Making Constitutional Sense: A Modal Approach to California\u27s Proposition 66

For years, the California Supreme Court has adopted a deferential posture when reviewing state constitutional challenges to a ballot initiative. The decision in Briggs v. Brown underscored the degree to which courts are willing to avoid striking down ballot initiatives on constitutional grounds, such as by broadly construing the initiative’s language to avoid constitutional problems. In construing the language of Proposition 66 to avoid separation of powers problems, however, Briggs effectively re-interpreted central pillars of Proposition 66 in ways rendering it unrecognizable to Californians who cast votes for and against the initiative. Such recasting of ballot initiatives raises fundamental jurisprudential questions concerning the courts’ ability to regulate the people’s reserved legislative powers vis-à-vis the initiative process. This Article examines the decision in Briggs and evaluates principles of judicial review as applied to popularly enacted ballot initiatives. This Article discusses various methods of constitutional reasoning, and considers challenges and issues when applying these approaches to the constitutional questions raised by Briggs. Briggs not only raises salient separation of powers issues, but the decision raises practical and political challenges as well. In the end, Briggs arguably limited its inquiry to a particular framework of constitutional reasoning without engaging the full breadth of argument archetypes that would have bolstered its decision in light of various constitutional values, institutional constraints, and political realities. In circumstances where the prevailing analytical framework proves unworkable in the long-run, courts should expand their analytical approach to include considerations such as prudence, history, text, ethics, and structure

Efficient time series detection of the strong stochasticity threshold in Fermi-Pasta-Ulam oscillator lattices

In this work we study the possibility of detecting the so-called strong stochasticity threshold, i.e. the transition between weak and strong chaos as the energy density of the system is increased, in anharmonic oscillator chains by means of the 0-1 test for chaos. We compare the result of the aforementioned methodology with the scaling behavior of the largest Lyapunov exponent computed by means of tangent space dynamics, that has so far been the most reliable method available to detect the strong stochasticity threshold. We find that indeed the 0-1 test can perform the detection in the range of energy density values studied. Furthermore, we determined that conventional nonlinear time series analysis methods fail to properly compute the largest Lyapounov exponent even for very large data sets, whereas the computational effort of the 0-1 test remains the same in the whole range of values of the energy density considered with moderate size time series. Therefore, our results show that, for a qualitative probing of phase space, the 0-1 test can be an effective tool if its limitations are properly taken into account.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review

Ecosystem type might mask the effect of ecosystem recovery on parasitoids’ biodiversity quality

Ecological restoration is considered a tool for repairing anthropogenic habitat disturbances, but the biodiversity recovering needs to be monitored. Here we evaluate a comprehensive approach for biodiversity: Biodiversity Quality, which comprises a set of 10 indices representing different components of diversity and providing an holistic overview. This approach was tested in a hyper-diverse insect group, the Ichneumonidae family in three different levels of conservation, i.e., a degraded area, a well-conserved area and an area undergoing ecological restoration for 10–15 years. Comparisons were done in three different ecosystems from southern Ecuador, i.e., Andean forest, rainforest and dry forest. We also compared the species assemblages through beta diversity indices. A total of 36 Townes style white Malaise traps were installed at three different conservation levels in 12 natural reserves, and all Ichneumonid insects collected were sorted, mounted and identified to operational taxonomic units (OTUs). A total of 2929 individuals in 708 OTUs were collected, which represented 1264.78 g of biomass. No differences were found between conservation levels, but all indices showed significant differences when comparing ecosystem types. Andean forests had significantly more richness, diversity, population and biomass than the other ecosystems, and less dominance and rarity than dry forests. Species composition of Ichneumonidae assemblages were also different between ecosystems and not so between conservation levels. When comparing in every ecosystem separately, degraded areas in dry forest had significantly more density and biomass than conserved areas. This represents a first attempt of applying this comprehensive approach in such a species-rich family.This research was supported by the Prometeo Project of Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación from Ecuador, and the projects DI-10-FARNR (2017–2019) and DI-10-FARNR-2019 from Universidad Nacional de Loja, Ecuador