Reforming Local Property for an Era of National Decline

Following a century of rapid growth, the global human population is predicted to crest and then decline in the coming generations. Some industrialized countries are already grappling with the economic and societal consequences of population loss. Others, including the United States, have only started to realize that decline might arrive on their doorsteps far sooner than originally anticipated, a prospect for which policymakers and legal scholars are presently unprepared. Global and national demographic change threaten to cause far-reaching dislocations, and local municipalities, too, will be asked to reckon with the aftermath. Yet local governance in the United States has long followed a dominant vision of population growth, with decline left stigmatized as a regional anomaly—as a symptom of crisis rather than a discrete catalyst for it. The growth gospel prevents local officials from preparing for decline preemptively when the resources can still be mustered to confront shifting demographics and dwindling tax streams. On the other hand, once a locality enters an era of decline, it runs headlong into vexing problems of property law. Underutilized land cannot simply be deleted or removed. It cannot be exchanged with utilized lands elsewhere in order to retain density, maintain vibrancy, and consolidate local infrastructure. As scholars have explored in the context of climate change, another looming challenge of the coming century, property law’s traditional preference for intergenerational stability hinders its utility when preparing for a changing world. Keeping pace requires that the institution evolve to become more adaptive and dynamic. Drawing upon recent property theory, this Article advocates for a reconfigured tenure form, the callable fee simple, which can be harnessed to create a new intergenerational mechanism for population decline: Future Consolidation Districts, or FCDs. After sketching the contours of an FCD, the Article explores how one could be created in a manner that provides flexibility to tackle future demographic dislocations, overcome implementation and equity challenges, and comport with existing local government and property norms, even while pushing the limits of both. Although today’s demographic forecasts may ultimately prove inaccurate, existing regimes cannot, and will not, remain static forever. They should be reconfigured deliberatively in advance rather than by necessity down the road

Confronting the Local Land Checkerboard

Fractured public land is hidden in plain sight. In communities across the country, a patchwork assortment of local governments share splintered ownership over surplus public properties, which can be found scattered in residential neighborhoods and alongside highways, in the shadows of development projects and in the scars of urban renewal. The ripple effect of this fragmentation extends across the spectrum of local governance. It creates needless costs and bureaucratic headaches at a time of acute fiscal distress for cities and counties. It contributes to an inequitable imbalance of local power between formal and informal landowners in a community. And curiously, the operative legal regime enables the problem while simultaneously muddying pragmatic ways to confront it. This Article seeks to shed light upon the local land checkerboard— and in doing so, the cluttered and opaque world of local government law that it inhabit

Interlocal Power Roulette

Local governments inhabit a crowded ecosystem. Cities, counties, and school districts—and many more—share overlapping territorial jurisdictions. Overlapping jurisdiction goes hand-in-hand with redundant local power, defined as a scenario where multiple governments hold independent authority to take the exact same action in the exact same territorial space. In Maine, for example, state law empowers three local bodies to operate the same sewer infrastructure. In Detroit, two separate entities are equally tasked with managing the city’s streetlights. And in communities across the country, local governments are broadly authorized to own the same parcels of public land, including in Oakland, California, where public properties are splintered between a grand total of fifteen different government bodies. How do localities navigate their shared powers in a shared governance ecosystem? In the absence of state guidance, local governments fashion ad hoc, largely circumstantial, and often informal regimes of interlocal power. Sometimes they compete with each other to control a public asset, while at other times they coordinate and exercise power in a joint manner. Sometimes they abstain from acting, on the hope or expectation that another local entity will take the lead, and at other times they bandwagon onto the governance decisions of another body. Rarely are these relationships set in stone. Instead, a relationship built on collaboration may devolve suddenly into competition, while even written agreements that delineate how two governments will exercise their redundant powers can prove illusory on the ground. Uncertainty reigns supreme in this interstitial universe, yielding an interlocal governance haze that this Article aims to highlight and moderate. The Article demonstrates why redundant and muddled power is so common, how it manifests in practice, and why state legislatures generally take a hands-off approach to the issue. Yet as it also demonstrates, legislatures sometimes do intervene, at times aggressively, to reorder interlocal power in pursuit of substantive policies or particular political goals. Intergovernmental power dynamics can thus lurch between the polar nodes of local indeterminacy and haphazard, state-imposed change. To break the impasse, this Article considers a counterintuitive strategy for local government officials: proactively asking the state to limit their power by creating an administrative oversight framework where none currently exists. Such a framework would enhance local democracy by shedding sunlight on conversations that today often occur in the shadows. It could also carve a middle-ground approach between the well-trod and often politically-fraught poles of state fiat and local autonomy, one where, instead, local actors can pursue a procedural initiative today to ward off unpredictable state interventions down the road

A Legal Map of New Local Parkland

Public parks play consequential roles in local communities. Parks can raise property values, encourage or inhibit sprawl, and promote health, safety, and social cohesion. The decision to create a park affects development in the surrounding area and dictates which residents can easily access the property’s new amenities—and which residents cannot. Yet, public stakeholders are given few signposts in making and monitoring public park acquisitions. Data on new parkland is scarce; moreover, the legal framework undergirding the process is poorly understood and rarely explored, particularly at the local government level. Although local governments are America’s leading stewards and gatekeepers of public park property, the actions of a parks department when acquiring new land receive bare direction from the formal legal regime and little attention from legal scholars. Instead, state law and judicial precedent grants almost unconstrained local discretion when acquiring parkland, a framework that delegates lawmaking to the lowest level of governance: to the local and sublocal institutions whose internal policies and unwritten practices determine what parkland is acquired, how potential land acquisitions are reviewed, and which stakeholders and priorities carry most weight in the process. Viewed as a whole, these policies and practices constitute an informal, heterogeneous legal regime of local parkland acquisition

Overall and cancer related mortality among patients with ocular inflammation treated with immunosuppressive drugs: retrospective cohort study

Context Whether immunosuppressive treatment adversely affects survival is unclear

Breakdown of a perturbed Z_N topological phase

We study the robustness of a generalized Kitaev's toric code with Z_N degrees of freedom in the presence of local perturbations. For N=2, this model reduces to the conventional toric code in a uniform magnetic field. A quantitative analysis is performed for the perturbed Z_3 toric code by applying a combination of high-order series expansions and variational techniques. We provide strong evidences for first- and second-order phase transitions between topologically-ordered and polarized phases. Most interestingly, our results also indicate the existence of topological multi-critical points in the phase diagram.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figure

The Risk of Intraocular Pressure Elevation in Pediatric Noninfectious Uveitis

To characterize the risk and risk factors for intraocular pressure (IOP) elevation in pediatric non-infectious uveitis

The impact of strabismus on quality of life in adults with and without diplopia: a systematic review

Strabismus affects approximately 4% of the adult population and can cause substantial physical disturbance and changes to appearance. This article aims to examine the impact of strabismus in adults both with and without diplopia, focusing primarily on quality of life (QoL). We highlight the value of measuring QoL, assess the ways in which it can be measured, and the impact the disease, diplopia, and surgery have on the patient. QoL differs for strabismus patients based on their diplopia status. Patients with diplopia tend to have more concerns relating to functional QoL, whereas patients without diplopia have primarily psychosocial concerns. Two diplopia-specific questionnaires have been designed to assess QoL and the perceived severity of symptoms. Further research is needed to identify the variables which influence QoL so that appropriate support can be given to all patients with strabismus to improve their QoL

Detection of transcriptional triggers in the dynamics of microbial growth: application to the respiratorily versatile bacterium Shewanella oneidensis

© The Author(s), 2012. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Nucleic Acids Research 40 (2012): 7132-7149, doi:10.1093/nar/gks467.The capacity of microorganisms to respond to variable external conditions requires a coordination of environment-sensing mechanisms and decision-making regulatory circuits. Here, we seek to understand the interplay between these two processes by combining high-throughput measurement of time-dependent mRNA profiles with a novel computational approach that searches for key genetic triggers of transcriptional changes. Our approach helped us understand the regulatory strategies of a respiratorily versatile bacterium with promising bioenergy and bioremediation applications, Shewanella oneidensis, in minimal and rich media. By comparing expression profiles across these two conditions, we unveiled components of the transcriptional program that depend mainly on the growth phase. Conversely, by integrating our time-dependent data with a previously available large compendium of static perturbation responses, we identified transcriptional changes that cannot be explained solely by internal network dynamics, but are rather triggered by specific genes acting as key mediators of an environment-dependent response. These transcriptional triggers include known and novel regulators that respond to carbon, nitrogen and oxygen limitation. Our analysis suggests a sequence of physiological responses, including a coupling between nitrogen depletion and glycogen storage, partially recapitulated through dynamic flux balance analysis, and experimentally confirmed by metabolite measurements. Our approach is broadly applicable to other systems.Office of Science (BER), U.S. Department of Energy [DE-FG02-07ER64388 to D.S. and DE-FG02- 08ER64511 to M.H.S.]; National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA Astrobiology Institute [NNA08CN84A to D.S.]