Reconstructing RFRA: The Contested Legacy of Religious Freedom Restoration

Almost every member of Congress voted to approve the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), a bill endorsed by an unprecedented coalition of dozens of religious and civil rights organizations spanning the political and ideological spectrum. President Clinton quipped at the signing ceremony that perhaps only divine intervention could explain such an unusual meeting of the minds: the establishment of “new trust” across otherwise irreconcilable “ideological and religious lines,” he remarked, “shows . . . that the power of God is such that, even in the legislative process, miracles can happen.” The RFRA consensus was especially “miraculous” because the legislation addressed a deeply divisive question: whether and under what circumstances religious objectors should be exempt from generally applicable laws. RFRA’s supporters, both within and outside Congress, would surely have had sharp disagreements about many specific claims for religious exemptions to particular laws. Yet they coalesced around RFRA, which circumvented such disagreements at the retail level by codifying a “cross-cutting” statutory standard that judges would be required to apply to an undifferentiated and unknown array of future claims for exemptions to every generally applicable law in the land

Organic plant breeding

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. To a major extent, organic farming depends currently on plant and animal varieties that have been bred for non-organic farming and that are often not suited to organic production. This position is inconsistent with a holistic approach to organic agriculture. Organically-bred plant varieties are needed to develop both the potential of organic agriculture and its integrity. A first attempt at developing a concept for organic plant breeding methodology has been proposed. A novel approach to breeding for organic production has also been started. Further development needs a parallel approach to animal breeding for organic systems

Could the Hercules satellite be a stellar stream in the Milky Way halo?

We investigate the possibility that Hercules, a recently discovered Milky Way (MW) satellite, is a stellar stream in the process of formation. This hypothesis is motivated by Hercules' highly elongated shape as well as the measurement of a tentative radial velocity gradient along its body. The application of simple analytical techniques on radial velocity data of its member stars provides tight constraints on the tangential velocity of the system (v_t = -16^{+6}_{-22} km/s, relative to the Galactic Standard of Rest). Combining this with its large receding velocity (145 km/s) and distance (138 kpc) yields an orbit that would have taken Hercules to within 6^{+9}_{-2} kpc of the Galactic centre approximately 0.6 Gyr ago. This very small perigalacticon can naturally explain the violent tidal destruction of the dwarf galaxy in the MW's gravitational potential, inducing its transformation into a stellar stream.Comment: Conference proceedings of "A Universe of dwarf galaxies: Observations, Theories, Simulations" held in Lyon, France (June 14-18, 2010

A Wikipedia Literature Review

This paper was originally designed as a literature review for a doctoral dissertation focusing on Wikipedia. This exposition gives the structure of Wikipedia and the latest trends in Wikipedia research

Introduction to Library Trends 42 (3) Winter 1994: Library Finance: New Needs, New Models

published or submitted for publicatio

The Future and Past of U.S. Foreign Relations Law

The increasing role that the US plays in the world can only mean a correspondingly greater role for foreign affairs law in the US legal community. The Supreme Court has recently cited international and comparative law materials to a striking, and all but unprecedented, degree