Inside State Courts: Improving the Market for State Trial Court Law Clerks

The power of state trial courts is tremendous. Charged with resolving 95% of the nation’s legal cases, state trial judges decide “the law” for thousands of litigants and criminal defendants every year, not to mention countless others impacted or bound by their decisions. Yet for decades state judges and academics have warned of a “crisis in the courts.” Many state courts today remain chronically underfunded, although they rarely ever compose more than 1% of the average state budget (and never more than 2%). State chief judges have decried the waning quality of state courts, arguing that inadequate funding has led to undue court delays, case backlogs, and poorly decided cases, placing state courts “at the tipping point of dysfunction.” Yet despite nearly four decades of court funding litigation and legislative debate, state court reform efforts remain limited in many states by one sobering and largely neglected fact: local government is in the driver’s seat on funding state trial courts and determining the quality of justice. When court funding is decentralized, and local communities must pay for their own court services, the property and income wealth of the community determines the quality of justice in that particular area. Unsurprisingly, decentralized state court funding systems have tended to benefit only courts in affluent communities, where the highest tax revenue and per capita income base predominate, while courts in poorer locales are often left lacking sufficient funding and resources to operate efficiently. This fact casts a long shadow over the ideal of equal opportunity to justice. This Article refracts the problem of local state court funding through one vitally important, but until now unstudied, judicial resource: state trial court clerkships

The “Vanishing Trial”: Arbitrating Wrongful Death

Within the past four decades, private arbitration has spread apace across the American legal landscape. The “mass production” of arbitration clauses has pervaded modern business life, relegating a multitude of legal doctrines from the public courthouse into the private realm. The results have been both acute and invidious. Modern judicial preferences for arbitration have given way to enforcement in areas of the formerly unenforceable. Courts are now compelling new classes of claims, previously thought to be beyond the pale of any arbitration agreement. The latest target in this expedition is the wrongful death action, with courts now shifting wrongful death litigants into private arbitration when they never agreed to arbitrate their disputes in the first place. The recent paradigm shift into wrongful death arbitration raises a complex blend of conceptual, practical, normative, and doctrinal problems. Under modern judicial preferences for arbitration, the problems that inhere within wrongful death arbitration have remained largely hidden. In this article, we expose these problems and develop a more nuanced and coherent rule of analysis that comprehends the history and purpose behind these two legal doctrines: wrongful death liability and arbitration. First, we show that courts compelling arbitration in this area distort the very rights wrongful death liability historically sought to defend—including the property rights of family members who depended upon the decedent for economic support. Next, we explain that, by denying family members access to public tribunals and punitive damage awards, courts compelling wrongful death arbitration erode the basic deterrence function of wrongful death liability. In reaching our conclusion, we urge a bright-line rule that rejects wrongful death arbitration as fundamentally inconsistent with the historical intent and purpose behind both wrongful death liability and arbitration

OH detection by absorption of frequency-doubled diode laser radiation at 308nm

Radiation at 308 nm has been obtained by frequency doubling the output of a commercial diode laser cooled to 165 K. A single pass through a crystal of LiIO3 converted 1 mW of 616 nm radiation to 50 pW of UV, and this was used to detect the OH radical in absorption in a flow tube. Possible extensions of the method for detection of OH in the atmosphere are discussed

The spatial distribution of HO2in an atmospheric pressure plasma jet investigated by cavity ring-down spectroscopy

Cold atmospheric pressure plasma jets make important contributions to a range of fields, such as materials processing and plasma medicine. In order to optimise the effect of those plasma sources, a detailed understanding of the chemical reaction networks is pivotal. However, the small diameter of plasma jets makes diagnostics challenging. A promising approach to obtain absolute number densities is the utilisation of cavity-enhanced absorption spectroscopy methods, by which line-of-sight averaged densities are determined. Here, we present first measurements on how the spatial distribution of HO2 in the effluent of a cold atmospheric pressure plasma jet can be obtained by cavity ring-down spectroscopy in an efficient way. Instead of recording fully wavelength resolved spectra, we will demonstrate that it is sufficient to measure the absorption coefficient at two wavelengths, corresponding to the laser being on and off the molecular resonance. By sampling the effluent from the 1.6 mm diameter nozzle in the radial direction at various axial positions, we determined that the distances over which the HO2 density was distributed were (3.9 ± 0.5) mm and (6.7 ± 0.1) mm at a distance of 2 mm and 10 mm below the nozzle of the plasma jet, respectively. We performed an Abel inversion in order to obtain the spatial distribution of HO2 that is presented along the symmetry axis of the effluent. Based on that localised density, which was (4.8 ± 0.6) ⋅ 1014 cm-3 at the maximum, we will discuss the importance of the plasma zone for the production of HO2

Trace species detection in the near infrared using Fourier transform broadband cavity enhanced absorption spectroscopy: Initial studies on potential breath analytes

Cavity enhanced absorption measurements have been made of several species that absorb light between 1.5 and 1.7 µm using both a supercontinuum source and superluminescent light emitting diodes. A system based upon an optical enhancement cavity of relatively high finesse, consisting of mirrors of reflectivity ∼99.98%, and a Fourier transform spectrometer, is demonstrated. Spectra are recorded of isoprene, butadiene, acetone and methane, highlighting problems with spectral interference and unambiguous concentration determinations. Initial results are presented of acetone within a breath-like matrix indicating ppm precision at <∼10 ppm acetone levels. Instrument sensitivities are sufficiently enhanced to enable the detection of atmospheric levels of methane. Higher detection sensitivities are achieved using the supercontinuum source, with a minimum detectable absorption coefficient of ∼4 × 10(-9) cm(-1) reported within a 4 min acquisition time. Finally, two superluminescent light emitting diodes are coupled together to increase the wavelength coverage, and measurements are made simultaneously on acetylene, CO(2), and butadiene. The absorption cross-sections for acetone and isoprene have been measured with an instrumental resolution of 4 cm(-1) and are found to be 1.3 ± 0.1 × 10(-21) cm(2) at a wavelength of 1671.9 nm and 3.6 ± 0.2 × 10(-21) cm(2) at 1624.7 nm, respectively

Chemical kinetics in an atmospheric pressure helium plasma containing humidity

Atmospheric pressure plasmas are sources of biologically active oxygen and nitrogen species, which makes them potentially suitable for the use as biomedical devices. Here, experiments and simulations are combined to investigate the formation of the key reactive oxygen species, atomic oxygen (O) and hydroxyl radicals (OH), in a radio-frequency driven atmospheric pressure plasma jet operated in humidified helium. Vacuum ultra-violet high-resolution Fourier-transform absorption spectroscopy and ultra-violet broad-band absorption spectroscopy are used to measure absolute densities of O and OH. These densities increase with increasing H 2 O content in the feed gas, and approach saturation values at higher admixtures on the order of 3 × 10 14 cm −3 for OH and 3 × 10 13 cm −3 for O. Experimental results are used to benchmark densities obtained from zero-dimensional plasma chemical kinetics simulations, which reveal the dominant formation pathways. At low humidity content, O is formed from OH + by proton transfer to H 2 O, which also initiates the formation of large cluster ions. At higher humidity content, O is created by reactions between OH radicals, and lost by recombination with OH. OH is produced mainly from H 2 O + by proton transfer to H 2 O and by electron impact dissociation of H 2 O. It is lost by reactions with other OH molecules to form either H 2 O + O or H 2 O 2 . Formation pathways change as a function of humidity content and position in the plasma channel. The understanding of the chemical kinetics of O and OH gained in this work will help in the development of plasma tailoring strategies to optimise their densities in applications

The Political Unconscious of Hannah Arendt: An Encounter with Psychoanalysis

This thesis argues for a rapprochement between Hannah Arendt’s novel theory of totalitarianism and psychoanalysis. Julia Kristeva has recently suggested that Arendt’s conceptualization of politics comes close at points to delivering a theory of the political conscious and unconscious. However, what has received little to no attention from scholars is that Arendt’s own analysis of the subterranean pathologies which she claims to necessitate totalitarianism -- diminishing human agency and political freedom; the paradox that as mass culture and capitalist consumption abound, we are also less equipped to control human action -- indeed closely remind one of the very mechanisms proposed by psychoanalysis. However, she never discussed this explicitly and certainly never cited psychoanalytic tools in her work. By examining the specific moments of Arendt’s theory which address the intersection of individual psychic life and the oftentimes conflictual world of appearances, we will be able to answer the fundamental question left unanswered by Arendt herself: how does one explain the psychic transformation of the subject to the extent that he readily desired and even enjoyed his role in the active constitution of the fascist project? By reading Arendt’s political thought alongside psychoanalytic writers, such as Freud, Lyotard, Lacan, Adorno, and Kristeva, we find that the enjoyment and desire to have oneself recognized through action and speech assumed a dramatically different form within totalitarianism. Instead of the enjoyment of human freedom in politics, totalitarianism sprang from the fantastical enjoyment of human superfluousness and objectification from within the ‘closed-circuit’ totalitarian imaginary

Spectroscopy techniques and the measurement of molecular radical densities in atmospheric pressure plasmas

Cold atmospheric pressure plasmas (CAPs) are finding an increasing number of applications in diverse fields such as sterilization, medicine and dentistry, because they induce chemical reactivity at near-ambient temperature. These plasmas are usually generated in noble gas flows which propagate into air, resulting in the production of a wide variety of species which can cause primary and secondary chemistry in both the gas and liquid phases. Detailed understanding of this low temperature reactivity requires selective and sensitive measurements of radical species. In this review we focus upon several techniques from a methodological point of view that are suitable for the sensitive detection of reactive species, or show promise for this purpose. A range of traditional and contemporary spectroscopic methods for measuring across different phases is highlighted in an attempt to present a 'detection landscape' for CAP-borne radicals