Reconstructing RFRA: The Contested Legacy of Religious Freedom Restoration

Almost every member of Congress voted to approve the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), a bill endorsed by an unprecedented coalition of dozens of religious and civil rights organizations spanning the political and ideological spectrum. President Clinton quipped at the signing ceremony that perhaps only divine intervention could explain such an unusual meeting of the minds: the establishment of “new trust” across otherwise irreconcilable “ideological and religious lines,” he remarked, “shows . . . that the power of God is such that, even in the legislative process, miracles can happen.” The RFRA consensus was especially “miraculous” because the legislation addressed a deeply divisive question: whether and under what circumstances religious objectors should be exempt from generally applicable laws. RFRA’s supporters, both within and outside Congress, would surely have had sharp disagreements about many specific claims for religious exemptions to particular laws. Yet they coalesced around RFRA, which circumvented such disagreements at the retail level by codifying a “cross-cutting” statutory standard that judges would be required to apply to an undifferentiated and unknown array of future claims for exemptions to every generally applicable law in the land

The National Security Agency\u27s Domestic Spying Program: Framing the Debate

On Friday, December 16, 2005, the New York Times reported that President George W. Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans\u27 telephone and e-mail communications as part of an effort to obtain intelligence about future terrorist activity.\u27 The Times report was based on leaks of classified information, presumably by NSA officials concerned about the legality of the program. The Times reported that at the President\u27s request it had delayed publication of the story for more than a year. The Indiana Law Journal reprinted four documents that, taken together, set forth the basic arguments concerning the lawfulness of the secret NSA surveillance program. The debate outlined by the four documents raises important issues about statutory interpretation in the face of claims of constitutional conflict, executive power during times of war, fundamental privacy rights of Americans, and ultimately, the rule of law in the war on terror

The applicability of Brillouin scattering to flow field diagnostics

To fill the void between turbulence theory and experiment; particularly in the flow fields consisting of monatomic gases, for example in wind tunnels, means of measuring fluctuating quantities are needed. In the area of density fluctuation measurement, the optical method of Brillouin scattering was suggested. This was based on the theory, that the Brillouin scattered intensity is proportional to a function of density. In this investigation the potential of this method as a diagnostic tool was studied. Here the density fluctuations in gases were sought. Continuous wave lasers and interferometers were used as the primary illuminating source and scattered light filters respectively

Application of Raman diagnostics to combustion

The use of laser Raman diagnostic techniques to measure the specie concentrations and their temperatures in combustion flow fields is discussed. The system designed to measure the specie concentrations, which included a ruby laser and a photodiode to trip the laser at the maximum light and heat output of the combustion process, is described and problems encountered in developing the system are reported. Photographs of the combustion process are presented and analyzed detailing the evolution of the combustion in terms of the photodiode and the lack of a noticeable Raman-Stokes signal. The absence of the Raman-Stokes signal is discussed

The Law (?) of the Lincoln Assassination

Shortly after John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, President Andrew Johnson directed that Booth’s alleged coconspirators be tried in a makeshift military tribunal, rather than in the Article III court that was open for business just a few blocks from Ford’s Theater. Johnson’s decision implicated a fundamental constitutional question that was a subject of heated debate throughout the Civil War: When, if ever, may the federal government circumvent Article III’s requirements of a criminal trial by jury, with an independent, tenure-protected presiding judge, by trying individuals other than members of the armed forces in a military tribunal? The political branches and others have debated this Article III question in several of the nation’s major wars, yet it remains unresolved, particularly with respect to the trial of domestic-law offenses. Moreover, that question is especially significant in the United States’ current armed conflicts against nonstate terrorist organizations, such as al Qaeda, because although members of such enemy forces, who lack international law “combatant immunity,” can often be tried in Article III courts for violation of U.S. criminal laws, Congress has recently authorized military commissions to try such enemy forces for certain domestic-law, war-related offenses. Moreover, during the recent campaign, President Trump indicated that he intends to increase the use of military tribunals—including even to try United States citizens. In attempting to justify the constitutionality of such military trials, the government and several judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have turned to the Lincoln assassination commission as a leading precedent, one that is said to help establish a political branch practice that should inform our current constitutional understandings of the proper scope of military jurisdiction. Such reliance on the Lincoln trial as legal authority is, in one sense, understandable, because that proceeding was, in Judge Kavanaugh’s words, “the highest-profile and most important U.S. military commission precedent in American history,” and thus it would be striking—indeed, a significant constitutional embarrassment—to conclude that the trial was unlawful. As this Article demonstrates, however, such respect for the Lincoln assassination trial as a canonical constitutional precedent would itself be historically anomalous. For almost 150 years it was virtually unthinkable for anyone to rely upon that proceeding as venerated legal authority: as one esteemed expert wrote, the Lincoln trial was a case of military jurisdiction that “no self-respecting military lawyer [would] look straight in the eye. There is a rich and familiar literature on many of the great constitutional questions raised during the Civil War—on issues such as secession, habeas suspension, emancipation, and presidential prerogatives. This is, however, the first comprehensive account of one of the most important and most dramatic of the constitutional debates of that war and its aftermath, involving the permissible scope of military justice and whether certain wartime exigencies might justify circumvention of Article III’s guarantees. All three branches engaged on this difficult question during and after the war, but it resisted resolution; indeed, it was the rare constitutional problem that flummoxed even Lincoln himself. At war’s end, the President and many of his congressional allies appeared to be on the verge of repudiating the system of military tribunals that Lincoln himself had superintended. His assassination, however, prompted his successor to convene the most controversial military trial of them all, an audacious proceeding that not only revived the heated debate over the constitutional question, but also precipitated one of the only instances in the nation’s history in which the Executive actually disregarded a judicial order—an action to prevent the Article III courts from adjudicating a challenge to their own displacement. The Article uncovers this fascinating but long-neglected chapter in the history of constitutional war powers. The article also carefully examines the place of the Lincoln trial in the nation’s constitutional discourse over the past century and a half—the ways in which that proceeding, and other Civil War military trials, have been accorded authority, or dismissed as nonauthoritative, by later generations. This broader historical narrative is not only of direct significance to the ongoing constitutional litigation challenging such military trials, but can also inform current academic and judicial debates about whether and under what circumstances political branch practice, especially high-profile precedents, ought to inform, or “liquidate,” the meaning or proper application of the Constitution

Extreme Values of the Fiedler Vector on Trees

Let $G$ be a connected tree on $n$ vertices and let $L = D-A$ denote the Laplacian matrix on $G$. The second-smallest eigenvalue $\lambda_{2}(G) > 0$, also known as the algebraic connectivity, as well as the associated eigenvector $\phi_2$ have been of substantial interest. We investigate the question of when the maxima and minima of $\phi_2$ are assumed at the endpoints of the longest path in $G$. Our results also apply to more general graphs that `behave globally' like a tree but can exhibit more complicated local structure. The crucial new ingredient is a reproducing formula for the eigenvector $\phi_k$

A biased electrostatic probe in a continuum regime

Current collection of biased electrostatic probe in continuum plasm

Recent Results on Nonlinear Elliptic Free Boundary Problems

In this paper we give an overview of some recent and older results concerning free boundary problems governed by elliptic operators