The Early Bird Waits for the Worm: May Federal Judgments Be Registered Prior to Appeal?

The federal registration statute, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1963, permits a judgment creditor to register his or her judgment in another state by simply filing a copy of the judgment with the clerk of the registering court. Registration is permitted when the judgment becomes final by appeal, when the time to appeal expires, or when the court that entered the judgment orders registration for good cause shown. The majority of courts have interpreted good cause as a showing that the judgment debtor lacks assets in the forum jurisdiction to fulfill the judgment, but possesses substantial assets in the registering jurisdiction. District courts are split, however, on whether there must be a pending appeal before registration can be ordered. Registration gives the judgment creditor power to create a lien on the judgment debtor’s property in another district. The effect of the registered judgment depends on a state’s laws regarding liens. Liens in some states may reach personal property, creating the potential for a registered judgment to have harsh effects on the debtor’s livelihood and placing restrictions on the alienability of real property. The posting of a supersedeas bond can stay the enforcement of a judgment and alleviate the need for registration. This Note argues that a judgment creditor should be permitted to register her judgment without waiting for the judgment debtor to file an appeal. However, a court should have discretion to consider whether permitting registration when the judgment debtor has not yet posted a supersedeas bond would cause irreparable harm to a good faith debtor, and if so, grant the debtor time to post a bond

The Early Bird Waits for the Worm: May Federal Judgments Be Registered Prior to Appeal?

The federal registration statute, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1963, permits a judgment creditor to register his or her judgment in another state by simply filing a copy of the judgment with the clerk of the registering court. Registration is permitted when the judgment becomes final by appeal, when the time to appeal expires, or when the court that entered the judgment orders registration for good cause shown. The majority of courts have interpreted good cause as a showing that the judgment debtor lacks assets in the forum jurisdiction to fulfill the judgment, but possesses substantial assets in the registering jurisdiction. District courts are split, however, on whether there must be a pending appeal before registration can be ordered. Registration gives the judgment creditor power to create a lien on the judgment debtor’s property in another district. The effect of the registered judgment depends on a state’s laws regarding liens. Liens in some states may reach personal property, creating the potential for a registered judgment to have harsh effects on the debtor’s livelihood and placing restrictions on the alienability of real property. The posting of a supersedeas bond can stay the enforcement of a judgment and alleviate the need for registration. This Note argues that a judgment creditor should be permitted to register her judgment without waiting for the judgment debtor to file an appeal. However, a court should have discretion to consider whether permitting registration when the judgment debtor has not yet posted a supersedeas bond would cause irreparable harm to a good faith debtor, and if so, grant the debtor time to post a bond

Chiral transport equation from the quantum Dirac Hamiltonian and the on-shell effective field theory

We derive the relativistic chiral transport equation for massless fermions and antifermions by performing a semiclassical Foldy-Wouthuysen diagonalization of the quantum Dirac Hamiltonian. The Berry connection naturally emerges in the diagonalization process to modify the classical equations of motion of a fermion in an electromagnetic field. We also see that the fermion and antifermion dispersion relations are corrected at first order in the Planck constant by the Berry curvature, as previously derived by Son and Yamamoto for the particular case of vanishing temperature. Our approach does not require knowledge of the state of the system, and thus it can also be applied at high temperature. We provide support for our result by an alternative computation using an effective field theory for fermions and antifermions: the on-shell effective field theory. In this formalism, the off-shell fermionic modes are integrated out to generate an effective Lagrangian for the quasi-on-shell fermions/antifermions. The dispersion relation at leading order exactly matches the result from the semiclassical diagonalization. From the transport equation, we explicitly show how the axial and gauge anomalies are not modified at finite temperature and density despite the incorporation of the new dispersion relation into the distribution function.Comment: 9 pages, no figures. v2: Some comments and more details added, typos fixed and reference list updated. Final version matching the published articl

Dynamical evolution of the chiral magnetic effect: Applications to the quark-gluon plasma

We study the dynamical evolution of the so-called chiral magnetic effect in an electromagnetic conductor. To this end, we consider the coupled set of corresponding Maxwell and chiral anomaly equations, and we prove that these can be derived from chiral kinetic theory. After integrating the chiral anomaly equation over space in a closed volume, it leads to a quantum conservation law of the total helicity of the system. A change in the magnetic helicity density comes together with a modification of the chiral fermion density. We study in Fourier space the coupled set of anomalous equations and we obtain the dynamical evolution of the magnetic fields, magnetic helicity density, and chiral fermion imbalance. Depending on the initial conditions we observe how the helicity might be transferred from the fermions to the magnetic fields, or vice versa, and find that the rate of this transfer also depends on the scale of wavelengths of the gauge fields in consideration. We then focus our attention on the quark-gluon plasma phase, and analyze the dynamical evolution of the chiral magnetic effect in a very simple toy model. We conclude that an existing chiral fermion imbalance in peripheral heavy ion collisions would affect the magnetic field dynamics, and consequently, the charge dependent correlations measured in these experiments.Comment: 41 pages, 14 figures, 3 appendices. Version 2: new global structure (appendix added), more explanations and additional references. Version accepted for publication in Physical Review D journa

MHD simulations of the solar photosphere

We briefly review the observations of the solar photosphere and pinpoint some open questions related to the magnetohydrodynamics of this layer of the Sun. We then discuss the current modelling efforts, addressing among other problems, that of the origin of supergranulation.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures; 4th French-Chinese Meeting on Solar Physics Understanding Solar Activity: Advances and Challenges, 4th French-Chinese, Nice, Franc