The flow field downstream of a hydraulic jump

A control-volume analysis of a hydraulic jump is used to obtain the mean vorticity downstream of the jump as a function of the Froude number. To do this it is necessary to include the conservation of angular momentum. The mean vorticity increases from zero as the cube of Froude number minus one, and, in dimensionless form, approaches a constant at large Froude number. Digital particle imaging velocimetry was applied to travelling hydraulic jumps giving centre-plane velocity field images at a frequency of 15 Hz over a Froude number range of 2–6. The mean vorticity determined from these images confirms the control-volume prediction to within the accuracy of the experiment. The flow field measurements show that a strong shear layer is formed at the toe of the wave, and extends almost horizontally downstream, separating from the free surface at the toe. Various vorticity generation mechanisms are discussed

State Action Problems

The state action doctrine is a mess. Explanations for why federal courts sometimes treat the private actions of private parties as public actions subject to the Constitution, as the Supreme Court did in Shelley v. Kraemer, are either vastly over-inclusive or fail to explain our law and values. A better approach is to understand the state action doctrine in institutional terms. I introduce a two-step, institutionally focused state action theory that is a natural consequence of a broader public–private theory of legal systems. In the first step, a court identifies a “state action problem,” meaning a privately made law that is poorly governed by the ordinary rules governing the making of contracts. If a court finds a state action problem, it proceeds to the second step and decides whether courts have superior capacity to remedy the problem than do other governmental institutions. This theory captures important intuitions about the public regulation of private lawmaking that other approaches either ignore or fail to ground theoretically. In addition, it helps to justify why racial discrimination is often a decisive fact in finding state action, explains why the doctrine is rarely invoked, and provides a firm, theoretical foundation for a doctrine otherwise adrift in search of guiding principles

Interconstituted Legal Agents

Legal theory and doctrine depend on underlying assumptions about human nature and sociality. Perhaps the most common and basic assumption is that we are separate persons who communicate imperfectly with one another. While this separation thesis has been questioned, it still dominates legal theory. However, I show that understanding separation and connection as alternative perspectives, rather than as ontologically true or false, reveals that legal conflict often arises when these perspectives give rise to clashing intuitions concerning the meaning of community and what constitutes goals and harms. This Article organizes perspectives on social relationships in increasing order of intersubjectivity: isolation, interaction, interdependence, and interconstitution. The last of these, interconstitution, understands people as continuously becoming who they are on account of one another, not as separate agents who merely influence one another. Some theories of human developmental biology suggest that this perspective has as reasonable a claim, and perhaps a greater claim, on social reality as do the more familiar ones. I use several problems in law to demonstrate the importance of the choice among these perspectives, especially highlighting the valuable insights of interconstitutionalism

Models of Law

The more we examine what is behind our most difficult legal questions, the more puzzling it can seem that we continue both to disagree strongly and, yet, to cooperate. If law is a reasoned enterprise, how is it that we are neither torn apart nor homogenized by our long social practice of it? I resolve this puzzle, and arrive at a richer understanding of law, using the idea of modeling familiar from the natural sciences and mathematics. I show (a) that theorists can model legal systems as abstract systems of institutions, information flows, and institutional processing or reasoning and (b) that the participants in a legal system themselves maintain and evaluate models of this sort. Understanding law this way clarifies numerous problems ranging from pluralism to legal interpretation. This work emphasizes four major points of the theory: (1) It identifies law as the conceptual side of cooperation and, thus, the means of coordinating decisionmaking. (2) It derives from human cooperation a picture of legal systems as a network of institutions exchanging information and maintaining their own rules of recognition and decision. (3) It advances the thesis that cooperation and its associated legal system arise when individuals create institution-information models, identify the models used by others, and accept the use of those models. (4) Finally, it provides a standard representation of institutions, their communications, and their reasoning. This analysis reveals that institutional agreement and disagreement occur at discrete levels. Together, these elements yield a theory of legal systems that grounds jurisprudence in the study of the human conceptual system. It sheds new light on the problem of theoretical disagreement, otherwise puzzling problems of pluralism, and the connection between law and morality

The Burden of Knowledge

Sometimes we are better off not knowing things. While we often hear that ignorance is bliss, there has not been a comprehensive consideration in the legal academy of the virtues of ignorance and its regulation. Though the distribution of knowledge, like the distribution of other goods, is affected both directly and indirectly by law, several characteristics of knowledge distinguish it from other kinds of property. Much has been written about the impact of the nonrival and nonexclusive nature of knowledge on its production and distribution. This Article centers around two other attributes of knowledge that combine to create a special kind of problem: (1) its stickiness, meaning that once acquired knowledge may not be abandoned but only fortuitously forgotten, and (2) its capacity to impose substantial disutilities on its holder. If ignorance is a good, then knowledge must be avoided in the first instance. My approach in this initial inquiry is pragmatic. I first consider four examples of knowledge that individuals may desire not to have, namely knowledge of one\u27s genetic make-up and predispositions, knowledge of one\u27s HIV status, lenders\u27 knowledge of the race of a borrower, and lawyers\u27 knowledge of the falsity of a client\u27s proposed testimony or evidence. From these I abstract discrete categories of ignorance interests, centered around (a) whether or not knowledge is undesirable for its tendency to interfere with conduct and (b) whether or not knowledge is undesirable for its substance. Finally, I begin to examine how we should respond legally to these interests in ignorance. I conclude that our decision whether to respect autonomy in making knowledge decisions is affected not only by our operating conception of autonomy but also the category of ignorance interest at issue. In addition, the nature of knowledge impacts our ability to ascertain preferences, our instrumental goals, and our choice of regulatory tools

Origin, Scope, and Irrevocability of the Manifest Disregard of the Law Doctrine: Second Circuit Views

After arbitration has occurred, parties may seek judicial enforcement of the arbitral award, converting the private determination into an enforceable judgment. Parties that did not prevail in the arbitration may, at the same time, seek to have the arbitral award vacated. This article concerns the doctrine that permits courts to vacate an arbitral award when the arbitrators “manifestly disregarded” the law, focusing on recent developments in the Second Circuit. Despite the exceedingly deferential scope of this doctrine, the Second Circuit has actually vacated a handful of arbitrations on grounds of manifest disregard, and the doctrine is routinely raised by litigants. We turn to three important issues the Second Circuit has recently considered, each of which helpfully illuminates the role of public courts in arbitration. The first issue is that the Second Circuit has identified manifest disregard as an extrastatutory form of judicial review, thus breaking from other circuits and from some of its earlier decisions. Although the issue does not appear to have been the subject of much focus, it has great consequence both for determining whether the doctrine is mandatory and whether it preempts conflicting state law. The second issue, building on the first, is whether parties may voluntarily choose either to eliminate review for manifest disregard or to permit review for error (which, as we will discuss, is a level of scrutiny foreign to the statutory scheme). The Second Circuit has held that parties may not prohibit courts from engaging in manifest disregard review. The circuits are divided as to whether parties may compel courts to engage in stricter review of arbitral awards than is provided either by the strict language of the Federal Arbitration Act or the manifest disregard doctrine. The third and last issue is the ephemeral rise and fall of the doctrine of manifest disregard of the evidence. Determining the limited instances when judges may examine the factual record developed at arbitration provides another opportunity to understand what courts mean by manifest disregard of the law

Effects of Chemical Feedbacks on Decadal Methane Emissions Estimates

The coupled chemistry of methane, carbon monoxide (CO), and hydroxyl radical (OH) can modulate methane's 9‐year lifetime. This is often ignored in methane flux inversions, and the impacts of neglecting interactive chemistry have not been quantified. Using a coupled‐chemistry box model, we show that neglecting the effect of methane source perturbation on [OH] can lead to a 25% bias in estimating abrupt changes in methane sources after only 10 years. Further, large CO emissions, such as from biomass burning, can increase methane concentrations by extending the methane lifetime through impacts on [OH]. Finally, we quantify the biases of including (or excluding) coupled chemistry in the context of recent methane and CO trends. Decreasing CO concentrations, beginning in the 2000's, have notable impacts on methane flux inversions. Given these nonnegligible errors, decadal methane emissions inversions should incorporate chemical feedbacks for more robust methane trend analyses and source attributions

The Nature of Standing

Standing to raise a claim before a judicial tribunal is notoriously contested. Federal courts during the last century developed an increasingly rule-like and rigid doctrine around the concept of private injury to govern access to the federal forum. Some states followed the federal lead. Others have created important exceptions, and even in federal courts, issues like organizational standing, legislative standing, and standing of qui tam relators have proved controversial. We describe a broader taxonomy of agenda control rules, of which standing rules are a special case, to understand why and how courts and other institutions govern their choices of what to decide.Dividing agenda control rules among ex ante and ex post rules and between procedural, membership-based, and subject matter-based rules, we identify standing as a set of rules analyzing a relationship between the entity raising an issue and the subject matter of the issue that is being proposed for decision. Using the broader toolkit of agenda rules, we analyze basic institutional considerations and how the rules within our taxonomy work together to serve various institutional goals. We elaborate the model using a peculiar standing regime employed by Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals as a concrete case study

Analysing the impacts of a large-scale EV rollout in the UK – how can we better inform environmental and climate policy?

Electrifying transport to meet local pollution and overall net zero carbon ambitions is now a key UK policy focus, but this will have important impacts on the energy system, the economy, and the environment. Understanding the changes that the electrification of transport will bring is crucial for developing sustainable policies for net zero goals and a just transition. A literature is emerging to analyse the impact of a large-scale penetration of electric vehicles (EVs), but generally limiting focus to the implications for the electricity network. In this paper, we aim to provide insight on the wider energy system impacts of the expected EV rollout in the UK, in terms of fuel changes, energy costs, CO2 emission reduction and network investments; and how different EV charging strategies increase or mitigate the impacts of the expected large-scale penetration of EVs. Results show that non-smart and/or decentralised charging will require considerably larger investments on the network to accommodate new EV demand. Network reinforcement costs are passed to the consumer via increased electricity prices and, albeit reduced, emissions shift from the transport to the power sector. These results show the importance of considering the whole energy system and the wider economy, to avoid carbon leakage and to maximise the effectiveness of policies

L’intervention en situation de crise en protection de la jeunesse. Crise familiale ou crise organisationnelle?

Cet article expose les résultats d’une recherche visant à mettre au jour les modèles auxquels se réfèrent implicitement des intervenantes et intervenants de la protection de la jeunesse dans leurs actions en situation de crise. Ces interventions visent des familles signalées en raison des troubles de comportement d’un enfant ou d’un adolescent, d’abus physique ou de négligence. Les résultats permettent de décrire, d’expliquer et de comprendre pourquoi et dans quels contextes les interventions sont mises en oeuvre. Ils révèlent que : a) les intervenants doivent faire face à trois types de crises distincts; b) le stress vécu par certains groupes d’intervenants constitue un élément central de l’intervention en situation de crise, et c) les difficultés liées à la concertation avec les nombreux partenaires du réseau provoquent des insatisfactions majeures chez les intervenants. La discussion porte sur l’impérative nécessité de mieux soutenir les intervenants et de créer une véritable concertation avec les partenaires.The purpose of this paper is to unravel the models which are implicitely referred to by staff members of a Youth Protection Agency when dealing with families in crisis. Families who are reported for child abuse or neglect, and families with youth displaying severe behavior problems, are involved in cases which are selected from staff members’ case load. Results identify the reasons and the contextual dimensions driving the workers’ interventions in crisis situations. Main findings are to the effect that (a) workers have to deal with three quite distinct types of crises; (b) personal stress is a central feature for specific groups of workers when dealing with families in crisis; (c) problems in collaborating with the service network partners is a major part of the frustration at least in two of the three types of crisis. Results discussion underscores the importance for offering a better support to workers and for installing a much stronger sense of collaboration among the various service partners