Still Broken: New York State Legislative Reform

Still Broken: New York State Legislative Reform is the 2008 update of the Brennan Center's 2004 and 2006 reports on the New York state legislative process. The report finds that the legislative process remains broken, and offers concrete recommendations for reform

Effects of Metallicity on the Rotation Rates of Massive Stars

Recent theoretical predictions for low metallicity massive stars predict that these stars should have drastically reduced equatorial winds (mass loss) while on the main sequence, and as such should retain most of their angular momentum. Observations of both the Be/(B+Be) ratio and the blue-to-red supergiant ratio appear to have a metallicity dependence that may be caused by high rotational velocities. We have analyzed 39 archival Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), high resolution, ultraviolet spectra of O-type stars in the Magellanic Clouds to determine their projected rotational velocities V sin i. Our methodology is based on a previous study of the projected rotational velocities of Galactic O-type stars using International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) Short Wavelength Prime (SWP) Camera high dispersion spectra, which resulted in a catalog of V sin i values for 177 O stars. Here we present complementary V sin i values for 21 Large Magellanic Cloud and 22 Small Magellanic Cloud O-type stars based on STIS and IUE UV spectroscopy. The distribution of V sin i values for O type stars in the Magellanic Clouds is compared to that of Galactic O type stars. Despite the theoretical predictions and indirect observational evidence for high rotation, the O type stars in the Magellanic Clouds do not appear to rotate faster than their Galactic counterparts.Comment: accepted by ApJ, to appear 20 December 2004 editio

More Voice for the People?

The question is whether the New York State Constitution should be amended to provide a broader and deeper voice for New Yorkers in their government. Our answer is unequivocally yes. But any constitutional changes should directly address the failures of New York\u27s notoriously dysfunctional legislature, including the system by which its members are elected. Specifically, we focus on the operations of the legislative chambers, the campaign finance system, and the system of legislative reapportionment. The reforms we suggest are intended to make our current institutions more democratic and to preserve the integrity of New York\u27s system of representative democracy. If implemented, they should help to restore the voices of New Yorkers to the halls of state government. We argue against reforms such as initiatives and referenda and term limits, which have historically allowed factions to tighten their holds on the jurisdictions in which they have been employed

Albany’s Dysfunction Denies Due Process

The coup that shut down the New York State Senate for over a month last summer brought the State Legislature\u27s dysfunction to the forefront of public consciousness. As the public waited for the approval of several critical budget bills and action on a long list of substantive legislation, two members of the newly elected Democratic majority deserted to the Republican side and then switched back again to caucus with the Democrats, destabilizing the already listing New York ship of state and spreading disgust among their colleagues and the public at large. These events were, unfortunately, not anomalous. The process by which laws are made in Albany has been in shambles for decades. Newspapers throughout the state have long reported on and editorialized against this dysfunction. Over the last six years, this view has been empirically undergirded by the work of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which has, since 2004, issued three major reports covering a decade of legislative voting records, debate transcripts, and documents that form the basis for legislative history

Capturing Heterogeneity in Medical Marijuana Policies: A Taxonomy of Regulatory Regimes Across the United States

BACKGROUND: There is considerable movement in the U.S. to legalize use of cannabis for medicinal purposes. Twenty-three U.S. states and the D.C. have laws that decriminalize use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Most prior studies of state medical marijuana laws and their association with overall marijuana use, adolescent use, crime rates, and alcohol traffic fatalities, have used a binary coding of whether the state had a medical marijuana law or not. Mixed results from these studies raise the question of whether this method for measuring policy characteristics is adequate. OBJECTIVES: Our objective was to develop a validated taxonomy of medical marijuana laws that will allow researchers to measure variation in aspects of medical marijuana statutes as well as their overall restrictiveness. METHODS/RESULTS: We used a modified Delphi technique using detailed and validated data about each state's medical marijuana law. Three senior researchers coded elements of the state laws in initiation of use, quantity allowed, regulations around distribution, and overall restrictiveness. We used 2013 NSDUH data to assess validity of the taxonomy. Results indicate substantial state-level variation in medical marijuana policies. Validation analysis supported the taxonomy's validity for all four dimensions with the largest effect sizes for the quantity allowed in the state's medical marijuana policy. CONCLUSIONS/IMPORTANCE: This analysis demonstrates the potential importance of non-dichotomous measurement of medical marijuana laws in studies of their impact. These findings may also be useful to states that are considering medical marijuana laws, to understand the potential impact of characteristics of those laws