Title VII’s Failures: A History of Overlooked Indifference

Nearly sixty years after the adoption of Title VII and over thirty since intersectionality theory was brought into legal discourse by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently failed to meaningfully implement intersectionality into its decisionmaking. While there is certainly no shortage of scholarship on intersectionality and the Court’s failure to recognize it, this remains an overlooked failure by the Supreme Court. This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I provides an overview of Title VII and intersectional discrimination theory. I then explain how the EEOC and the Supreme Court have historically handled intersectional discrimination cases. Part II compares and contrasts some of the most influential feminist, political, and legal theories on sex discrimination with intersectionality. Though these theories might seem incompatible, I then offer a brief discussion of how they can be understood in concert. I also explain how the Court can improve its Title VII decisionmaking. Part III provides a framework for courts, plaintiffs, and defendants in Title VII discrimination cases to incorporate intersectional theory and, most importantly, to recognize the unique harms experienced by plaintiffs bringing Title VII claims

The Limits of Legislation in Achieving Social Change

This paper proceeds from the premise that law is an appropriate, perhaps inevitable, instrument for dealing with ethical issues related to the use of research animals but then addresses the limits of the legislation in promoting change

Lived experiences of state housing in South Africa's cities: Johannesburg and Durban

A focus on the lived experiences of beneficiaries of South Africa's main housing programme reveals its diverse results, which challenge more straightforward readings of it in either largely positive or largely negative terms. Incorporating specific findings from previous studies in the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg and Durban, the paper explores a range of emotions, experiences and effects of the housing benefit across three dimensions: first, beneficiaries’ interactions with their housing; second, gendered experiences; and third, citizenship practices. Discussing different aspects of the lived experience of the housing sheds light on the effects of policy on people’s lives, helping to refine and distinguish multiple facets of an often unqualified and limited portrayal of the housing ‘beneficiary’. These complex, and at times conflicting, inscriptions, impressions and effects are read against particular socio-economic contexts. Outcomes reveal some sense of inclusion at the same time that wider patterns of inequality persist, to a large extent echoing Anand and Rademacher’s (2011) analyses of public housing initiatives in Mumbai

The Evolution of Altruism in Spatially Structured Populations

The evolution of altruism in humans is still an unresolved puzzle. Helping other individuals is often kinship-based or reciprocal. Several examples show, however, that altruism goes beyond kinship and reciprocity and people are willing to support unrelated others even when this is at a cost and they receive nothing in exchange. Here we examine the evolution of this "pure" altruism with a focus on altruistic teaching. Teaching is modeled as a knowledge transfer which enhances the survival chances of the recipient, but reduces the reproductive efficiency of the provider. In an agent-based simulation we compare evolutionary success of genotypes that have willingness to teach with those who do not in two different scenarios: random matching of individuals and spatially structured populations. We show that if teaching ability is combined with an ability to learn and individuals encounter each other on a spatial proximity basis, altruistic teaching will attain evolutionary success in the population. Settlement of the population and accumulation of knowledge are emerging side-products of the evolution of altruism. In addition, in large populations our simple model also produces a counterintuitive result that increasing the value of knowledge keeps fewer altruists alive.Altruism, Teaching, Knowledge Transfer, Spatially Structured Social Dilemmas

Men’s experiences of state sponsored housing in South Africa: Emerging issues and key questions

In South African cities, millions of men and women living informally, are being rehoused through the state-directed provision of formal houses to poor beneficiaries. This intervention is reshaping their lives, and innovatively targets beneficiaries with dependents, where over half are women (RSA 2014). Aiming to redress the historical context of gendered inequality in housing ownership, and house the very poor, these policy and implementation changes necessarily impact on men in terms of their power, resources and employment but in complex ways including positive and negative. The home remains significant for many men’s desires for authority and identity. Using the lens of masculinity, this paper considers the ways in which men are experiencing this housing intervention, revealing a complex mix of outcomes in terms of their sense of identity, their relationships and their financial pressures and income generation. It draws on empirical work in South Africa to illuminate the importance of focusing on men in relation to housing and offers key questions for future research

Lived experiences of state housing in South Africa's cities: Johannesburg and Durban

A focus on the lived experiences of beneficiaries of South Africa's main housing programme reveals its diverse results, which challenge more straightforward readings of it in either largely positive or largely negative terms. Incorporating specific findings from previous studies in the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg and Durban, the paper explores a range of emotions, experiences and effects of the housing benefit across three dimensions: first, beneficiaries’ interactions with their housing; second, gendered experiences; and third, citizenship practices. Discussing different aspects of the lived experience of the housing sheds light on the effects of policy on people’s lives, helping to refine and distinguish multiple facets of an often unqualified and limited portrayal of the housing ‘beneficiary’. These complex, and at times conflicting, inscriptions, impressions and effects are read against particular socio-economic contexts. Outcomes reveal some sense of inclusion at the same time that wider patterns of inequality persist, to a large extent echoing Anand and Rademacher’s (2011) analyses of public housing initiatives in Mumbai

Gendered il/legalities of housing formalisation in India and South Africa

Urban interventions, such as state-led housing provision in India and South Africa, establish new legal landscapes for urban residents (formerly slum/informal dwellers), who become home owners, legal occupiers of spaces, ratespayers and visible citizens although not in ways that are necessarily contingent. These material-legal processes are also acutely gendered underscoring wider calls for a feminist approach to legal geographies. Informed by a comparative empirically driven study, this paper explores how in both contexts, urban interventions work to enhance gender equality through improving women’s material shelter in the city, and introduce tenure security, often prioritising very poor women. Yet, their implementation is riddled with slippages as well as operating within a broader poverty–patriarchy nexus. This means that these legally framed benefits have occurred alongside complex and perverse outcomes including unemployment, gendered tensions and acute loss of privacy for some. Housing interventions produce uneven legal geographies, with persisting gendered inequalities and poverty distorting residents’ abilities to benefit from material-legal interventions aimed at improving their lives

Conformational Dependence of a Protein Kinase Phosphate Transfer Reaction

Atomic motions and energetics for a phosphate transfer reaction catalyzed by the cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) are calculated by plane-wave density functional theory, starting from structures of proteins crystallized in both the reactant conformation (RC) and the transition-state conformation (TC). In the TC, we calculate that the reactants and products are nearly isoenergetic with a 0.2 eV barrier; while phosphate transfer is unfavorable by over 1.2 eV in the RC, with an even higher barrier. With the protein in the TC, the motions involved in reaction are small, with only P$_\gamma$ and the catalytic proton moving more than 0.5 \AA. Examination of the structures reveals that in the RC the active site cleft is not completely closed and there is insufficient space for the phosphorylated serine residue in the product state. Together, these observations imply that the phosphate transfer reaction occurs rapidly and reversibly in a particular conformation of the protein, and that the reaction can be gated by changes of a few tenths of an \AA in the catalytic site.Comment: revtex4, 7 pages, 4 figures, to be submitted to Scienc

Optical absorption spectra in fullerenes C60 and C70: Effects of Coulomb interactions, lattice fluctuations, and anisotropy

Effects of Coulomb interactions and lattice fluctuations in the optical absorption spectra of C60 and C70 are theoretically investigated by using a tight binding model with long-range Coulomb interaction and bond disorder. Anisotropy effects in C70 are also considered. Optical spectra are calculated by using the Hartree-Fock approximation followed by the configuration interaction method. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The broad peaks at excitation energies, 3.7eV, 4.7eV, and 5.7eV, observed in experiments of C60 molecules in a solution are reasonably described by the present theory. Peak positions and relative oscillator strengths are in overall agreement with the experiments. The broadening of peaks by lattice fluctuations is well simulated by the bond disorder model. (2) The optical gap of C70 is larger when the electric field of light is parallel to the long axis of the molecule. The shape of the frequency dispersion also depends on the orientation of the molecule. These properties are common in the free electron model and the model with Coulomb interactions. (3) The spectrum of C70 averaged over bond disorder and random orientations is compared with experiments in a solution. There is an overall agreement about the spectral shape. Differences in the spectra of C60 and C70 are discussed in connection with the symmetry reduction from a soccerball to a rugbyball.Comment: PACS numbers: 78.66.Qn, 78.20.Dj, 71.35.+z, 31.20.Tz; LaTeX, 15 pages, 5 figures (Physical Review B); Note: Please request figures to Authors. They will be sent via snail mai

2-Chloro-3-hydroxy­methyl-6-methoxy­quinoline

All the non-H atoms of the title compound, C11H10ClNO2, are roughly coplanar (r.m.s. deviation = 0.058 Å). In the crystal, adjacent mol­ecules are linked by an O—H⋯N hydrogen bond, generating chains running along the a axis