Introduction: Symposium on Paul Gowder, the rule of law in the real world

This is a short introduction to a book symposium on Paul Gowder's recent book, _The Rule of Law in thee Real World_ (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The book symposium will appear in the St. Luis University Law Journal, 62 St. Louis U. L.J., -- (2018), with commentaries on Gowder's book by colleen Murphy, Robin West, Chad Flanders, and Matthew Lister, along with replies by Paul Gowder

“Dreamers” and Others: Immigration Protests, Enforcement, and Civil Disobedience

In this short paper I hope to use some ideas drawn from the theory and practice of civil disobedience to address one of the most difficult questions in immigration theory, one rarely addressed by philosophers or other theorists working on the topic: How should we respond to people who violate immigration law? I will start with what I take to be the easiest case for my approach—that of so-called “Dreamers”—unauthorized immigrants in the US who were brought to this country while still children (often as infants) and who have spent the majority of their lives in the US. Members of this group have engaged in wide-scale protests, making the civil disobedience paradigm all the more plausible. I will then move on to the case of unauthorized immigrants who have engaged in protests, but who do not fall into the “Dreamer” category. Finally, I will consider whether thinking about immigration law violations from the perspective of civil disobedience—and the proper response to that—can help us think about immigration enforcement more generally

Intrinsic Differences in the Inner Jets of High- and Low-Optically Polarized Radio Quasars

A significant fraction of compact radio-loud quasars display most of the characteristics of relativistically beamed, high-optical polarization blazars, yet are weakly polarized in the optical regime. We have used the VLBA at 22 and 43 GHz to look for differences in the parsec-scale magnetic field structures of 18 high- and low-optically polarized, compact radio-loud quasars (HPQs and LPRQs, respectively). We find a strong correlation between the polarization level of the unresolved parsec-scale radio core at 43 GHz and overall optical polarization of the source, which suggests a common (possibly co-spatial) origin for the emission at these two wavelengths. The magnetic fields of the polarized 43 GHz radio cores are aligned roughly transverse to the jet axis. Similar orientations are seen in the optical, suggesting that the polarized flux at both wavelengths is due to one or more strong transverse shocks located very close to the base of the jet. In LPRQs, these shocks appear to be weak near the core, and gradually increase in strength down the jet. The LPRQs in our sample tend to have less luminous radio cores than the HPQs, and jet components with magnetic fields predominantly parallel to the flow. The components in HPQ jets, on the other hand, tend to have transverse alignments. These differences cannot be accounted for by a simple model in which HPQs and LPRQs are the same type of object, seen at different angles to the line of sight. A more likely scenario is that LPRQs represent a quiescent phase of blazar activity, in which the inner jet flow does not undergo strong shocks.Comment: 29 pages, includes 25 figures and 6 tables. Uses emulateapj5.sty. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. A version with better quality figures (785Kb, gzipped) can be found at http://sgra.jpl.nasa.gov/html_lister/LPQ

Resolving Doppler-factor crisis in AGNs: non-steady magnetized outflows

Magnetically-driven non-stationary acceleration of jets in AGNs results in the leading parts of the flow been accelerated to much higher Lorentz factors than in the case of steady state acceleration with the same parameters. The higher Doppler-boosted parts of the flow may dominate the high energy emission of blazar jets. We suggest that highly variable GeV and TeV emission in blazars is produced by the faster moving leading edges of highly magnetized non-stationary ejection blobs, while the radio data trace the slower-moving bulk flow. Model predictions compare favorably with the latest Fermi gamma-ray and MOJAVE radio VLBI results