A Precarious Path: The Bill of Rights After 200 Years

The Bill of Rights occupies an ambiguous place in American society. Americans favor the Bill of Rights in principle, but when asked whether they support particular rights guarantees for real-life practices such as gun ownership, capital punishment, abortion, and flag burning, Americans fervently and profoundly disagree. The essays David J. Bodenhamer and James W. Ely, Jr. have compiled in The Bill of Rights in Modern America After 200 Years, richly suggest why Americans have reconciled principle and practice with such difficulty. Written for a popular audience by specialists who possess a profound knowledge of and differing views concerning the technical and philosophical issues, these essays clearly achieve the editors\u27 goal of promoting a fresh and lively dialogue that probes contemporary controversies over the scope and protection of individual rights. Central to this dialogue is the fundamental tension between individual and community rights claims. Americans disagree about the practical application of rights guarantees largely because those guarantees acquire meaningful content principally within the context of community expectations and authority. As abstract principles, rights exist in a vacuum. When it comes to the exercise of rights, however, the vacuum is filled with various social interests that attach to sometimes competing claims to these rights. Settlement of these conflicting rights claims requires government intervention. At least in constitutional democracies such as the United States, this intervention creates a public space within which individual, group, and local and national communitarian conflicts are resolved. In practice, government intervention often restricts individual and group rights, yet it also permits majoritarian institutions to formally sanction and even broaden rights claims. Thus, the community\u27s power to curb or destroy rights coexists with its authority to sanction and expand rights. Conflicting rights claims also create struggles to secure legitimation from constitutional institutions and authorities. The power of courts, legislatures, and law enforcement agencies to resolve conflicts involving individual and community interests and to administer appropriate remedies rests on an official interpretation of constitutional provisions. This interpretation determines the legitimacy of the actions of not only individual and communitarian interests but also governmental bodies and officials charged with implementing constitutional provisions. Bodenhamer and Ely\u27s collection of essays addresses the legitimation issue in a variety of contexts. This issue appears in perhaps its most familiar form when essay authors explain and evaluate particular doctrines established by the Supreme Court that pertain to such matters as the rights of the accused, the death penalty, symbolic speech, and the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment\u27s Due Process Clause. Here, the issue involves not simply whether the Court\u27s doctrines, for policy reasons, should legitimate either an expansion or a contraction of rights claims. The larger implication is whether elected and other non-judicial state or federal officials more appropriately should determine the legitimacy of rights claims. This point also bears upon the question of the extent to which the allocation of legitimacy should take into account the original intent of the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights

Abdominal aortic aneurysm is associated with a variant in low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a common cause of morbidity and mortality and has a significant heritability. We carried out a genome-wide association discovery study of 1866 patients with AAA and 5435 controls and replication of promising signals (lead SNP with a p value < 1 × 10-5) in 2871 additional cases and 32,687 controls and performed further follow-up in 1491 AAA and 11,060 controls. In the discovery study, nine loci demonstrated association with AAA (p < 1 × 10-5). In the replication sample, the lead SNP at one of these loci, rs1466535, located within intron 1 of low-density-lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 (LRP1) demonstrated significant association (p = 0.0042). We confirmed the association of rs1466535 and AAA in our follow-up study (p = 0.035). In a combined analysis (6228 AAA and 49182 controls), rs1466535 had a consistent effect size and direction in all sample sets (combined p = 4.52 × 10-10, odds ratio 1.15 [1.10-1.21]). No associations were seen for either rs1466535 or the 12q13.3 locus in independent association studies of coronary artery disease, blood pressure, diabetes, or hyperlipidaemia, suggesting that this locus is specific to AAA. Gene-expression studies demonstrated a trend toward increased LRP1 expression for the rs1466535 CC genotype in arterial tissues; there was a significant (p = 0.029) 1.19-fold (1.04-1.36) increase in LRP1 expression in CC homozygotes compared to TT homozygotes in aortic adventitia. Functional studies demonstrated that rs1466535 might alter a SREBP-1 binding site and influence enhancer activity at the locus. In conclusion, this study has identified a biologically plausible genetic variant associated specifically with AAA, and we suggest that this variant has a possible functional role in LRP1 expression

Restrictive Trade Practices and Extraterritorial Application of Antitrust Legislation in Japanese-American Trade [Article]

Symposium: Prevention and Settlement of Economic Disputes Between Japan and the United States: Part III: Dispute Avoidance and Dispute SettlementThis material published in Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law is made available by the James E. Rogers College of Law, the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library, and the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact the AJICL Editorial Board at http://arizonajournal.org/contact-us/