Private Force/Public Goods

This Article rethinks the benefits and dangers of private force in war. It shows that privatization must be viewed within the special requirements and confines of national security policy making and weighed against available alternatives. Contrary to academic and mainstream conventional wisdom, this Article concludes that national security privatization comports well with core constitutional and democratic principles and offers greater transparency and democratic control than commonly understood. Moreover, this Article argues that the American use of privatized force reflects and accomplishes normative and democratic commitments of international and domestic law that would be impossible to replicate through other policy avenues

Judicial Deference and Democratic Values

Reviewing: David Rudenstine, The Age of Deference: The Supreme Court, National Security, and the Constitutional Order (Oxford University Press 2016); Christopher Kutz, On War and Democracy (Princeton University Press 2016)

The Elusive Zone of Twilight

In his canonical concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, Justice Robert Jackson set forth a tripartite framework for evaluating exercises of presidential power. Regarding the middle category of that framework, Justice Jackson famously suggested that presidential actions undertaken in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority implicate a zone of twilight, within which any actual test of power is likely to depend on the imperatives of events and contemporary imponderables rather than on abstract theories of law. Since the articulation of this idea some seventy years ago, the Supreme Court has furnished little additional guidance as to how courts should evaluate presidential actions that implicate the zone of twilight, thus leaving it largely to the lower courts to translate Justice Jackson\u27s contemporary imponderables into workable doctrinal commands. Taking that observation as its starting point, this Article canvasses the small but important body of lower court opinions that have grappled with Justice Jackson\u27s zone of twilight. Its investigation yields two important takeaways. First, these opinions reveal a varied, ad hoc, and sometimes-inconsistent set of approaches to reviewing twilight-zone actions, as lower courts have failed to converge on a single methodological approach to evaluating presidential action against a backdrop of formal legislative silence. And second, the opinions reflect a longstanding and steadfast reluctance to engage with the twilight zone\u27s substance, as lower courts have frequently found ways to avoid concluding that plausible instances of twilight-zone action give rise to the contemporary imponderables that Justice Jackson himself invoked. We hypothesize that these two features of contemporary twilight-zone opinions their doctrinal haphazardness and their sporadic incidence may exist in something of a positive feedback loop, with the uncertain and amorphous state of twilight-zone doctrine deterring lower courts from assigning presidential action to Justice Jackson\u27s middle category, and with the relative paucity of twilight-zone opinions impeding the development of a coherent and streamlined decisional methodology. We thus conclude this Article by proposing a simple but flexible method of two-dimensional twilight-zone analysis an approach that might help to break this cycle of avoidance and amorphousness and thus render Justice Jackson\u27s zone of twilight a more useful and active venue for the resolution of separation-of-powers cases

Testosterone Influence on Gene Expression in Lacrimal Glands of Mouse Models of Sjögren Syndrome

Purpose: Sjögren syndrome is an autoimmune disorder that occurs almost exclusively in women and is associated with extensive inflammation in lacrimal tissue, an immune-mediated destruction and/or dysfunction of glandular epithelial cells, and a significant decrease in aqueous tear secretion. We discovered that androgens suppress the inflammation in, and enhance the function of, lacrimal glands in female mouse models (e.g., MRL/MpJ-Tnfrsf6lpr [MRL/lpr]) of Sjögren syndrome. In contrast, others have reported that androgens induce an anomalous immunopathology in lacrimal glands of nonobese diabetic/LtJ (NOD) mice. We tested our hypothesis that these hormone actions reflect unique, strain- and tissue-specific effects, which involve significant changes in the expression of immune-related glandular genes. Methods: Lacrimal glands were obtained from age-matched, adult, female MRL/lpr and NOD mice after treatment with vehicle or testosterone for up to 3 weeks. Tissues were processed for analysis of differentially expressed mRNAs using CodeLink Bioarrays and Affymetrix GeneChips. Data were analyzed with bioinformatics and statistical software. Results: Testosterone significantly influenced the expression of numerous immune-related genes, ontologies, and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways in lacrimal glands of MRL/lpr and NOD mice. The nature of this hormone-induced immune response was dependent upon the autoimmune strain, and was not duplicated within lacrimal tissues of nonautoimmune BALB/c mice. The majority of immune-response genes regulated by testosterone were of the inflammatory type. Conclusions: Our findings support our hypothesis and indicate a major role for the lacrimal gland microenvironment in mediating androgen effects on immune gene expression

Driver Behavior as a Function of Ambient Light and Road Geometry

OBJECTIVES To determine how ambient light (day versus night) and road geometry affect driving behavior,especially the speeds that drivers choose when not constrained by lead vehicles.METHODSRecently, it has become technically easier to observe how people drive b offering them longtermuse of highly instrumented vehicles. Much of this type of work has been done in connectionwith large-scale field operational tests (FOTs) of various innovative vehicle systems. Theinformation obtained is in many ways complementary to information from observation of traffic.Traffic observation often provides information about a large number of drivers, but at a relativelycoarse level and in a spatially and temporally limited context (i.e., observing how a large numberof drivers negotiate a particular intersection). In contrast, long-term use of highly instrumentedvehicles is more restricted in terms of how many drivers can be observed, although the feasiblenumbers are now reasonably high. On the positive side, data from instrumented vehicles canoffer very detailed information about driving behavior over many miles and many days.In this paper, we present results from a database of driving behavior that was derived from arecent FOT for an adaptive cruise control (ACC) system (although the data used here are all fromphases of the study that involved only normal vehicle equipment). The FOT involved tenidentical cars that were instrumented for a variety of types of data. The most important data forpresent purposes were: speed, yaw rate, location from the Global Positioning System (GPS), andpresence or absence of a lead vehicle within about 100 m based on the forward-looking sensorsof the ACC system. The instrumented cars were driven by a total of 108 participants, each ofwhom was given a car to use as his or her own vehicle in normal driving for either two or fiveweeks. The participants were sampled from licensed drivers in southeastern Michigan, andrepresented a wide range of age and driving experience.RESULTSResults will be reported in terms of speed as a function of horizontal road curvature in light anddark conditions, and as a function of driver age and gender, all for situations in which there is nolead vehicle within about 100 m. CONCLUSIONSCurrent evidence about headlighting suggests that drivers’ ability to see and negotiate theroadway is virtually unaffected by differences in ambient light, although their ability to perceiveand avoid objects on the road, such as pedestrians, is greatly reduced when headlamps are themain source of light. There is also evidence that drivers do not markedly reduce their speed inconditions of low ambient light. The current analysis allows us to determine how drivers react tospecific road geometries in light and dark conditions. This has implications for how well drivers’perceptual abilities match their driving behavior, and also for assessing the potential benefit of avariety of innovative headlighting systems that are currently being designed to adapt in variousways to vehicle speed and road geometry

Driver Behavior as a Function of Ambient Light and Road Geometry

OBJECTIVES To determine how ambient light (day versus night) and road geometry affect driving behavior,especially the speeds that drivers choose when not constrained by lead vehicles.METHODSRecently, it has become technically easier to observe how people drive b offering them longtermuse of highly instrumented vehicles. Much of this type of work has been done in connectionwith large-scale field operational tests (FOTs) of various innovative vehicle systems. Theinformation obtained is in many ways complementary to information from observation of traffic.Traffic observation often provides information about a large number of drivers, but at a relativelycoarse level and in a spatially and temporally limited context (i.e., observing how a large numberof drivers negotiate a particular intersection). In contrast, long-term use of highly instrumentedvehicles is more restricted in terms of how many drivers can be observed, although the feasiblenumbers are now reasonably high. On the positive side, data from instrumented vehicles canoffer very detailed information about driving behavior over many miles and many days.In this paper, we present results from a database of driving behavior that was derived from arecent FOT for an adaptive cruise control (ACC) system (although the data used here are all fromphases of the study that involved only normal vehicle equipment). The FOT involved tenidentical cars that were instrumented for a variety of types of data. The most important data forpresent purposes were: speed, yaw rate, location from the Global Positioning System (GPS), andpresence or absence of a lead vehicle within about 100 m based on the forward-looking sensorsof the ACC system. The instrumented cars were driven by a total of 108 participants, each ofwhom was given a car to use as his or her own vehicle in normal driving for either two or fiveweeks. The participants were sampled from licensed drivers in southeastern Michigan, andrepresented a wide range of age and driving experience.RESULTSResults will be reported in terms of speed as a function of horizontal road curvature in light anddark conditions, and as a function of driver age and gender, all for situations in which there is nolead vehicle within about 100 m. CONCLUSIONSCurrent evidence about headlighting suggests that drivers’ ability to see and negotiate theroadway is virtually unaffected by differences in ambient light, although their ability to perceiveand avoid objects on the road, such as pedestrians, is greatly reduced when headlamps are themain source of light. There is also evidence that drivers do not markedly reduce their speed inconditions of low ambient light. The current analysis allows us to determine how drivers react tospecific road geometries in light and dark conditions. This has implications for how well drivers’perceptual abilities match their driving behavior, and also for assessing the potential benefit of avariety of innovative headlighting systems that are currently being designed to adapt in variousways to vehicle speed and road geometry

Looking through a social lens: conceptualising social aspects of knowledge management for global health practitioners

Knowledge management plays a critical role in global health. Global health practitioners require knowledge in every aspect of their jobs, and in resource-scarce contexts, practitioners must be able to rely on a knowledge management system to access the latest research and practice to ensure the highest quality of care. However, we suggest that there is a gap in the way knowledge management is primarily utilized in global health, namely, the systematic incorporation of human and social factors. In this paper, we briefly outline the evolution of knowledge management and then propose a conceptualization of knowledge management that incorporates human and social factors for use within a global health context. Our conceptualization of social knowledge management recognizes the importance of social capital, social learning, social software and platforms, and social networks, all within the context of a larger social system and driven by social benefit. We then outline the limitations and discuss future directions of our conceptualization, and suggest how this new conceptualization is essential for any global health practitioner in the business of managing knowledge