17,094 research outputs found
Compelling Interests and Contraception
On the eve of Griswold v. Connecticutâs fiftieth anniversary, employers are bringing challenges under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to federal laws requiring them to include contraception in the health insurance benefits that they offer their employees. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, five Justices asserted that the government has compelling interests in ensuring employees access to contraception, but did not discuss those interests in any detail. In what follows, we clarify those interests by connecting discussion in the Hobby Lobby opinions and the federal governmentâs briefs to related cases on compelling interests and individual rights in the areas of race and sex equality.
The governmentâs compelling interests, we argue, are best understood from within two horizons: they encompass not only core concerns of the community in promoting public health and facilitating womenâs integration in the workplace, but also crucial concerns of the employees who are the intended beneficiaries of federal lawâs contraceptive coverage requirementâinterests that sound in bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and equal citizenship. Further, as we show, a full accounting of the governmentâs compelling interests attends both to their material and expressive dimensions.
This more comprehensive account of the governmentâs compelling interests in providing employees access to contraception matters both in political debate and in RFRA litigation as courts determine whether the government has pursued its interests by the least restrictive means. The more comprehensive account offered here is less susceptible to compromise and tradeoffs than is an account focused only on material interests in public health and contraceptive cost
Contraception as a Sex Equality Right
Challenges to federal law requiring insurance coverage of contraception are occurring on the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Courtâs decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. It is a good time to reflect on the values served by protecting womenâs access to contraception.
In 1965, the Court ruled in Griswold that a law criminalizing the use of contraception violated the privacy of the marriage relationship. Griswold offered women the most significant constitutional protection since the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, constitutional protection as important as the cases prohibiting sex discrimination that the Court would decide in the next decadeâperhaps even more so. Griswold is conventionally understood to have secured liberty for women. But the right to contraception also secures equality for women, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw clearly in the 1970s and as the Court eventually would explain in Planned Parenthood v. Casey
Central station applications planning activities and supporting studies
The application of photovoltaic technology in central station (utility) power generation plants is considered. A program of data collection and analysis designed to provide additional information about the subset of the utility market that was identified as the initial target for photovoltaic penetration, the oil-dependent utilities (especially muncipals) of the U.S. Sunbelt, is described along with a series of interviews designed to ascertain utility industry opinions about the National Photovoltaic Program as it relates to central station applications
Pregnancy and Sex Role Stereotyping: From Struck to Carhart
The guarantee of equal protection of the laws extends to women as well as men. Yet for the first 100 years of the Fourteenth Amendmentâs life, the Supreme Court never found a law unconstitutional on the grounds that it discriminated on the basis of sex. Between 1970 and 1980, social movement advocacy and brilliant litigation by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others changed our constitutional law. Over the course of the decade, the Court extended the anti-stereotyping principle from discrimination on the basis of race to discrimination on the basis of sex. But fidelity to the principle had its limits. In short, the Courtâs 1970s cases hold that the antistereotyping principle constrains laws that classify by sex, but do not find the principle violated where government regulates pregnancy. Our Essay unsettles this familiar story by making three points. First, we show that in the 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the womenâs movement argued that the antistereotyping principle applied to pregnancy; the movement viewed the regulation of pregnant women as a paradigmatic site of sex-role stereotyping. Second, we show that even though the Court initially had difficulty seeing that sex role stereotypes were sometimes implicated in cases concerning the regulation of pregnancy, the Courtâs constitutional decisions have increasingly come to recognize the relationship between pregnancy discrimination and sex discrimination. Third, we suggest that the Court and other constitutional interpreters should revisit Geduldig and read the decisionâs holding more preciselyâand narrowlyâas recognizing that, while there are legitimate reasons for regulating pregnancy, such regulation can be animated by invidious or traditionally stereotypical judgments. This understanding has implications for both equal protection and reproductive rights cases
Struck by Stereotype: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Pregnancy Discrimination as Sex Discrimination
It was always recognition that one thing that conspicuously distinguishes women from men is that only women become pregnant; and if you subject a woman to disadvantageous treatment on the basis of her pregnant status, which was what was happening to Captain Struck, you would be denying her equal treatment under the law.(1
Green-Schwarz Formulation of Self-Dual Superstring
The self-dual superstring has been described previously in a
Neveu-Schwarz-Ramond formulation with local N=2 or 4 world-sheet supersymmetry.
We present a Green-Schwarz-type formulation, with manifest spacetime
supersymmetry.Comment: 11 pg., (uuencoded dvi file) ITP-SB-92-5
On Supermultiplet Twisting and Spin-Statistics
Twisting of off-shell supermultiplets in models with 1+1-dimensional
spacetime has been discovered in 1984, and was shown to be a generic feature of
off-shell representations in worldline supersymmetry two decades later. It is
shown herein that in all supersymmetric models with spacetime of four or more
dimensions, this off-shell supermultiplet twisting, if non-trivial, necessarily
maps regular (non-ghost) supermultiplets to ghost supermultiplets. This feature
is shown to be ubiquitous in all fully off-shell supersymmetric models with
(BV/BRST-treated) constraints.Comment: Extended version, including a new section on manifestly off-shell and
supersymmetric BRST treatment of gauge symmetry; added reference
Configurations of Handles and the Classification of Divergences in the String Partition Function
The divergences that arise in the regularized partition function for closed
bosonic string theory in flat space lead to three types of perturbation series
expansions, distinguished by their genus dependence. This classification of
infinities can be traced to geometrical characteristics of the string
worldsheet. Some categories of divergences may be eliminated in string theories
formulated on compact manifolds.Comment: 24 pages, DAMTP-R/94/1
Proximity Effects in Radiative Transfer
Though the dependence of near-field radiative transfer on the gap between two
planar objects is well understood, that between curved objects is still
unclear. We show, based on the analysis of the surface polariton mediated
radiative transfer between two spheres of equal radii and minimum gap ,
that the near--field radiative transfer scales as as
and as for larger values of up to the far--field limit. We
propose a modified form of the proximity approximation to predict near--field
radiative transfer between curved objects from simulations of radiative
transfer between planar surfaces.Comment: 5 journal pages, 4 figure
Giant radiation heat transfer through the micron gaps
Near-field heat transfer between two closely spaced radiating media can
exceed in orders radiation through the interface of a single black body. This
effect is caused by exponentially decaying (evanescent) waves which form the
photon tunnel between two transparent boundaries. However, in the mid-infrared
range it holds when the gap between two media is as small as few tens of
nanometers. We propose a new paradigm of the radiation heat transfer which
makes possible the strong photon tunneling for micron thick gaps. For it the
air gap between two media should be modified, so that evanescent waves are
transformed inside it into propagating ones. This modification is achievable
using a metamaterial so that the direct thermal conductance through the
metamaterial is practically absent and the photovoltaic conversion of the
transferred heat is not altered by the metamaterial.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
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