Consumer Arbitration as an Alternative to Judicial Preseizure Replevin Proceedings

In 1972, when the Supreme Court held two state statutes allowing prejudgment replevin of chattels without prior notice or an opportunity to be heard violative of the fourteenth amendment of the United States Constitution (Fuentes v. Shevin) consumer advocates applauded the expansion of due process principles. Fear that increased costs and delay resulting from disruption of creditors\u27 remedies might impair the operation of the consumer credit market, however, led the Court to call for legislative innovations designed to minimize these effects. Two years later, the expansion of due process protections for consumer debtors subsided when, in Mitchell v. W.T. Grant Co., the Court upheld a Louisiana sequestration procedure allowing prejudgment seizure of chattels on a creditor\u27s ex parte application. By approving a prejudgment seizure remedy which required neither notice nor prior adversary hearing, as long as other procedural safeguards were employed, the Court made the desirability of prior notice and hearing as much a question of legislative discretion as one of constitutional mandate; now state lawmakers may decide whether these particular procedural safeguards are beneficial to both consumer and creditor interests. While resolution of this problem may hinge upon subjective notions of fairness and justice, responsible legislative decisions also will require careful analysis of the economic effects of providing prior notice and hearing to allegedly defaulting consumer debtors. Mandatory arbitration to test the creditor\u27s claims prior to repossession can provide one procedure that will ensure fairness to the consumer while minimizing burdens on creditors and the consumer credit market. Providing an economical opportunity to be heard by means of mandatory consumer credit arbitration can resolve the present constitutional uncertainty by guaranteeing procedural due process rights in prejudgment replevin proceedings

Implications of British aid to West Africa for colonial economic policy.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityIn recent years Gambia, Ghana, the Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone have been engaged in public investment programs to promote economic development. These West African countries are all part of the sterling area. The development programs have been financed from various sources, including United Kingdom grants-in-aid. Certain official British statements claim categorically that the burden of these grants falls upon the United Kingdom. While it is true that the grants are given by the British it is not clear that the United Kingdom shoulders the burden. In view of these considerations, the proposition that a substantive change in British policy toward economic development of its dependencies, or former dependencies, particularly in West Africa, can be doubted

Bankruptcy as a Vehicle for Resolving Enterprise-Threatening Mass Tort Liability

A difficult challenge facing the American judicial system is providing for the fair and efficient resolution of litigation arising from mass tort liability. A mass tort involves a harmful act or series of acts by a company, such as the production of a defective product, that results in injuries to numerous victims--sometimes numbering into the thousands or hundreds of thousands. The most difficult cases are those involving “long-tail” mass torts, such as those relating to asbestos, where there is a long latency period between a person\u27s use or exposure to a harmful product and the first manifestation of harm. Removal of the defective product from the marketplace or from society as a whole will not end the continuing manifestation of injuries. Given the thousands of future claimants who will first discover their injuries in decades to come, long-tail mass torts place an enormous burden on the defendant company and the judiciary. The high costs of litigation threaten both adequate compensation for the vast number of victims and the survival of the defendant\u27s business. The practical inability to provide each tort victim with traditional, individualized adjudication under the usual rules of litigation in these mass tort situations has led to the use of class actions or other mechanisms designed to deal collectively, rather than individually, with numerous claimants. When a defendant company is faced with mass tort liability that threatens the viability of the enterprise, and other mechanisms either have failed or would be ineffective in avoiding the destruction of its business, it is likely to seek protection under the federal bankruptcy laws. Johns-Manville Corp.Celotex Corp.,Eagle-Picher Industries, Inc., Keene Corp., and at least a dozen other asbestos manufacturers deluged with thousands of personal injury claims; A.H. Robins Co. facing potentially devastating Dalkon Shield personal injury claims; Dow Corning Corp. under an onslaught of breast implant litigation; and other companies--all expecting countless future claimants who have not yet manifested any injury--have sought protection under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code within the past twenty years. . . . The purpose of this Article is to discuss the positive features of the present bankruptcy system that, in general, make it a fair and effective vehicle for dealing with mass tort liability. This Article will then suggest improvements to make bankruptcy an even more effective mechanism for dealing with mass tort cases. It is not the purpose of this paper to advocate that bankruptcy is the only, or even the best, mechanism for dealing with mass tort liability in all situations.Ideally, class actions, multidistrict litigation, alternative dispute resolution, and other vehicles for resolving mass tort liability will continue to improve as mechanisms for dealing with mass tort cases. When other mechanisms fail or are likely to be ineffective, and survival of the enterprise is threatened, however, companies with otherwise viable businesses will seek protection under the federal bankruptcy laws. The improvement of the bankruptcy system in the treatment of mass tort liability, therefore, should be a part of any comprehensive plan to improve the mechanisms for addressing mass tort liability in the American judicial system

Denying Secured Creditors the Right to Credit Bid in Chapter 11 Cases and the Risk of Undervaluation

The Bankruptcy Code has reached a delicate balance between protecting the rights of secured creditors and providing financially troubled companies with flexibility in reorganizing their businesses. One protection that has been available to secured creditors is the right to “credit bid” at any sale of collateral free of liens, which allows the creditor to buy the property by offsetting its claim against the purchase price instead of paying cash. This right is designed to assure that property is not sold free of security interests at a price that is below the collateral’s true value. An inadequate sales price deprives the creditor of the full benefit of its security interest. The importance of credit bidding has grown as asset sales have become more common in chapter 11 cases. Despite the universal view during the past three decades that the right to credit bid was essentially guaranteed when property is sold under a chapter 11 plan, two recent controversial decisions—the Fifth Circuit’s decision in In re Pacific Lumber Co. and the Third Circuit’s decision in In re Philadelphia Newspapers, LLC—curtailed this protection by holding that a secured lender may be denied the right to credit bid when its collateral is sold under a chapter 11 plan if the bankruptcy court makes a judicial finding that the creditor will realize the “indubitable equivalent” of its secured claim without credit bidding

Ensuring Trust in One Time Exchanges: Solving the QoS Problem

We describe a pricing structure for the provision of IT services that ensures trust without requiring repeated interactions between service providers and users. It does so by offering a pricing structure that elicits truthful reporting of quality of service (QoS) by providers while making them profitable. This mechanism also induces truth-telling on the part of users reserving the service

Microstructure-based Modeling of Primary Cilia Mechanics

A primary cilium, made of nine microtubule doublets enclosed in a cilium membrane, is a mechanosensing organelle that bends under an external mechanical load and sends an intracellular signal through transmembrane proteins activated by cilium bending. The nine microtubule doublets are the main load-bearing structural component, while the transmembrane proteins on the cilium membrane are the main sensing component. No distinction was made between these two components in all existing models, where the stress calculated from the structural component (nine microtubule doublets) was used to explain the sensing location, which may be totally misleading. For the first time, we developed a microstructure-based primary cilium model by considering these two components separately. First, we refined the analytical solution of bending an orthotropic cylindrical shell for individual microtubule, and obtained excellent agreement between finite element simulations and the theoretical predictions of a microtubule bending as a validation of the structural component in the model. Second, by integrating the cilium membrane with nine microtubule doublets and simulating the tip-anchored optical tweezer experiment on our computational model, we found that the microtubule doublets may twist significantly as the whole cilium bends. Third, besides being cilium-length-dependent, we found the mechanical properties of the cilium are also highly deformation-dependent. More important, we found that the cilium membrane near the base is not under pure in-plane tension or compression as previously thought, but has significant local bending stress. This challenges the traditional model of cilium mechanosensing, indicating that transmembrane proteins may be activated more by membrane curvature than membrane stretching. Finally, we incorporated imaging data of primary cilia into our microstructure-based cilium model, and found that comparing to the ideal model with uniform microtubule length, the imaging-informed model shows the nine microtubule doublets interact more evenly with the cilium membrane, and their contact locations can cause even higher bending curvature in the cilium membrane than near the base

Bayesian Networks for Max-linear Models

We study Bayesian networks based on max-linear structural equations as introduced in Gissibl and Kl\"uppelberg [16] and provide a summary of their independence properties. In particular we emphasize that distributions for such networks are generally not faithful to the independence model determined by their associated directed acyclic graph. In addition, we consider some of the basic issues of estimation and discuss generalized maximum likelihood estimation of the coefficients, using the concept of a generalized likelihood ratio for non-dominated families as introduced by Kiefer and Wolfowitz [21]. Finally we argue that the structure of a minimal network asymptotically can be identified completely from observational data.Comment: 18 page

Primary Cilia Have a Length-Dependent Persistence Length

© 2019, The Author(s). The fluctuating position of an optically trapped cilium tip under untreated and Taxol-treated conditions was used to characterize mechanical properties of the cilium axoneme and its basal body by combining experimental, analytical,and computational tools. We provide, for the first time, evidence that the persistence length of a ciliary axoneme is length-dependent; longer cilia are stiffer than shorter cilia. We demonstrate that this apparent length dependence can be understood by a combination of modeling axonemal microtubules as anisotropic elastic shells and including actomyosin-driven stochastic basal body motion.Our results also demonstrate the possibility of using observable ciliary dynamics to probe interior cytoskeletal dynamics. It is hoped that our improved characterization of cilia will result in deeper understanding of the biological function of cellular flow sensing by this organelle

Posttraumatic pseudolipoma: MRI appearances

The goal of this study was to describe the MRI characteristics of posttraumatic pseudolipomas. Ten patients with previous history of blunt trauma or local surgery were investigated with MRI at the level of their deformity. The etiology was blunt trauma in eight patients and postoperative trauma in two. For all patients medical documentation, in the form of clinical history and physical examination, confirmed that a visible hematoma was present acutely at the same location following the injury and that the contour deformity subsequently appeared. All patients underwent liposuction. Preoperative bilateral MRI examinations were performed on all patients. The mean clinical follow-up was 17.8 months. MRI examinations were interpreted in consensus by two experienced musculoskeletal radiologists with attention to fatty extension (subcutaneous fatty thickness and anatomical extension), asymmetry compared with the asymptomatic side, the presence or absence of fibrous septae or nonfatty components, and patterns of contrast enhancement. Ten posttraumatic pseudolipomas were identified. Clinically, they showed as subcutaneous masses with the consistency of normal adipose tissue. Their locations were the abdomen (n=1), hip (n=1), the upper thigh (n=6), the knee (n=1), and the ankle (n=1). On MRI examinations, using the contralateral side as a control, pseudolipomas appeared as focal fatty masses without a capsule or contrast enhancement. Posttraumatic pseudolipomas may develop at a site of blunt trauma or surgical procedures often antedated by a soft tissue hematoma. Characteristic MRI findings are unencapsulated subcutaneous fatty masses without contrast enhancemen