A Tale of Two Justices: Brandeis, Marshall, and Federal Court Judicial Diversity

In this Article, I will focus on the appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court as a significant landmark in the history of the federal judiciary. I explore this topic initially through a comparison of President Woodrow Wilson's 1916 appointment of Louis Brandeis with President Lyndon Johnson's appointment of Thurgood Marshall as a symbolic opening of the federal bench to African-American lawyers. Both Brandeis and Marshall were well-known nationally prior to their appointments, with Brandeis engaged in significant domestic and international activities, including his embrace of Zionism, and Marshall engaged in almost a four-decade long assault on racial segregation and Plessy v. Ferguson.' Perhaps not ironically, both endured abnormally long waits between nomination and confirmation while their opponents raised substantive objections that thinly veiled the opposition to the placement of a member of their respective groups on the highest court

The Battle for Brown

This article contends that the battle to preserve and place the principles of Brown v. Board of Education' at the center of the quest for educational equality is more important than ever before. Initially, this article notes that the United States Supreme Court's stewardship of Brown has been uneven, and the decision's precedential force has been much diminished in the hands of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. But as the Court has withdrawn from vigorous enforcement of Brown's desegregation mandate, segregation in public education persists, and other factors such as class, housing segregation, hypercriminalization, and employment discrimination intersect with race to condemn black and brown children to disparities in educational attainment. While Court partisans2 and the nation debate whether we are a post-racial America, 3 many sobering realities, including disparate educational outcomes, demonstrate that racial disparity and discrimination in America remain as resilient as ever

Before and After Michael Brown—Toward an End to Structural and Actual Violence

This Article offers a comprehensive view of the multitude of factors and circumstances that have culminated with the current climate of racial unrest. Greene traces the historical sources of racism as it intersects with policing and the justice system through the twentieth century and demonstrates how it pervades many aspects of American culture, from Supreme Court jurisprudence to television shows, in a “structure of violence.” Greene points out the need for a paradigm shift to overcome these forces in the new century

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall - Gender, Olympic Competition and Persistence of the Feminine Ideal

When the Modern Games began in 1896, women did not compete.5 The founder of the modern Games adamantly opposed female competition on the basis of a natural law principle it believed governed the role of women. Its leadership held that female competition would violate "the laws of nature" and would be "the most unaesthetic sight human eyes could contemplate."6 "It seems to me therefore that is those sports and games which are suitable for men be modified and reduced so that they cannot anyway injure the woman, and if we can create organizations which will enforce these modified regulations stringently, we will have gone a long way towards achieving our objects."7 Today, the role of women is still limited by policies that echo these outdated assumptions about female capacity, now justified by scientific and fair completion rationales. In this article I posit that the history. of sport is plagued by a commitment to a feminine ideal. In part one, I argue that achievement of gender equality in Olympic Sport is limited by a feminine ideal. That ideal embodies women as stereotypically feminine and weak, males as stereotypically masculine and stronger, and males as decision-makers over the scope of women's competitive destiny.

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Up Against the Wall: Congressional Retention of the Spending Power in Times of “Emergency”

President Trump’s border wall has evolved from an ambitious campaign promise into a real opportunity to explore presidential versus Congressional authority to determine how the president spends Congressionally appropriated funds. The president’s arguments that he has the power to build the wall under either the National Emergencies Act or the funding provisions of 10 U.S.C. § 9705 or 10 U.S.C. § 284 lack merit—the cited non-emergency-tied statutes do not provide funding for the wall. The former authorizes the utilization of Treasury Forfeiture funds tied to specific law enforcement activities but excludes the ambitious and broad construction project the president proposed; the latter authorizes support only for counterdrug activities. The wall constitutes an unprecedented appropriation for a project without mooring in statutory language permitting only unspecified minor military construction projects. Nor does The National Emergencies Act authorize the president to use Congressionally appropriated funds to build a wall that congress has expressly declined to fund. Congress enacted the National Emergencies Act after Executive abuses during the Vietnam War and to curb—not encourage—presidential usurpation of Congressional spending power based on emergency rationales. Although the National Emergencies Act imposes scant substantive and procedural limitations on a president’s ability to declare a national emergency and divert funds to address such an emergency, the Act does not allow the president to manufacture a basis for such a declaration where none exists. Even so, the chronology of events leading up to the emergency declaration demonstrates that the president’s invocation of an emergency is a ruse. Additionally, the president’s Executive Order cites 10 U.S.C. § 2808, which requires the declaration of a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act. That Act authorizes a president to undertake “military construction projects” when he declares a national emergency in accordance with that Act. But Section 2808 only applies where a national emergency “requires the use of the armed forces” and only authorizes military construction projects “necessary to support such use of the armed forces.” The statutory language of 10 U.S.C. § 2808 makes it clear that effectuating immigration policy does not qualify as a military construction. It has been long settled that presidential power must stem from an act of Congress or from the president’s own Article II powers. That dictum need not deprive a president of flexibility in the execution of powers delegated to her by Congress or in the execution of power delegated to her by the Constitution. Neither the foreign affairs power to recognize nations nor Commander in Chief authority to repel sudden attacks authorize the president to spend funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes. The Constitution did delegate to Congress the power to “provide for the common defense and general welfare” of the United States with the proviso that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law.” That provision does not deprive Congress of the flexibility to delegate power to the president, but here Congress did not authorize these expenditures and expressly declined to provide funding for “the Wall” on two occasions. Thus, the president’s use of Congressionally appropriated funds to build “his Wall” is in conflict with Congress’s will and unlawful. So far, though lower courts have agreed with this result, a Supreme Court stay of the decision that enjoined the use of Defense Department funds in effect permits the president to finalize contracts and begin wall construction pending the resolution of the dispute on the merits in the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court. In its short decision that granted the stay, the Supreme Court signaled that if the case arrives via certiorari and the Court grants review, a majority will conclude that the Sierra Club plaintiffs have “no cause of action.” If that transpires, the favorable outcome for the president will turn on the nature of the litigants not the legality of the Wall construction project. For those concerned with the preservation of constitutional limitations on the Executive, “better half a loaf than none at all.”

Up Against the Wall: Congressional Retention of the Spending Power in Times of “Emergency”

President Trump’s border wall has evolved from an ambitious campaign promise into a real opportunity to explore presidential versus Congressional authority to determine how the president spends Congressionally appropriated funds. The president’s arguments that he has the power to build the wall under either the National Emergencies Act or the funding provisions of 10 U.S.C. § 9705 or 10 U.S.C. § 284 lack merit—the cited non-emergency-tied statutes do not provide funding for the wall. The former authorizes the utilization of Treasury Forfeiture funds tied to specific law enforcement activities but excludes the ambitious and broad construction project the president proposed; the latter authorizes support only for counterdrug activities. The wall constitutes an unprecedented appropriation for a project without mooring in statutory language permitting only unspecified minor military construction projects. Nor does The National Emergencies Act authorize the president to use Congressionally appropriated funds to build a wall that congress has expressly declined to fund. Congress enacted the National Emergencies Act after Executive abuses during the Vietnam War and to curb—not encourage—presidential usurpation of Congressional spending power based on emergency rationales. Although the National Emergencies Act imposes scant substantive and procedural limitations on a president’s ability to declare a national emergency and divert funds to address such an emergency, the Act does not allow the president to manufacture a basis for such a declaration where none exists. Even so, the chronology of events leading up to the emergency declaration demonstrates that the president’s invocation of an emergency is a ruse. Additionally, the president’s Executive Order cites 10 U.S.C. § 2808, which requires the declaration of a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act. That Act authorizes a president to undertake “military construction projects” when he declares a national emergency in accordance with that Act. But Section 2808 only applies where a national emergency “requires the use of the armed forces” and only authorizes military construction projects “necessary to support such use of the armed forces.” The statutory language of 10 U.S.C. § 2808 makes it clear that effectuating immigration policy does not qualify as a military construction. It has been long settled that presidential power must stem from an act of Congress or from the president’s own Article II powers. That dictum need not deprive a president of flexibility in the execution of powers delegated to her by Congress or in the execution of power delegated to her by the Constitution. Neither the foreign affairs power to recognize nations nor Commander in Chief authority to repel sudden attacks authorize the president to spend funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes. The Constitution did delegate to Congress the power to “provide for the common defense and general welfare” of the United States with the proviso that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law.” That provision does not deprive Congress of the flexibility to delegate power to the president, but here Congress did not authorize these expenditures and expressly declined to provide funding for “the Wall” on two occasions. Thus, the president’s use of Congressionally appropriated funds to build “his Wall” is in conflict with Congress’s will and unlawful. So far, though lower courts have agreed with this result, a Supreme Court stay of the decision that enjoined the use of Defense Department funds in effect permits the president to finalize contracts and begin wall construction pending the resolution of the dispute on the merits in the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court. In its short decision that granted the stay, the Supreme Court signaled that if the case arrives via certiorari and the Court grants review, a majority will conclude that the Sierra Club plaintiffs have “no cause of action.” If that transpires, the favorable outcome for the president will turn on the nature of the litigants not the legality of the Wall construction project. For those concerned with the preservation of constitutional limitations on the Executive, “better half a loaf than none at all.”

2003-2004 Research Honors Program Abstracts (for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Undergraduates)

Faculty in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University mentor and guide undergraduate students who have chosen to pursue a research project and graduate with honors. These abstracts reflect the depth of their scholarship and intellectual ability. The research projects encompass work in animal science, biological science, entomology, landscape studies, natural resources, physical science, plant science, and social science