Disabled Autonomy

Disability law is still undertheorized. In 2007, Ruth Colker wrote that disability law was undertheorized because it conflated “separate” with “unequal,” and because disability was largely ignored or poorly understood within theories of justice. The solution for Colker was to attach the anti-subordination perspective, which was developed to apply to race and sex, directly to disability. This Article argues that this transportation from the race and sex contexts was a partial solution, but is not sufficient to give full substance to disability law theory. Concepts from critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence have long been simply transported into the disability context, acting as an imperfect facsimile. The primary purpose of those concepts was to describe, analyze, and remedy problems primarily related to race and gender, not disability. While disability law has benefitted to some extent from inclusion in these legal theories, many of the unique features and complexities of disability law have been left on the table. This Article explores those complexities. Autonomy, usually thought of as an uncomplicated social good for other groups, is challenged in disability theory by two competing values. The value of anti-subordination is critical because it seeks to address, and redress, discrimination, sigma, and stereotyping. An anti-subordination perspective gives a voice and supplies resources to people with disabilities, and will counsel against choices that support stigma and stereotyping. An anti-subordination perspective might seek to limit a right to physician-assisted suicide, for example, because of concerns about exploitation and the messaging that disabled lives are not worth living. This runs counter to an autonomy-focused perspective, which would support the choice to end one’s life in the end stages of a terminal disease. An anti-eliminationism perspective advocates for the preservation of, and resources for, disabled lives. This comes to mean that not only are people with disabilities valued, but their disability is valued too. Instead of seeking to end Autism, for example, an anti-elimination perspective seeks to support Autistics. However, an anti-eliminationism perspective might also support the restriction of choice, and therefore come into conflict with autonomy, where there is a choice that results in the end of a disability. An anti-elimination perspective could seek to restrict the ability to selectively terminate pregnancies when a disability is found, for example. Anti-eliminationism inherently challenges the notion that getting rid of disability is a good thing. Parts I, II, and III of this Article describe the values of autonomy, anti-subordination, and anti-eliminationism in the disability context, and argue that these values are each critical components of disability law and theory. Part IV of this article provides an overview of some real-world examples where these values come into immediate conflict

Mesolithic health and subsistence at Langhnaj and Mahadaha, India

The late Mesolithic period in India saw the emergence of agriculture in the Harappan civilization. From here agriculture spread east and south replacing hunting and gathering. Health throughout the world changed as agriculture was adopted, which can be seen in human skeletal remains. Langhnaj and Mahadaha are two of these late Mesolithic hunting and gathering sites. Langhnaj is located in western India within the area the Harappan civilization controlled and had access to domesticated food. Mahadaha is located in eastern India in an area with no evidence of agriculture. From the human remains, more specifically the attributes of the dentition, this study will try to determine whether there was a difference in health between these sites

Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: \u3cem\u3eKiyemba v. Obama\u3c/em\u3e and the Meaning of Freedom, Separation of Powers, and the Rule of Law Ten Years After 9/11

This article is about the rise and fall of continued adherence to the rule of law, proper application of the separation of powers doctrine, and the meaning of freedom for a group of seventeen Uighurs—a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority whose members reside in the Xinjiang province of China—who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base since 2002. Most scholars regard the trilogy of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumediene v. Bush as demonstrating the Supreme Court’s willingness to uphold the rule of law during the war on terror. The recent experience of the Uighurs suggest that this commitment is either waning or was never as strong as scholars thought. About a year and a half before the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States Supreme Court was primed to hear oral arguments in the Uighurs’ case known as Kiyemba v. Obama. The issue in this case was whether the Uighurs, who were concededly being detained illegally, would be released from Guantanamo Bay. As a result of the government’s latest delay tactics, the Court never heard the merits of the case. Had it done so, the Court, arguably, would have established the contours of a constitutionally required habeas remedy for foreign nationals whose indefinite detention had been judicially declared illegal and no other option but release into the continental interior of the United States is possible. The Court’s dismissal of the Uighurs previously granted cert petition thus signaled the beginning of the end of the Court’s landmark “war-on–terror” line of precedential cases culminating in the evisceration of its 2008 seminal case of Boumediene v. Bush. With the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision now reinstated in which the court had held in 2009 that habeas courts had no jurisdiction to order the release of foreign nationals under such circumstances because it was an immigration case triggering the political branches’ plenary power over which such matters are largely immune from judicial intervention. But Kiyemba v. Obama is not an immigration case. The Uighurs were brought here involuntarily as a result of the government’s counterterrorism policies, the implementation of which the Court had declared unlawful over the course of a four year period beginning with Rasul v. Bush in 2004. The D.C. Circuit Court holding, which still stands, was erroneous because the Uighurs never sought to immigrate to this country; their filing of writs of habeas corpus placed the matter solidly in the area of granting constitutionally required habeas relief which a habeas court has jurisdiction to decide. Through political machinations and influences at all levels of government, however, the Supreme Court has more recently decided to end its role of protecting the individual rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees with a series of denials of cert.-petitions without a single dissent authored to voice concerns about the beginning of the end of the Republic Benjamin Franklin once said we had but only if we could keep it. And although most of the original group of Uighurs has subsequently been relocated to other countries, the two still remaining have now entered their second decade of unlawful detention

Nutrient Adequacy of Children Participating in WIC

USDA's Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides supplemental foods to participants, in most cases through vouchers for retail purchase of foods designated as approved by the program. WIC food packages were initially designed to include foods rich in nutrients that were lacking in the diets of low-income participants. This brief summarizes two recent ERS-sponsored studies that provide new assessments of nutrient intakes of WIC children, income-eligible children not participating in the program, and children ineligible for the program.Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, WIC, food assistance programs, nutrient intake, diet quality, CSFII, NHANES, vitamin C, vitamin A, iron, protein, calcium, ERS, USDA, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty,

The role of p38 MAPK and its substrates in neuronal plasticity and neurodegenerative disease

A significant amount of evidence suggests that the p38-mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signalling cascade plays a crucial role in synaptic plasticity and in neurodegenerative diseases. In this review we will discuss the cellular localisation and activation of p38 MAPK and the recent advances on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of its substrates: MAPKAPK 2 (MK2) and tau protein. In particular we will focus our attention on the understanding of the p38 MAPK-MK2 and p38 MAPK-tau activation axis in controlling neuroinflammation, actin remodelling and tau hyperphosphorylation, processes that are thought to be involved in normal ageing as well as in neurodegenerative diseases. We will also give some insight into how elucidating the precise role of p38 MAPK-MK2 and p38 MAPK-tau signalling cascades may help to identify novel therapeutic targets to slow down the symptoms observed in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease

The Globular Cluster Populations of Giant Galaxies: Mosaic Imaging of Five Moderate-Luminosity Early-Type Galaxies

This paper presents results from wide-field imaging of the globular cluster (GC) systems of five intermediate-luminosity (M_V ~-21 to -22) early-type galaxies. The aim is to accurately quantify the global properties of the GC systems by measuring them out to large radii. We obtained BVR imaging of four lenticular galaxies (NGC 5866, NGC 4762, NGC 4754, NGC 3384) and one elliptical galaxy (NGC 5813) using the KPNO 4m telescope and MOSAIC imager and traced the GC population to projected galactocentric radii ranging from ~20 kpc to 120 kpc. We combine our imaging with Hubble Space Telescope data to measure the GC surface density close to the galaxy center. We calculate the total number of GCs (N_GC) from the integrated radial profile and find N_GC = 340 +/- 80 for NGC 5866, N_GC = 2900 +/- 400 for NGC 5813, N_GC = 270 +/- 30 for NGC 4762, N_GC = 115 +/- 15$ for NGC 4754, and N_GC = 120 +/- 30 for NGC 3384. The measured GC specific frequencies are S_N between 0.6 and 3.6 and T in the range 0.9 to 4.2. These values are consistent with the mean specific frequencies for the galaxies' morphological types found by our survey and other published data. Three galaxies (NGC 5866, NGC 5813, NGC 4762) had sufficient numbers of GC candidates to investigate color bimodality and color gradients in the GC systems. NGC 5813 shows strong evidence (>3 sigma) for bimodality and a B-R color gradient resulting from a more centrally concentrated red (metal-rich) GC subpopulation. We find no evidence for statistically significant color gradients in the other two galaxies.Comment: 61 pages, 21 figures, 11 tables. Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journa