Gerald Ford, the Nixon Pardon, and the Rise of the Right

Perhaps more than the 1960s, the early 1970s marked the high water mark of the liberal consensus. Roe v. Wade, which grounded the right to abortion in the right to privacy, represented the apex of rights-based liberalism and perpetuated the division between public and private, a crucial facet to liberalism. As President, Nixon often governed liberally even though he talked conservatively, and thus many conservatives regarded him as a traitor. The rise of the modern Republican Party and the right was highly contingent: When Nixon resigned, both the Republican Party and conservatives seemed even more divided, endangered, and mired in scandal than they did after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. In this Article, I discuss a critical time for those forces and the rule of law, the first month of the Ford Presidency

Brief Lives

Owen Fiss has led an enviable life. The Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale Law School is a revered teacher; author of dozens of books and articles on procedure, constitutional law, and legal theory; and one of the most cited legal scholars of all time. Devotion to Brown v. Board of Education, the liberalism it fostered, and the Warren Court pervade Fiss\u27s life as a law clerk, lawyer, and professor. They also pervade his writings, even his magisterial Holmes Devise volume on the Fuller Court. In Pillars of Justice: Lawyers and the Liberal Tradition, a book written to inspire and instruct the young, Fiss introduces us to his legal liberalism, Yale, and heroes - Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, John Doar, Burke Marshall, Harry Kalven, Eugene Rostow, Arthur Leff, Catharine MacKinnon, Joseph Goldstein, Robert Cover, Morton Horwitz, Carlos Nino, and Aharon Barak

Management of grapevine trunk diseases: knowledge transfer, current strategies and innovative strategies adopted in Europe

Since the early 1990s, grapevine trunk diseases (GTDs) have posed threats for viticulture. Esca complex, Eutypa- and Botryosphaeria- diebacks, mostly detected in adult vineyards, are currently responsible for considerable economic losses in the main vine-growing areas of the world. Other GTDs, such as Petri- (Esca complex) and Black-foot diseases, are emerging problems in grapevine nurseries (resulting in grafting failures and/or loss of saleable plants) and in young vineyards. The impacts of GTDs in modern viticulture depend on several factors, some related to their complexity, and others linked to host plant characteristics, changes in vineyard management and to the scarcity of simple tools for their control. For these reasons control of GTDs remains difficult, also depending on knowledge transfer from research to field and vice versa. This paper outlines the main preventive and curative techniques currently applied, scientifically tested or not that have resulted from the outcomes of “Winetwork”, a European Union funded project with special emphasis on the promising and innovative approaches.

Sparse ACEKF for phase reconstruction

We propose a novel low-complexity recursive filter to efficiently recover quantitative phase from a series of noisy intensity images taken through focus. We first transform the wave propagation equation and nonlinear observation model (intensity measurement) into a complex augmented state space model. From the state space model, we derive a sparse augmented complex extended Kalman filter (ACEKF) to infer the complex optical field (amplitude and phase), and find that it converges under mild conditions. Our proposed method has a computational complexity of N(z)N logN and storage requirement of O(N), compared with the original ACEKF method, which has a computational complexity of O(NzN(3)) and storage requirement of O(N(2)), where Nz is the number of images and N is the number of pixels in each image. Thus, it is efficient, robust and recursive, and may be feasible for real-time phase recovery applications with high resolution images

Toll-Like Receptors 2 and 4 Regulate the Frequency of IFNγ-Producing CD4+ T-Cells during Pulmonary Infection with Chlamydia pneumoniae

TLR2 and TLR4 are crucial for recognition of Chlamydia pneumoniae in vivo, since infected TLR2/4 double-deficient mice are unable to control the infection as evidenced by severe loss of body weight and progressive lethal pneumonia. Unexpectedly, these mice display higher pulmonary levels of the protective cytokine IFNγ than wild type mice. We show here, that antigen-specific CD4+ T-cells are responsible for the observed IFNγ-secretion in vivo and their frequency is higher in TLR2/4 double-deficient than in wild type mice. The capacity of TLR2/4 double-deficient dendritic cells to re-stimulate CD4+ T-cells did not differ from wild type dendritic cells. However, the frequency of CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ T-cells was considerably higher in wild type compared to TLR2/4 double-deficient mice and was inversely related to the number of IFNγ-secreting CD4+ effector T-cells. Despite increased IFNγ-levels, at least one IFNγ-mediated response, protective NO-secretion, could not be induced in the absence of TLR2 and 4. In summary, CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ regulatory T-cells fail to expand in the absence of TLR2 and TLR4 during pulmonary infection with C. pneumoniae, which in turn enhances the frequency of CD4+IFNγ+ effector T-cells. Failure of IFNγ to induce NO in TLR2/4 double-deficient cells represents one possible mechanism why TLR2/4 double-deficient mice are unable to control pneumonia caused by C. pneumoniae and succumb to the infection

The Rule of Law is Dead! Long Live the Rule of Law!

Polls show that a significant proportion of the public considers judges to be political. This result holds whether Americans are asked about Supreme Court justices, federal judges, state judges, or judges in general. At the same time, a large majority of the public also believes that judges are fair and impartial arbiters, and this belief also applies across the board. In this paper, I consider what this half-law-half-politics understanding of the courts means for judicial legitimacy and the public confidence on which that legitimacy rests. Drawing on the Legal Realists, and particularly on the work of Thurman Arnold, I argue against the notion that the contradictory views must be resolved in order for judicial legitimacy to remain intact. A rule of law built on contending legal and political beliefs is not necessarily fair or just. But it can be stable. At least in the context of law and courts, a house divided may stand

Pulmonary Hypertension in Adults with Congenital Heart Disease: Real-World Data from the International COMPERA-CHD Registry

Introduction: Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a common complication in patients with congenital heart disease (CHD), aggravating the natural, post-operative, or post-interventional course of the underlying anomaly. The various CHDs differ substantially in characteristics, functionality, and clinical outcomes among each other and compared with other diseases with pulmonary hypertension. Objective: To describe current management strategies and outcomes for adults with PH in relation to different types of CHD based on real-world data. Methods and results: COMPERA (Comparative, Prospective Registry of Newly Initiated Therapies for Pulmonary Hypertension) is a prospective, international PH registry comprising, at the time of data analysis, >8200 patients with various forms of PH. Here, we analyzed a subgroup of 680 patients with PH due to CHD, who were included between 2007 and 2018 in 49 specialized centers for PH and/or CHD located in 11 European countries. At enrollment, the patients’ median age was 44 years (67% female), and patients had either pre-tricuspid shunts, post-tricuspid shunts, complex CHD, congenital left heart or aortic disease, or miscellaneous other types of CHD. Upon inclusion, targeted therapies for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) included endothelin receptor antagonists, PDE-5 inhibitors, prostacyclin analogues, and soluble guanylate cyclase stimulators. Eighty patients with Eisenmenger syndrome were treatment-naïve. While at inclusion the primary PAH treatment for the cohort was monotherapy (70% of patients), with 30% of the patients on combination therapy, after a median observation time of 45.3 months, the number of patients on combination therapy had increased significantly, to 50%. The use of oral anticoagulants or antiplatelets was dependent on the underlying diagnosis or comorbidities. In the entire COMPERA-CHD cohort, after follow-up and receiving targeted PAH therapy (n = 511), 91 patients died over the course of a 5-year follow up. The 5-year Kaplan–Meier survival estimate for CHD associated PH was significantly better than that for idiopathic PAH (76% vs. 54%; p < 0.001). Within the CHD associated PH group, survival estimates differed particularly depending on the underlying diagnosis and treatment status. Conclusions: In COMPERA-CHD, the overall survival of patients with CHD associated PH was dependent on the underlying diagnosis and treatment status, but was significantly better as than that for idiopathic PAH. Nevertheless, overall survival of patients with PAH due to CHD was still markedly reduced compared with survival of patients with other types of CHD, despite an increasing number of patients on PAH-targeted combination therapy