and administrative factors that may impact state bureaucratic resistance, including the underlying partisanship of the state, whether the state agency has elected leaders, the partisan composition of the state legislature, the percentage of commissioners on the state agency that are Republican, and the percentage of the population that lives in rural areas. These results suggest that a state agency’s decision to resist federal administrative policy through litigation is not driven by anti-centralization ideology, legislative or public pressure on the agency to resist, or the underlying economy of the state. Rather, it is driven by partisanship—namely, the partisanship of pivotal leaders in state agencies. Our findings have important implications for understanding regulatory politics. These results call into question the idea that bureaucratic agencies operate as technocratic, politically neutral institutions. They argue against top-down theories of bureaucracy that posit that bureaucratic institutions act only as the legislature or chief executive prefers. And they suggest that polarization in the United States extends even to the heads of the bureaucracy

Partisanship Drives State Agencies’ Resistance to Federal Regulation

The vertical fragmentation of regulatory authority in the U.S. political system creates numerous opportunities for conflict between federal and state governments. In the context of energy policy, one such opportunity arises from the dual authority of the states and federal government to regulate electricity markets and infrastructure. This dual authority over utility policy allows state regulators with preferences different from their federal counterparts to resist national utility policy. Under what conditions do states resist these federal regulatory efforts? The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and various state-level energy regulators have recently debated the respective responsibilities of the federal and state governments in the energy regulation context. Some state regulators argue that authority over utility regulation ought to be decentralized, reserving as much power to the states as possible. But FERC has maintained that barriers to interstate cooperation ought to be lifted, stripping some power from those state agencies that cannot regulate commerce outside their geographical borders. These arguments concerning centralization play out frequently in American politics. In the context of energy policy, the regulatory scheme engendered by the Federal Power Act of 1920 serves as the venue for such arguments. The Federal Power Act authorized the federal government to regulate “the transmission of electric energy in interstate commerce and…the sale of electric energy at wholesale in interstate commerce,” while implicitly reserving all remaining aspects of service and delivery to the states through the Tenth Amendment. This scheme of dual federalism, where federal and state authority do not overlap, was appropriately tailored to the United States in the 1920s. But as energy markets have evolved, the clear divide between state and federal authority has blurred. Energy markets have become increasingly interstate in nature. In addition, FERC has affirmatively expanded its own jurisdiction by encouraging firms to engage in interstate commerce through Order No. 1000, a rule that set requirements for public utility transmission planning and cost allocation. In response to FERC’s Order, public utility commissions in Alabama, Illinois, and South Carolina sued FERC, objecting to the Order as an impermissible extension of federal authority. Although all three commissions eventually lost in federal court, these agencies strongly signaled their objection to FERC policy. This federalist contretemps should come as no surprise to careful observers of regulatory politics. We know that state agencies often attempt to resist federal policy either through discourse, such as press releases or conference statements, or through action, such as litigation or rulemaking. We do not know, however, the conditions under which state agencies will resist a federal agency. We lack a general theory of state bureaucratic behavior with respect to federal policy. Observers and journalists often argue that jurisdictional chauvinism motivates resistance. States attempt to secure as much power as they can—full stop. Similarly, some observers assert that agencies led by Republicans resist federal policy more often because Republican principles object to centralization. However, new research we conducted on the determinants of state bureaucratic resistance to federal administrative policy demonstrates that, rather than jurisdictional parochialism or a philosophical commitment to federalism, partisanship drives resistance. Simply put, state agencies—whether led by Republicans or Democrats—resist their federal counterparts more often when opposing parties control the state and federal agencies. To test empirically what drives bureaucratic resistance, we collected data on state utility regulators’ decisions to initiate or join resistance litigation against FERC across all 50 states over an eight-year period, from 2010 to 2017. We found that the decision to resist via litigation rarely occurred, as only 5.5 percent of state utility regulators resisted across our sample of eight years. But we also found that two factors disproportionately affect an agency’s decision to resist: conflicting partisanship within FERC itself, and whether the agency is from a state in the U.S. South. To test this proposition, we were faced with the task of collecting information on all public utility regulators at the state and federal levels from 2010 to 2017. This task was made much simpler due to the work of Janice Beecher, who has collected the names and parties of all state utility regulators from the 19th century to today. Using multivariate logistic regression—a statistical method that estimates the probability of some action or outcome while holding key variables constant—we found that, although a state utility regulator controlled by the same party as FERC has about a 1.7 percent chance of resisting FERC decisions, a state regulator whose partisanship conflicts with that of FERC has about a 6.6 percent chance of resisting. Additionally, state utility agencies from non-Southern states have only about a 2.6 percent chance of resisting, while those from Southern states have about a 10.8 percent chance of resisting FERC. These probabilities control for various political, demographic, and administrative factors that may impact state bureaucratic resistance, including the underlying partisanship of the state, whether the state agency has elected leaders, the partisan composition of the state legislature, the percentage of commissioners on the state agency that are Republican, and the percentage of the population that lives in rural areas. These results suggest that a state agency’s decision to resist federal administrative policy through litigation is not driven by anti-centralization ideology, legislative or public pressure on the agency to resist, or the underlying economy of the state. Rather, it is driven by partisanship—namely, the partisanship of pivotal leaders in state agencies. Our findings have important implications for understanding regulatory politics. These results call into question the idea that bureaucratic agencies operate as technocratic, politically neutral institutions. They argue against top-down theories of bureaucracy that posit that bureaucratic institutions act only as the legislature or chief executive prefers. And they suggest that polarization in the United States extends even to the heads of the bureaucracy

The Personal Finances of United States Supreme Court Justices and Decision-making in Economic Litigation

What explains probusiness judicial decision-making? Existing scholarship focuses on federal judges acting strategically or ideologically, but this represents only some factors affecting judicial behavior. Our objective is to develop a theory of judicial decision-making in economic litigation based on judges’ personal finances. We test this approach by considering how Supreme Court justices’ investments impact decision-making in cases involving businesses. While ethical standards suggest that judges should recuse themselves from cases whose outcomes affect them financially, research implies that judges make strategic choices regarding ethical conflicts. If judges participate in cases that implicate their personal finances, does this affect their votes? We marshal evidence from Supreme Court justices’ financial disclosures and argue that in business litigation, judges vote to promote the economic well-being of industries in which they invest. We find justices are more likely to decide for business litigants when personally invested in firms from industries affected by the litigation’s outcome